It's Garry Shandling's Show

Under-appreciated sitcom that started on Showtime in 1986 and ran for a few years on the Fox network. Starring, of course, Garry Shandling. Tom Petty appeared frequently as Garry's next-door neighbor.

I mainly remember it for its wonderful theme song:

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"It's Garry Shandling's Theme" by Joey Carbone, Garry Shandling, and Alan Zweibel

performed by Randy Newman

This is the theme to Garry's Show,
The theme to Garry's show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would write his theme song.
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's Show?

This is the theme to Garry's Show,
The opening theme to Garry's show.
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits.
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle.
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show".

<whistles>

This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.

You can currently hear a WAV file of the song at http://soundamerica.com/sounds/themes/Television/F-H/gshandng.wav

Editors Note: On March 24, 2016 Gary Shandling died in his home. The cause of death was a blood clot in his lungs following deep vein thrombosis in his legs. He was 66 years old.

What made the show unique was the fact that the action took place in front of a studio audience with the characters being fully aware that the audience was there, making it almost the sitcom equivalent of a lucid dream. A lucid sit-com, if you will.

A lot of the plots used this lucidity as a means of creating comedy situations, allowing Garry to get away with things you can do on television but not in real-life, my all-time favourite prop being "It's Garry Shandling's Flashback Booth". Should there be any historical details that need explaining to the audience, Garry would get in the booth, put on a headset and the standard ripple dissolve would cut to the flashback. In fact, most of Garry's possessions in the show where prefixed with "It's Garry Shandling's...", including "It's Garry Shandling's Car" and "It's Garry Shandling's Parking Space".

Like The Larry Sanders Show, the show concept was brought to the UK in the early nineties with Sean's Show, written by Sean Hughes and shown on Channel 4.