STILL ALIVE, BARELY

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

The days of Roseanne Roseannadanna and "Jane, you ignorant slut!" are long gone. But to those who cannot remember them, the Saturday Night Live of the mid-1990s must seem like some flavorless leftover that Mom and Dad--those mockable aging baby boomers--refuse to discard from the fridge. Still, the fate of Lorne Michaels' legendary, revolutionary late-night comedy show continues to fascinate as almost no other show on TV does; what happens to it matters.

The show has successfully weathered SATURDAY NIGHT DEAD headlines in the past, but this year it is facing its gravest crisis yet. Last season SNL was bombarded with fierce criticism not only from the public and the press but also from unhappy performers and network executives like NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer, who deemed the cast members too distracted and the writing "weak." His complaints were mild compared with those of many longtime viewers, whose memories of last year's endlessly puerile sketches are still vivid.

Adding to SNL's challenge this fall is the presence, for the first time, of serious network competition. On Oct. 14th, Fox will launch Mad-TV, a sketch-comedy show based on Mad magazine. The one-hour program, which will air at 11 p.m. Eastern time (half an hour earlier than SNL) looks unpromising--crass, pointless skits, like one in which homeless people forage for breakfast food in Dumpsters, seem to be favored here too--but if it fails, Fox already has a potential backup in the works: a sketch-comedy hour being developed by Roseanne.

Michaels, meanwhile, has spent the summer overseeing SNL's most sweeping overhaul in a decade. After conducting nationwide auditions, he has hired five new cast members, most of them unknowns. Such stalwarts as Chris Farley and Adam Sandler will be gone. Except for a couple of lower-profile players (Mark McKinney and Molly Shannon), the only major returnees are Weekend Update anchor Norm MacDonald and David Spade, who will have his own regular commentary spot at 12:30.

The turnover in writing staff has been just as drastic. Of the 17 writers on board this year, 12 are newcomers. (Most come from performance rather than print backgrounds; Michaels this time has generally avoided raiding his usual source, the Harvard Lampoon.) In some ways, SNL is a victim of its own success. Writers can now find many other markets in prime time for their talents, at least in part because of the SNL influence: several of last year's younger writers have left for shows like Seinfeld, The Simpsons and News Radio. "The sensibility of SNL is all over TV now," says former staff writer Robert Smigel, one of four people who rejected offers from Michaels to take over as head writer. Smigel will instead be executive producer of a new sketch-comedy show Dana Carvey is doing for ABC.

SNL's transition summer hasn't been smooth. The show's new team was to begin work on Aug. 14, but Michaels didn't secure his last few writers and final two cast members (returnee Shannon and newcomer Darrell Hammond) until last week. Moreover, despite the influx of new faces, veteran SNL watchers are wondering just how much of a rejuvenation the show will get. Four of the five new performers come from the Goundlings and Second City--the same comedy troupes Michaels has mined for years. In addition, SNL's notoriously male-dominated culture seems likely to continue unchanged: only three of this season's 17 writers are women.

Despite the problems, the pressure and the pre-emptive bad buzz, Michaels remains unflappable. "I wish I could say with certainty that this show will be a smash," he says, "but I know it will be a lot of people trying very hard." One big improvement, he contends, is the reduced size of the cast--from 13 to nine. Last year's numbers were "a huge problem from a writing perspective," says David Mandel, who left SNL to write for Seinfeld, "because you were juggling so many people, you could never hook into any one performer." Hiring unknowns, Michaels says, will help the show's stability, since fewer cast members will be tempted by movie offers--something of an epidemic in recent years. "We're back to the show being the most important thing," he says. "Holding it to higher standards--that's my job."

To do that, however, Michaels will need a sharper editing eye than some feel he demonstrated last season. "I saw pretty good sketches die on the way to the screen," notes Michael McKean, another departing cast member. "If a sketch asked a lot of an audience, they didn't want it. By and large, you had one smart piece within the 90 minutes." Michaels will need to come up with a lot more of those next season if Saturday Night is to live again.