Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! Coverage of Curb Your Enthusiasm will begin next week. In the meantime, I’m excited to set the figurative table by resurrecting an entry from this blog’s decade-long run. Here’s how it works: I’ll provide a link to a piece that I first published many seasons back, and then I’ll offer a bit of updated commentary. But, as I always caution, please be gentle; this early article is from a long time ago, and my standards have changed as I’ve changed — I’ve improved as a thinker, a communicator, and a television-watcher.

So, let’s revisit… The Seven Best THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW Episodes of Season Two: https://jacksonupperco.com/2017/08/08/the-seven-best-the-larry-sanders-show-episodes-of-season-two/

Last week, we discussed the obvious link between Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld, but there’s another series to which Curb owes a big part of its identity. It’s also a single-camera comedy with a metatheatricality that comes from a show biz setting where famous people play versions of themselves. No, not the leads in this case — but the guests. It’s The Larry Sanders Show, one of the best sitcoms of the 1990s and an early jewel for HBO, refining some of the tenets associated with that channel’s brand: shorter episode orders, fluctuating runtimes, off-season scheduling, more mature content, etc. And of course, there’s the self-aware wink of a broken in-house fourth wall, as a medium references itself… Now, yes, they’re otherwise different shows, as Curb is so built around Larry David, whose comic sensibilities are not Garry Shandling’s. But they’re in the same subgenre, just as Larry Sanders and Seinfeld share a natural kinship from being contemporaneous half-hour comedies that telegraph smarts via the “meta” within their very concepts. Indeed, Jerry Seinfeld appeared several times on The Larry Sanders Show as himself — not only in the series finale, but also in a notable entry from Season Two. Additionally, Seinfeld’s co-creator Larry David contributed to Shandling’s earlier sitcom, Showtime’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which was co-created by Alan Zweibel, a key consultant on Curb Your Enthusiasm’s formative second and excellent third seasons. So, when looking for posts to rerun before diving into Curb (next week), this seemed like the right title to revisit, for it reveals the HBO sensibility into which Curb was stepping, starting with a faux documentary special from 1999 that essentially served as a pilot for the actual series, which began in 2000 — now no longer a mockumentary, though still in the single-camera vérité style of Larry Sanders, and with a sense of story that had aspects of, predominantly, Seinfeld, but also this terrific, overlooked gem affiliated with both Seinfeld and David. And while Curb is an extension of Seinfeld, Curb is also an extension of Larry Sanders — a major influence on the TV-for-TV-lovers ethos that sitcoms have increasingly embraced. So, if you’re a Seinfeld or Curb fan, Larry Sanders is a must!

Come back next week for the start of Curb! And stay tuned tomorrow for a new Wildcard!