HBO To Air Judd Apatow's Garry Shandling Documentary in March
by Dan Snierson
Jan. 12, 2018


This spring, HBO will bring Garry Shandling back to the network: Judd Apatow’s two-part documentary about the late comedian who brought you two highly inventive and influential TV comedies: Showtime’s "It’s Garry Shandling’s Show" and HBO’s "The Larry Sanders Show".

The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling will premiere on March 26 and conclude on March 27, the network announced on Thursday at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour in Pasadena.





The four-hour-plus documentary about the comedian who passed away in 2016 — someone that Apatow considered a close friend, boss, colleague, and “one of the most important comedy minds of all time” — boasts interviews with 40-plus comedians, including James L. Brooks, Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron Cohen, David Coulier, Jon Favreau, Jay Leno, Kevin Nealon, Conan O’Brien, Bob Saget, Jerry Seinfeld, and Sarah Silverman.

In addition, it features personal diaries, letters, and home videos, and covers his rise to success on the stand-up circuit to becoming a TV star to lawsuits over "The Larry Sanders Show".





Asked at TCA why the documentary stretches more than four-and-a-quarter hours, Apatow quipped, “O.J. got seven hours and he murdered people. So don’t you deserve more time for not murdering people?”

http://ew.com/tv/2018/01/11/hbo-judd-apatow-garry-shandling-documentary/

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Did Judd Apatow's Garry Shandling documentary need to be four-and-a-half hours long? (http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/the-zen-diaries-of-garry-shandling-hbo-review.html)

The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling is Apatow's "best, most focused" work since Freaks and Geeks, says Matt Zoller Seitz. Yet Seitz wonders if a documentary running two nights and more than four hours is excessive. "Is there too much of a good thing here? Maybe," he says. "There are emperors, generals, and Nobel-prizewinner scientists who don’t get four-and-a-half hours on HBO, and it’s possible that we didn’t need a detailed segment about Shandling’s voice-over work on the 2006 animated film Over the Hedge (even though it ends up being a testament to his work ethic; he extensively rewrote his own dialogue and took the role of a turtle very seriously). Although Shandling completists will love the segment on the digressive, quasi-documentary DVD supplements he created for the Larry Sanders Show box set, others may wonder if it wouldn’t just be better to tell people how they can order them...Still, anybody who was inspired and moved by Shandling’s work won’t complain about being able to luxuriate in this exhaustive account. Even the slack portions are intriguing because of the access Apatow has to the records of Shandling’s time on Earth."

ALSO:

"I love documentaries that are not rushing through their subject matter," says Apatow (https://tv.avclub.com/judd-apatow-insists-the-world-remember-how-important-ga-1824030846)
The Zen Diaries feels like a catch-up chat at a funeral that's happening two years after Shandling's death (http://www.indiewire.com/2018/03/zen-diaries-of-garry-shandling-review-hbo-documentary-judd-apatow-1201943228/)
Apatow wanted to do right by Garry Shandling -- "but right by Garry doesn't mean making Garry look great" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/arts/television/zen-diaries-of-garry-shandling-hbo-judd-apatow.html)
Had Shandling lived, Apatow doesn't see him doing a Netflix-style interview show (https://www.thedailybeast.com/judd-apatow-on-revealing-the-real-garry-shandling-and-directing-stormy-daniels)
Female writer who alleged It's Garry Shandling's Show misogyny wonders why only three women were interviewed (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/i-worked-garry-shandling-judd-apatow-s-doc-shows-a-man-i-never-knew-guest-column-1097157)