by *Before the Internet
At the age of 11, I watched the premiere of Saturday Night Live. I would go on to follow the series for the next two decades and saw it go through phases of innovation, imitation, leadership, downfall and the futile chase to recover its founding magic. It has become exactly what it once mocked.
****
I was 11 when “NBC’s Saturday Night” debuted in October of 1975.
In some ways, I was the perfect age and target for the show. You might say, “Well, that’s young,” but I have an older brother, James, who was then 18. āWoodyā was highly influential, and I was highly attuned to goofy humor. So whatever he was into, I was absorbing.
I do remember having that clean hard drive of a young kid too, where the things your older siblings say, do and like make a long-lasting impression. I had full recall of entire skits.
We were all aware of irreverent humor in my house growing up. Mad magazine was happening. “Monty Python” was big. Woody Allen, ditto. Amazingly, I was permitted to subscribe to National Lampoon. Our Dad, a huge Johnny Carson fan, had cut his teeth on Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. All in all, I wasn’t too young.
That October night my 6th-grade friend Mike Frickey invited me to spend the night at his house, which was his Dad’s apartment in Evansville. His dad was a younger parent in the social strata of my friendsā parents, thus everything aligned for us that night.
Mike’s dad even made popcorn. I didn’t know it then, but it was the series’ premiere episode, George Carlin as host. I thought it was cool, and because I was made aware of it from the first moment I remembered to keep watching.
So that was my first SNL experience. I was an early adopter. Although I never looked at the show and said, “I want to do that,” I definitely recognized it as new and different, aimed generally at younger people and something that our parents weren’t going to respond to quite the same way.
Apart from the humor I absorbed with 100 percent retention, the other standout feature was the show’s amazing musical guests. SNL was adept at breaking acts nationally. For a kid in the Midwest who’s now 14 years old to see a band like Talking Heads on network television was all in the same moment, disturbing, eye-opening, and ultimately pretty great.
After a couple of seasons, people were now familiar with the rhythm of how the show unfolded, what kind of skits they could expect, and the types of performances they’d be getting from the guest hosts. The show hit a natural turning point, where it would have to make casting changes and evolve from its original incarnation.
And those were awkward times. Joe Piscopo was among the first of memorable cast changes (it was not an upgrade), and Eddie Murphy’s arrival in the 1980s marked a period of ambition, where cast members saw the show as a platform for themselves. Unfortunately, it often devolved into competition and politicking amongst the cast, as they felt compelled to self-promote, invent catchphrases, and otherwise try to gain the favor of the writers.
The original SNL had a brilliant lineup of fearless writers and they all brought an edge that SNL was never able to recapture. And that makes sense because when the show was new, it was “taking down” big targets, and had summoned the right ‘voice’ to make that work.
And then as the show was successful and these writers were now moving onward and upward (or reading their own glittering reviews), a natural attrition took place.
The magic of the original brilliant two or three seasons was lost. Unrecoverable, of course, but then the question remained, “Well, what do we do in this next phase of the show?”
What they did was: They found Eddie Murphy, arguably still the series’ singular biggest star. And, NBC executives had to fire and then rehire SNL creator Lorne Michaels to understand what they had and didn’t have.
There was competition from ABC, briefly, “Fridays.” LOL.
There was the superb “SCTV,” which never competed head to head, but it was again something in the same familiar vein and offered a contrast or a comparison.
From its inception until 1986, when I graduated from college, SNL went through phases of innovation, imitation, leadership, decline and trying to return to creative peak. The cast, writing and show drove this process, and quality fluctuated between brilliance and failure.
Its heyday was the first four seasons, while the second decade is best remembered for the era of Murphy, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal, Harry Shearer, and Martin Short. This phase relied more on video content but still made an effort to maintain quality.
The 1990-93 SNL seasons (with cast members Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Mike Myers, Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon with young David Spade, Chris Farley, and Adam Sandler) is the only other truly great era of the show in my opinion:
ā¢ Motivational speaker Matt Foley.
ā¢ āCoffee Talk with Linda Richman.ā Carvey as both George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot, with Darrell Hammond as Clinton. The Chippendaleās audition sketch with Patrick Swayze and Farley. Wayneās World. Sprockets.
ā¢ Miller remains the greatest “Weekend Update” host ever, and it isn’t close. Who else could take the bathyscaphe down into the Marianas Trench of references the way Miller could? A highly subjective list of oft-cited, Favorite Miller References of mine includes: Topo Gigio, the Zapruder film, Tenzing Norgay, Blanche DuBois and Bob Crane. (One of my favorite things to hear from certain friends these days is, “Dennis Miller: He used to be so clever.”)
Lorne had figured out how to keep the engine running with a home-run cast, great writing and balanced politics.
It was a golden time for the show.
I stopped being a regular viewer around 2003. If forced to pinpoint it, I can cite the first few times that Weekend Update anchors suddenly began to break character to laugh at their own jokes, as in, “This material is so good, I just can’t contain myself!”
The show has become what it once lampooned so effectively: Establishment. But much worse is the realization that SNL appears unwilling to satirize those they align with. It can’t help itself.
I could be wrong.
Youāre invited to persuade me otherwise. Iāve missed at least the last threeĀ full cast eras, so perhaps SNL today isnāt safe. Perhaps it isnāt partisan. Perhaps it isnāt utterly predictable. I do not hate the show, I just don’t care about it as much I did.
It’s difficult to create five-ish sketches that are funny on a consistent basis in that short amount of production time. That should be acknowledged, along with the truth that the SNL audience of the last 15 years is scared to laugh at ā and its own writers are scared to step away from ā anything that goes against… āCorrectness,ā we’ll just call it.
And the cast is cut from the same, safe cloth (witness the Shane Gillis hiring/firing mess).
SNL is a relic now.Ā And Lorne is 80.Ā
But the show had its run, beginning with the truly edgy, original writers including Michael OāDonoghue, the incredible Not Ready for Primetime Players, the Murphy-Guest-Crystal-Short years, and culminating in the Golden Era cast of Carvey, Farley, Hartman (Phil Hartman: my God, brilliant), Myers, Miller, Nealon, Rock, Sandler, Schneider.
SNL rose to success in 1975 by skewering the Establishment, but today it is Establishment ā precisely what it mocked and why it rose to success in the first place.
Stuart Wade 
3 Comments