Garry does Larry

On Stage 11 of the Raleigh Studios lot in Hollywood, where Garry Shandling has created a parallel television universe—a fictional talk show starring himself called The Larry Sanders Show—it's easy to get confused about what's real and what isn't.

There are dressing rooms in one building and sets built to look like dressing rooms in another. There are writers feeding lines to actors playing writers feeding lines to actors. There are makeup people making up actors playing makeup people, producers conversing with actors playing producers. And just across the parking lot from HBO's real Larry Sanders Show production office—a cluttered maze of ringing telephones, scattered notepads, and half-finished cups of coffee—is a painstaking replica of a production office—a cluttered maze of ringing telephones, scattered notepads, and half-finished cups of coffee.

''We try not to think about it,'' says one of the show's real crew members, acknowledging that the set occasionally feels like one big house of mirrors. ''We're afraid that our heads might explode.''

If not literally mind-blowing, Shandling's latest television premise is mind-bending at least, and it has wowed the critics: ''an artistic success of stunning brilliance,'' raved the Hollywood Reporter. ''I want people to think they're watching an actual talk show,'' says Shandling. ''But then I want to show them everything that goes on away from the camera, too.'' Airing Saturdays at 10:30 p.m. and now in its third week of 13, the half-hour program combines talk-show segments in which Garry as Larry chats up celebrities as themselves, like Mimi Rogers and Herve Villechaize, with documentary-style film footage of Larry's behind-the-curtain interactions with his staff, his ego-massaging producer (Rip Torn), his ever-so-humble announcer (Jeffrey Tambor), and his second wife (Megan Gallagher).

Most of this is scripted, but Larry Sanders' repartee with his star guests often is not. When Carol Burnett mentions in the Aug. 29 episode that all those years of good-night ear tugs have made one lobe slightly longer than the other, Garry/Larry spontaneously breaks in-and breaks up the studio audience- with, ''So you actually have to get earmuffs at a specialty shop.''

''I'm trying to make all of this as realistic as possible,'' says the man who alternated with Jay Leno as guest host of The Tonight Show in the late '80s. Shandling, 42, has wearily collapsed into an office chair, his high-topped feet propped on a desk. ''There's so much hypocrisy that goes on in talk shows. At home, you can watch and never guess whether the host likes the guest, doesn't like the guest, wants to date them, or wants to kill them. But you can certainly tell backstage. And that's the part that has always intrigued me.''

Indeed, The Larry Sanders Show's plots, most of them generated by Shandling, are about the dirty little talk-show secrets we've always suspected—how comics get blacklisted for appearing on someone else's program, how the star gets insecure when a guest host (in this case Dana Carvey, playing himself) does a little too well. In addition, much about Shandling's imaginary talk show seems specifically familiar—the braying, obsequious sidekick, the fern-laden set, the multiple marriages of the host. Carson, perhaps?