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.