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Last week I was watching Gary Shandling on The Late Show. He was plugging the new DVD collection Not Just The Very Best of The Larry Sanders Show (which is rather unsatisfying when we remember the show has only released its first season in its entirety).

I only watched about three minutes of the interview. I had to skip it because I found his freakish trampoline-like face so abhorrent I had to keep reminding myself that his old show, The Larry Sanders Show, was in fact great. So I went to the archives and watched the first four episodes of season 1. As it turns out, the show is still great (and Shandling, for the record, was never Robert Redford — barely even Robert Evens).

Larry Sanders, along with The Dana Carvey Show, seemed to be the breeding ground for all of today’s best comedy writers. The irony being that Gary Shandling and Dana Carvey, themselves never had much of a post-series career. Perhaps that makes sense, as both showcased rock-solid writing far more than they had performance.

The fact that The Larry Sanders Show launched amidst the late-night wars of the early 90s gives it a relevance missing from shows such as Studio 60, which wanted us to believe we currently live in a world where sketch comedy is as important as international peace talks. In 1992, when Larry Sanders first premiered on HBO, it wouldn’t be unheard of to think of late-night programming as something of a catalyst for the American zeitgeist. It was a time before The Daily Show and Adult Swim when broadcast networks still had a corner on the market. Jay had just replaced Johnny and Dave had yet to move to CBS.

It also didn’t hurt that the show was just plain funny. The drama always came from the workings of a late night talk show, but the comedy was completely based on character — which the show created as well as anyone. The series is very much a seminal achievement in comedy’s evolution, and should be sought out by anyone who enjoys desk-based humor.

It also teaches us the valuable lesson that today’s horrific plastic-surgery doesn’t effect yesterday’s classic entertainment.

Before The Corner and The Wire David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun. During the mid-80s he spent a year following around homicide detectives and wrote the book “Homicide: Life on the Killing Streets.” That book was eventually turned into the series Homicide: Life on the Street which aired on NBC from 1993-1999. Last night I watched my first episode of the show (though not the first episode of the show). It now airs daily on the Sleuth Channel, a digital cable channel owned by NBC-Universal (natch) that reruns their well stocked back-catalog of mystery and crime series.

It’s almost impossible to judge a television program on one episode, let alone judge a series that aired for seven years based on a fleeting 45-minute excerpt of the story. That being said, Homicide, from what I can tell, is fantastic television. The short review would be something along of the lines of Homicide being just like The Wire but without the nuance, but that sells it short. Sure, things are a little more blunt, but compared with The Wire, everything else might as well be a sledgehammer.

Instead, Homicide: Life on the Street is simultaneously a look at what cop shows once were, and a look at what cop shows would eventually become. Visually the series is as gritty as CSI (and the other modern procedurals) is slick. The editing is jumpy, sometimes covering the same action two or three times from different angles. The look is very reminiscent of early episode of OZ (both shows were produced by Tom Fontana).

Dramatically, the most significant difference between Homicide and, really, everything else on television today, is how the actors were given so much room to breath. In the episode I watched, two cops played out a scene on the inside of a yacht through two commercial breaks. Modern television is so tight and so insistent on MOVING. THE. PLOT. FORWARD. you rarely get the chance to see actors just act. It’s an interesting quandary for a medium that is almost entirely based on the assumption that a character is so believable the audience wants to tune in each week to see their story.

As someone who’s watched a ton of television Homicide had all the makings of a fantastic series. What troubled me was how a show like this could have been on for so long during my formative years and yet I never saw a single frame of it until last night. Curious. I’ll have to get a hold of the first season to correct that problem.

Ever do something you’ve always been meaning to do and then once you do it you feel really stupid that it took you so long to get around to doing it in the first place? Well that was my experience this past weekend when I finally made my pilgrimage uptown to the Museum of Television and Radio. For those who haven’t been, the museum, unlike most in the city (or anywhere), doesn’t have a permanent exhibit but instead offers various screenings throughout the day of classic television as well as allowing visitors the opportunity to select an hours worth of programming from their library that they can watch in a cool little booth that is both modern and ancient (it’s like having On-Demand service on VHS).

We got there late in the day so the only screening I was able to catch was a 30-minute compilation of Steve Martin on 70s era SNL. It was hit and miss, but it did feature the one where Steve is in a bar and sees Gilda Radner sitting across the room. He walks over to her and the two start to dance out of the bar set and all over the studio. It’s one of my all-time favorites.

When I sat down at their catalog computer to decide on what program I’d be watching I knew exactly what I wanted to see. It was a program that I watched regularly from the ages of — I don’t know — five (?) until it was canceled in 1989. It was a great show, if thematically a little over the head of a kindergartener. But there was this one episode that has always stuck out in my mind. I saw it once when I was a kid but hadn’t seen it since. It was an episode that seemed important at the time, even if I wasn’t exactly sure why. I’ll tell you about it right after the jump…

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