After a near-fatal 1976 car crash, a voice asked Garry Shandling whether he wanted to continue his life. His instinctive yes set the trajectory for modern television. He emerged with the clarity to use comedy as a scalpel, dissecting all the fake, performative ways we interact.

This episode unpacks the brilliant contradictions and quiet, massive legacy of the godfather of meta-comedy. From childhood grief to deconstructing the sitcom, from walking away from a five-million-dollar late-night job to mentoring a generation, we reveal a man who turned his deepest pain into a literal cure for others.

• How his brother’s death from cystic fibrosis at age 10 shaped his low tolerance for anything fake
• Walking out of his lucrative writing career after a producer said ‘Chrissy wouldn’t say that’
• How ‘It’s Garry Shandling’s Show’ and ‘The Larry Sanders Show’ invented the DNA of modern comedy
• The heartbreaking reason he refused to have children, and his disciplined private life of boxing and Buddhism
• The 15.2-million-dollar gift to UCLA that funded research into the exact diseases that defined his life and death