The ideal audience for “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling” is someone who’s never heard of comedian Garry Shandling, but is predisposed to liking him. If you’re already a fan of Shandling’s, it’s unlikely that director Judd Apatow’s ludicrously long HBO documentary will shed much additional light on the comedian’s life and legacy. If you’re not attuned to Shandling’s brand of deadpan comedy, ‘The Zen Diaries,’ which often takes the humorist’s genius for granted, is decidedly not for you.
READ MORE: ‘The Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling’ Trailer: Judd Apatow Examines A Comedy Legend
Protracted and broken into two parts, ‘The Zen Diaries’ first half focuses on Shandling’s life and career up to the point of “The Larry Sanders Show” (a show that Apatow worked on as a writer and producer) and the second covers everything that followed. Nothing in part one is especially revelatory; it covers Shandling’s time as asubstitutehost for the legendary Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” his subsequent departure, and his first television series, “The Garry Shandling Show.”
The central thesis of Apatow’s doc is that Shandling’s life and career were shaped by one formative event: the death of his younger brother Barry, who died when they were children. The doc considers Barry’s death to be the most transformative event of Garry’s life, with its ripple effects shaping him until his death in 2016. As presented, the “Barry hypothesis” is a bit flimsy, but Apatow presents it confidently.
Part two is more illuminating: it covers Shandling’s later years, from his brilliant work on ‘Larry Sanders’ to the harassment lawsuit involving ex-girlfriend Linda Doucett and the bitter divorce with ex-manager Brad Grey. Apatow, transparently intent on enshrining Shandling, tends to deflect anytime the depicted events speak negatively of Shandling. But when it comes to ‘Larry Sanders’ and Shandling’s legal troubles, it becomes obvious that Shandling’s ego was easily bruised. Friends and employees of Shandling’s discuss their fears of excommunication for voicing a dissenting opinion. Doucett claims that Shandling fired her from working on ‘Larry Sanders’ the day after they broke up. Even as he presents dissenting points of view, it often feels as if Apatow isn’t willing to fully explore the darker, more complex side of Shandling.
Composed of archival footage — stand-up, private home video, and behind-the-scenes, — clips from various TV projects, and a series of talking-head interviews that Apatow conducts with a number of Shandling’s associates, “The Zen Diaries” is inexcusably overlong. The documentary is a deeply emotional exercise on the part of Apatow, to whom Shandling was a dear friend and mentor. One imagines that he found it difficult to part with some of this material, which might account for the film’s four-hour runtime.
Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Favreau and a number of other celebrity friends appear briefly to sing Shandling’s praises, but their interviews aren’t particularly enlightening. Filmmaker Peter Berg shows up to discuss Shandling’s profound influence on the brutal war film “Lone Survivor,” of all things, a bizarre tidbit that isn’t fully explored. Interviews with less-famous figures such as Ed Solomon and Alan Zweibel, who were integral to Shandling’s life and career, could stand to be expanded at the expense of that less-pertinent material.
It often feels as though Apatow is hell-bent on convincing the audience of Shandling’s genius by force-feeding them ‘Larry Sanders’ clips, rather than allowing Shandling to convince them of it on his own. And while Apatow is on-camera for long stretches of time, he rarely goes into detail about his own relationship with Shandling.
Toward the end of the two-hours-and-twenty-minutes long Part 2, Apatow diverges into long tangents about Shandling’s appearance on “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” this one time he was interviewed by Ricky Gervais, and his vocal contribution to the animated feature “Over the Hedge.” You get the sense that other, more important segments had to be significantly shortened to make room for them. A segment on Shandling’s failed movie career, for instance, is noticeably brief, despite it being one of the most intriguing in the entire four-hour doc.
It’s frustrating because Shandling was an incomparably important figure, whose contributions to TV and comedy reverberated throughout subsequent generations of television and comedy. The word “tortured” comes up often in relation to Shandling’s life as a working comedian; Apatow refers to him such and later asks various interviewees all inevitably agree with this thesis. And while it might be true that Shandling was anguished, it doesn’t change the fact that he was an incredibly successful person who was very good at what he did. If only Apatow was content with that and not intent on positioning Shandling as deeply troubled, the documentary might feel more truthful.
There’s a beautiful 90-minute tribute hidden in this four-hour behemoth. While Shandling’s path to success might not have been obstacle-laden, it does speak to the fact that genuine talent is the most important indicator of success. Shandling’s work on “Larry Sanders” and ‘Garry Shandling’ paved the way for generations of self-referential, industry-focused television shows. He’s a monumentally important figure regardless of his underdog status (or lack thereof). Apatow has only positive intentions in making a tribute to one of his mentors and heroes. If only his shaggy but likable hagiography could have reined itself in a bit more in doing so. [B-]