TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/092589/09258900.075

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 98 lines

VIDEO, Page 75

At 15, Saturday Night Lives

The laughs are still coming, but the old gleam is gone

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.