HOLLYWOOD — We could begin with the Zen "emptiness circle" tattooed on the back of his neck. Or start by setting the scene: "It's a pleasant spring afternoon on the calm and verdant grounds of the Hotel Bel-Air; swans glide thoughtlessly across a still pond." We could open with a joke that also communicates detail: "I'm playing with guys younger than me," said Garry Shandling, 57, fresh from a game of basketball, "and I realized today my strongest defensive technique is that I'm so out of breath that the guy I'm guarding thinks I could die at any minute."

Or a deep thought, half-disguised as a joke: "I've been on a state of high alert since high school. I didn't need 9/11 to remind me that we live on a ball of flame."

Or we could get right to the news that this week marks the release of "Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show," a four-disc selective retrospective of the paradigm-breaking, paradigm-setting 1992 to 1998 HBO comedy about a late-night talk- show host and his codependents — a set with which Shandling, its star and guiding light, was thoroughly, even profoundly involved.

LOTS OF NEW MATERIAL

The DVD, which contains eight hours of new material, is a thing of many angles, as much about Shandling as it is about "Sanders," and as much about the actors as the characters they played, and as much about the process as the product. It revels in contradictions: the seriousness of comedy; playing a role to become yourself; offering for public consumption what the menu describes (in Shandling's handwriting) as "intimate, personal, indulgent visits with my friends that are meant for only me to see."

"What am I going to do that is different and appropriate and gives honor to the show and that cast?" Shandling rhetorically asked on the above-mentioned afternoon at the above-mentioned hotel. Roused to make a case or searching to complete a thought or to roll an idea into a joke, Shandling presents an interesting mix of passion and abstraction. ("Because the show was special, almost a sacred process. And there's a theme that runs through the DVD, which is the search for authenticity in life. You want to see bloopers? It's not what the show was about." When he calls the project "a labor of love," he is not being glib; love, in some unlikely way, is its actual subject.

A PACE SETTER

Though it was never successful in the way of "Frasier" or "Friends," the series' influence continues to play out, if only because it demonstrated how cable television could accommodate more complicated flavors; in that sense, it made way for "The Sopranos" and whatever else "The Sopranos" made way for. It achieved a kind of easy naturalism not even TV drama had managed and was new in its use of strong language but also its use of silence. There was no laugh track, no background music. It was dark, but human; edgy, but not heartless; its heroes often pathetic, yet sympathetic.

It anticipated the current run on backstage comedies and explored the blurring of the line between fact and fiction later seen in "Entourage," "Extras" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," with guest celebrities playing versions or inversions of themselves; it developed the "walk and talk" scene Aaron Sorkin made the stylistic cornerstone of "Sports Night," "The West Wing" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." "Sanders" writer-producer Judd Apatow carried its devotion to the real into his next project, the comedy "Freaks and Geeks."

Shandling seems to see everything — stand-up comedy, acting, boxing, a DVD, this interview — as an occasion for growth, learning, self-realization. He's been meditating since the late '70s, when he would head with his dog into the hills behind Santa Barbara to "clear out his mind." "But in 1978, all the people I was working with would think that was really weird, to the degree I stopped talking about it. And I think my dog stopped telling the other dogs 'cause he was embarrassed. The other dogs are going, 'You mean, you just go out there and sit there? He doesn't throw you anything, you don't chase anything?' "

GURU CREDITED

His interest in Zen must have primed him for Roy London, the acting teacher who received a "special thanks" credit on every episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" and whom Shandling calls "the most important man ever in my life." "A lot of questions I had about life and about art and psychology he had answers to. And he was guiding people in that class to eliminate everything but their essence and just be, so you're working on life and acting at the same time."

One choice on the DVD's opening menu reads, "I don't really want to watch this DVD. I'd rather spend my time talking to a human being." (Selecting it gets the response "Option not available.") Appropriately, then, the heart of the set — which includes the usual commentary tracks and deleted scenes, along with a documentary on the show — is the several long, basically unedited encounters Shandling has with some of the show's celebrity guests, who are, not coincidentally, also his friends: Sharon Stone, Alec Baldwin, David Duchovny, Ellen DeGeneres, Carol Burnett, Tom Petty, Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld. These are "experimental" pieces he describes as "whatever happens from the actual human contact, when you don't have to do anything or prove anything."

The best are unguarded almost to the point of strangeness.

Shandling has not been exactly inactive or invisible since he ended "Sanders" — he's hosted the Emmys, made a few movies, was the voice of the turtle in the animated feature "Over the Hedge" — but this DVD is his real next act. "It isn't just a look at old shows — there's a progression, and this experiment in leaving the camera on. I don't know how it's going to integrate into what I do next, but I think I'm evolving. I'm curious to see what I do — I don't want to have to work on it, but I'd be interested in seeing it."