Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2010 November 03 • Wednesday

New on the Gutbrain shelf is the complete Larry Sanders Show on DVD!

Thanks to Shout! Factory for finally putting it out. I had them all on videotape and watched them over and over, so this is one time when I'll actually be checking out the commentary tracks and watching all the extras (something I almost never do). The set also comes with a book.

The book gives glimpses of what a really serious book might be like. I'd like to see the complete scripts, reproduced as these two pages are.

The Larry Sanders Show is one of the greatest English-language television series, perhaps the greatest. Nicholson Baker knows what I'm talking about. In his most recent novel, The Anthologist, the narrator Paul Chowder has this to say.

One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly—maybe—and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. Some scholar will write, a thousand years from now: Surprisingly very little is known of Monica McGowan Johnsons and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who wrote the "hair bump" episode of Mary Tyler Moore. Or: surprisingly little can be gleaned from the available record about Maya Forbes and Peter Tolan, who had so much to do with the greatness of Larry Sanders.

You will notice that Larry Sanders is mentioned both first and last. And part of Nicholson Baker's greatness is contained in that "—maybe—".

If you pre-ordered the set, as I did, you also got this hat.

No flipping!