At 15, Saturday Night Lives
By Richard Zoglin
John Belushi and Gilda Radner are no longer around. The other Not Ready for Prime Time originals have phased into either obscurity or fat-cat Hollywood stardom. The baby boomers who discovered the show in the mid-'70s are now watching alongside their kids and struggling to keep up with the cast changes (which one is Phil Hartman?). Still, an anniversary for Saturday Night Live -- which will mark the start of its 15th season with a prime-time special next Sunday -- is more than just a routine occasion for TV nostalgia. The pressing question: Is Saturday Night still alive or merely on life support?
Saturday Night Live was not just another television show; it was the show that changed television. When it made its debut in October 1975, Carol Burnett and Sonny and Cher were still the definition of hip TV comedy. NBC's new late- night series burst onto that scene with a countercultural whoop. It brought to TV, for the first time, the comic sensibility of the '60s generation: anti- Establishment, idol-smashing, media savvy. The show seemed to break new ground almost weekly: pushing the boundaries of permissible language and subject matter, rejuvenating political satire, breaking the "fourth wall" to make fun of the TV medium itself. It helped launch or boost the careers of comics like Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman, gave avant-garde rock an outlet on mainstream TV and made the world safe for David Letterman.
Most of those accomplishments date from the show's first five seasons -- also known as the Golden Age. A young producer named Lorne Michaels had assembled a talented group of writers and performers from such cutting-edge venues as the Second City satirical troupe and National Lampoon magazine. Chevy Chase was the show's first star and formative influence, but the group effort soon produced a cornucopia of cultural reference points for the '70s: Roseanne Roseannadanna, the Coneheads, the Nerds, Belushi's Samurai warrior, Dan Aykroyd's Tom Snyder, and on and on.
The last of the original cast members, as well as Michaels, left at the end of the 1980 season, and Saturday Night Live was forced to rebuild from scratch. In the next few seasons -- the Dark Ages -- the show managed to unearth one superstar (Eddie Murphy) but a lot of also-rans (Charles Rocket, Mary Gross). One year it brought in seasoned ringers like Billy Crystal and Martin Short (no fair -- they were ready for prime time); then Michaels returned with an all new cast that ranged from teen flashes-in-the-pan like Anthony Michael Hall to Hollywood veteran Randy Quaid. But the ensemble - feeling had disappeared, and the writing had grown desperate and juvenile: in one witless sketch, Bobby and Jack Kennedy plot to murder Marilyn Monroe. There was talk of cancellation.
Then, out of the ashes, a renaissance of sorts. For the 1986-87 season, Michaels pieced together a cast that finally took hold and is now starting its fourth season together. Only one of them -- the silky, moonfaced Jon Lovitz, creator of the pathological-liar character -- seems to capture the old spirit: like Belushi or Aykroyd or Radner, he gets laughs by simply showing up onstage. Still, there's plenty of talent on hand: Dana Carvey, a pixieish comic with devilish impressions of George Bush and Jimmy Stewart; Victoria Jackson, a ditsily appealing blond; and the sparkling, versatile Jan Hooks. If none seem destined for stardom, they have at least been together long enough to get comfortable.
The writers are more comfortable with them too. Carvey's Bush impersonation galvanized the troupe into some sharp political satire on the '88 campaign. In one inspired sketch during the Iran-contra affair, President Reagan (ah, that's Phil Hartman) puts on his familiar bumbling act in public, then turns into a whipcracking boss in private, directing every detail of the covert operation, down to computing interest on the money stored in Swiss bank accounts. The show's movie parodies have also had some shrewd twists: Carvey, for example, playing Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant in Rain Man -- who turns out to be giving gambling tips to Pete Rose.
The show, in short, is once again delivering laughs. So why, for a veteran fan, does the new Saturday Night Live still seem like a pale imitation of its old self? For one thing, the most popular bits -- Carvey's Church Lady, the body-building brothers Hans and Franz -- are the weakest parts of the show, crowd pleasers that depend on makeup gimmicks rather than nimble gags. Too many sketches are pat and obvious in ways that the old group wouldn't have tolerated (a team of ad executives, marooned on an island, worries more about meetings and market surveys than about building a raft to escape). The live production, meanwhile, is more polished but lacks the old gleam. The actors now get extensively made up for their impressions (Chevy used to do Gerald Ford without even changing his voice). Yet the skits seem more ragged and underrehearsed than they were during the seat-of-the-pants '70s.
In those days, SNL writers would sometimes reject comic ideas with the put- down "That's Carol Burnett." It was their code language for material that was too broad, too mainstream. Saturday Night Live may not quite have become the Carol Burnett Show of the '80s, but complacency has crept in. Perhaps it was inevitable. TV anniversaries, after all, serve another important function. They remind us that shows grow old.