It's Garry Shandling's Show: Grant Gets Broken

It's Garry Shandling's Show: Grant Gets Broken
Showtime
September 17, 1986
Sitcom
VHS
B

This is the second episode of the series, as Garry tells us in his opening monologue.  That is, Garry Shandling delivers an opening monologue as a character named "Garry Shandling," in a series that took the George Burns aspects of Burns & Allen and made them even more modern and meta.  It's the first of my cable series, although I originally watched it on Fox a year or two after it premiered.  (And for awhile Fox and Showtime aired new episodes almost simultaneously.)  Then and now, I found it funny, not just gimmicky but genuinely quirky and likable.  Sitcom situations are presented tongue in cheek, as when Garry sees no point in having his friends' approval to babysit again, when "we've already done that show."

I don't remember anything about Episode One but as it's called "The Day Garry Moved In," we can guess that it set up the premise.  The series is still settling in, and in fact Garry tells us we haven't met Jackie yet, because she hadn't been cast before.  Bachelor Garry, who says that he can barely dress himself, is friends with Pete and Jackie Schumaker, played by Michael Tucci (from Grease) and Bernadette Birkett.  Their 12-year-old son is played by 12-year-old Scott Nemes (who was in Meatballs Part II).  In this episode, Pete and Jackie are having marital problems, so he suggests they go to Santa Barbara for the weekend and he'll babysit Grant.  They're reluctant, till Garry's responsible single neighbor Nancy Bancroft (Molly Cheek, with some of the biggest '80s hair I've ever seen outside of a metal band) says she'll help out.  Unfortunately, Garry's friend Lewis (Geoffrey Blake in a role that would soon be dropped) hits Grant with Garry's front door.  The fourth wall is soon in shambles, and not just from Garry.

Richard Karron, who was an Officer on Three's Company, makes his first of three appearances on IGSS, here as a Priest.  Gorgeous Dream Babe Lesa Lee would play a nameless Woman on Who's the Boss? in '89.  Shandling co-wrote this episode with Alan Zweibel, who wrote for Saturday Night Live in the '70s.  Veteran director Alan Rafkin, who did an episode each for That Girl and What's Happening!!, two for M*A*S*H, and twenty-three for The Bob Newhart Show, here does his first of an impressive forty-eight for IGSS.