Steve Landesberg
Steve Landesberg is an actor, born 1936.
Landesberg came out of stand-up, which is the only way to explain the timing. Born in New York in 1936, he worked the comedy circuit and the talk shows, turning up on The Merv Griffin Show and The Dean Martin Show before television found the right container for him.
That container was Barney Miller. As Detective Arthur Dietrich he played the squad's insufferable know-all, a man who answers the question nobody asked with the fact nobody wanted, delivered so evenly that the joke lands a half-second after the line does. He was in 124 episodes, from the last episode of the 1975 season to the end of the show in 1982, and was nominated for three Emmy Awards for it. It is one of the great deadpan performances in American sitcom, and it typed him permanently.
Everything after is a variation on the calm professional. He was Dr. Halperin on The Golden Girls, Dr. Myron Finkelstein on Head Case, and Dr. Rosenbaum in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, plus voice work as Gary on Dinosaurs and a bailiff on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. There were sitcom leads that did not take, in Conrad Bloom and Fish, and a straight dramatic turn in a television film about the U.S.S. Indianapolis. He died in 2010, and the Dietrich performance has outlasted almost everything around it.
Movies (2)
TV (12)
Where to start with Steve Landesberg
Barney Miller and nothing else, first. Dietrich is the entire case for him, and the show is structured perfectly to display the trick: a squad room where everyone talks over everyone, and one man answering in complete sentences with a fact that makes the situation worse. Almost any episode from 1977 onward works as a sample.
After that, the pleasure is spotting the same instrument in other hands. The Golden Girls gives him a doctor, Forgetting Sarah Marshall gives him another one two decades later and gets exactly the same unbothered delivery, and Head Case built a whole series on that register.
The voice work is the surprise: Dinosaurs and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law both use his flatness well. When Things Were Rotten is the deep cut for anyone curious about mid-seventies studio comedy, and Conrad Bloom is the road not taken.