Garry Shandling’s House of Mirrors

Newspaper and magazine clippings--the latest dispatches from the talk-show wars--plaster the bulletin board behind the desk in Garry Shandling’s Studio City office. It’s a wall full of news from the front: Letterman going to CBS; Leno keeping his job; Arsenio kicking himself; there’s Whoopi in trouble; Chevy getting ready; Dennis Miller dead and gone.

The purpose of the clippings, regularly posted since production began on the second season of “The Larry Sanders Show,� was supposed to be research and inspiration, a road map to possible story lines for Shandling’s make-believe late-night talk show. The real-life plot twists--network-jumping hosts, backstage bickering, cutthroat competition for ratings and guests--have been endless fodder for Shandling (who plays Sanders) and his writers. It’s the stuff from which they’ve created a parallel television universe where the audience gets to see not only the fictional talk show, but the off-camera moments as well.

“I’ve heard from Dave and Jay and Arsenio, and they all found the show to be very realistic,� Shandling says. “To know we’ve come that close to the mark is very gratifying.

“In fact, Johnny Carson told me that he assumed we’d taken one episode from something that had happened to him. It’s the one where Hank (Sanders’ obsequious sidekick, Hank (Hey Now) Kingsley, played by Jeffrey Tambor) had fallen asleep on the couch during the show. Johnny said during one of his shows that he’d looked over and Ed was nodding off. But I swear we didn’t know about that when we wrote the episode. We had no idea.�

To be on the set of “The Larry Sanders Show� is to enter a looking-glass world, art imitating life every time you turn around.

A backstage maze of corridors and offices leads to a sound stage where there’s a set designed to look like a backstage maze of corridors and offices. Writers feed lines to actors who are playing writers; makeup people touch up makeup on actors who are playing makeup people; producers having conversations with actors who are playing producers. It’s even weirder on nights when the talk-show segments are videotaped, when there are real celebrity guests--this year including Alec Baldwin, Helen Hunt and Teri Garr--and a real audience laughing and applauding as if Larry Sanders is someone they’ve been watching for years.

When you build a house of mirrors, though, sometimes you bump into yourself. Which brings us back to those clippings on Garry Shandling’s wall. When he looks at them lately, he sees stories about himself, news items about Conan O’Brien getting the 12:30 a.m. Letterman slot at NBC after Shandling turned it down. And then there’s the speculation that Garry might be following Dave to CBS sometime next year, a matter about which, for the time being, Shandling and his associates prefer not to comment. But the door, quite clearly, is open.

“There are a lot of things I would like to do in my career. I would like to do a movie. I’d like to stretch as an actor and I’d like to continue writing,� Shandling says. “But I happen to really love late-night television. That’s where I got my start. I was exposed to comedy through ‘The Tonight Show,’ through Johnny Carson and Jack Paar and Steve Allen. And I’m also a huge Dave Letterman fan. So there’s still an emotional connection for me to that form. I’d have to examine each specific proposal carefully and I’d have to really think about if it’s what I want to do. But yes, that could be in the cards for me.�

Shandling says he was seriously considering the NBC offer--reportedly a $20-million deal--but finally turned it down because he didn’t think he could have a show ready soon enough to meet the network’s timetable. “I happen to know what it takes to create a television show,� he says, “and it can’t be done quickly.

“And I don’t do anything halfway. The perfectionist part of me wants to be sure that what I’m doing is exactly right. To dive in right now (to another talk show) would have been rushing things.’

The perfectionist part of Shandling is one of the reasons that, even though HBO gave the go-ahead for 22 new “Larry Sanders� episodes this year, only 18 will be produced. “For me to do 18, it feels like I’m doing 36,� Shandling says, flat on his back on the office couch. In addition to creating, starring and doing much of the writing for the show, Shandling insists on overseeing practically every aspect of its production, everything from editing to sound-effects “sweetening,� just as he did on his last cable series, Showtime’s “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.�

“It’s not that I’m uncomfortable delegating authority,� he says, a little defensively. “In fact, I relish it and think I’ve surrounded myself with really talented people. But the series I’ve done, they’ve been visions of mine. So I know what they are and I know what it takes to make them work. And I think I’m working less hours on this series than my last one. I’m only in here 10 or 12 hours a day instead of 15.�

Pleased as he is with the critical response to the show, Shandling says there will be some changes this season, with more emphasis on the characters’ lives--Larry’s in particular--away from the studio. With that in mind, Sanders’ marriage will break up in the season premiere. It will be a trauma made all the worse by low overnight ratings, bad demographics and another year with no Emmy nomination.

“We thought Larry had to have an event that would make him look at his life,� Shandling says, “and a divorce is certainly one of those.�

If, in fact, Shandling does move on to a real-world talk show next year, what he says he’d miss most is the chance to pretend he’s somebody else.

“People don’t know that I’ve worked on acting for 15 years, that I’ve studied and gone to class. What happened is that because I was playing Garry Shandling on my other show, people assumed I wasn’t acting. That’s why I wanted to do this series, not just because it’s about talk shows, but because it had characters with real behavior and ranges of emotion. I knew I’d be challenged by that.�

“The Larry Sanders Show� airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on HBO.