Time Traveling with Larry Sanders

I moved a few weeks ago and have been unpacking bit by bit, taking time to think through how my life's going to flow in this new space --  my workspace, media set-up, acquiring of grown-up furniture, pet management and setting up a kitchen that I promised myself I'd actually use this time.

While I putz around the apartment moving things here and there, I play something from Netflix Instant on my computer-- usually a TV show that's light, doesn't require focused attention and offers a big chunk of continuous episodes, since this seems to be taking forever. I settled on The Larry Sanders Show.

I was in college when Larry Sanders was on HBO and, while I heard plenty of praise for the series about a fictional late night talk show, I was too busy and too broke to watch cable TV. If you're familiar with the show, then you can imagine how much fun I'm having watching it for the first time -- in five-hour chunks no less. It's not only helped pass the time, it's helped lift me out of the post-break-up blues on more than one occasion.

But I think I'm getting more out of the Larry Sanders in 2011 than I would've in 1992. Namely, nostalgia. Though the show itself is timeless (until the dinosaur late night talk show format becomes extinct, anyway), the references aren't: jokes about a philandering Bill Clinton, celebrity guests like Richard Simmons, Mimi Rogers, John Forsythe, Dana Delaney, a pipsqueak David Spade, my hero Carol Burnett, a scrappy, dearly departed Peter Falk. Plus the "up-and-coming" show regulars like a goth Janeane Garfalo and a perennially douche-baggy Jeremy Piven (but in a good way). And let's not forget the fashion, which looks more 80s than what I choose to remember.

It's so authentic, I almost feel 20 again while I'm watching it. But maybe that's just because I still can't afford cable.