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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 15, 1992
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Larry Sanders Show, “The Garden Weasel” (Season 1, Episode 1). [Stream on HBO GO]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It’s been observed before, but it’s worth re-iterating: when The Larry Sanders Show debuted on HBO in 1992, there were four major networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX — and the idea of cable, even pay cable, competing with the networks in the realm of original programming was pretty much a pipe dream. The Larry Sanders Show really changed everything, for HBO, for TV comedy, and for television as a whole.
The Larry Sanders Show was not a slow burn, either. It was immediately a critical success, it nabbed a bunch of top Emmy nominations (for Series, stars Garry Shandling, Rip Torn, and Jeffrey Tambor, and guest stars Tom Berenger and Carol Burnett) for its very first season, and perhaps most importantly, it was a fully-formed show with a sense of its own identity from the very first episode. Shandling’s long and distinguished career as a stand-up obviously gave him an edge in playing late-night talk show host Larry Sanders. In the first episode, we see Larry grappling with the eternal struggle of art versus commerce, as he’s tasked with doing native advertising for the Garden Weasel (as ’90s a product as you could imagine!). We get a great sense of who Art (Torn) and Hank (Tambor) are, the former a tenacious producer whose bark is almost always more potent than his bite, and the latter a doofy sidekick who sometimes proves savvier than meets the eye.
In terms of what Larry Sanders did for HBO, the impact is pretty much immeasurable, as it opened the door for the possibilities of what original programming could do for the network. After Larry came Oz and eventually the double-whammy of Sex and the City and The Sopranos that officially launched HBO into the realm of “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO.”
