It was the show that launched a thousand catch-phrases, dozens of comedy legends, and hype so outsized it engendered feelings of inadequacy long before its original cast left the premises.
How does one get a handle on Saturday Night Live?
If you are Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, you start at the beginning, with an aging talk show host who wanted to rest his show on weekends, a declining broadcasting network left with a large hole in their programming, and a hungry young producer named Lorne Michaels who wanted to make TV for Baby Boomers like himself.
“I want to do a show for the generation that grew up on television,” Michaels explained. In 1975 he did just that. Saturday Night tells the story of how the show happened, how it grew, and how it was nearly devoured by its early (and tough to repeat) success.
Published just ten years after the comedy-variety series’ debut, Saturday Night has a curious lost-in-time quality. It is after all a detailed history of a show that has since run on for 37 more seasons and counting. Most of the show’s defining moments had not yet taken place when this hit bookstores. Many current fans will be unfamiliar with names like “Mr. Mike” and “Land Shark” employed here regularly.
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| A portrait of "Saturday Night's" Not Ready For Prime Time Players, as they were known at the time, circa 1977: Clockwise from top: Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray (at bottom), Garrett Morris, John Belushi, and Jane Curtin. Image from https://imasportsphile.com/comedy-1981-how-to-test-marijuana-for-paraquat-with-dan-akroyd-garrett-morris/ |
Even the title they give the show itself, “Saturday Night,” mystifies. I always thought it was called “Saturday Night Live,” or “SNL,” said so fast to become a blurred “Essenell.” But Hill and Weingrad note “Saturday Night” was how the show had always been known by its original cast and crew, and thus what they call it here.
A bit of a time capsule feel predominates.
In October 1975, it went on the air for the first time as NBC’s Saturday Night. Michaels told the suits he knew the ingredients he wanted, just not the proportions. There was a mismatched vibe from the start. George Carlin, the first host, walked on stage wearing a suit jacket and T-shirt. Speakers for the musical numbers did not work properly. The original lighting director disappeared before airtime; his successor would be gone before the next show.
Even the audience was having issues:
Somebody had forgotten to make sure all the seats in the studio were filled, and at the last moment the pages from NBC’s Guest Relations staff had been out on Sixth Avenue pulling in any warm bodies they could find. Thus some of the those who witnessed Saturday Night’s first dress rehearsal were derelicts taking the opportunity to spend ninety minutes off the street.
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| One concern for Michaels was set design. According to the book, he was pleased with how the show looked on air. “Instead of looking all shiny and Mylar,” he said, “it looked sort of
run-down and beat-up, like New York City did.” Above, Peter Tosh performs on a December 1978 show. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0694938/ |
But with that chaos came considerable charm, and also room for the show to develop a formula that worked. By the fourth episode, something had clicked.
Hill and Weingrad credit the host of that episode, Candice Bergen:
Bergen would later compare the experience of hosting Saturday Night to being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army – you either converted and became Tanya [sic], she said, or you died. Bergen definitely converted.
The book takes a long time to get to that point, as Hill and Weingrad spend a lot of pages on the rise of counterculture comedy in the 1960s and early 1970s. As they paint it, there was a serious generation gap between what Boomers and older viewers found humorous. Some of that was political or sexual in nature, much else came down to tone. Implicitly or overtly, a lot of the show’s content went beyond the boundaries of acceptability for broadcast television.
A key contribution of Michaels to his show was finding a way to deliver harder-edge material, so-called “guerrilla comedy,” without violating network standards and practices. Another was to gather a group of disparate comedic artists, performers and writers alike, and mold them into a loose but efficient team that could work nonstop for three weeks out of every month.
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| Producer Lorne Michaels helps block a "Weekend Update" segment with Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd, circa 1977. Michaels' control of his show extended to removing audience members who were too conservatively attired. "He didn't want viewers at home to see 'Saturday Night' as a party for businessmen," the authors write. Image from https://www.biography.com/news/lorne-michaels-saturday-night-live-origins |
More important than either of those things, however, was finding that one face that would sell the show to a national audience: Chevy Chase.
Hired on as a writer, Chase had been a performer on both a musical and radio show produced by National Lampoon magazine, a farm club for many “Saturday Night” talents. Chase found his groove on “Saturday Night” early as the mock newscaster of its “Weekend Update” segment, where the book notes he was allowed the opportunity of building up his profile by appearing as himself.
Chase is one of only two original cast members (Laraine Newman is the other) who spoke to the book’s authors at any length. Perhaps as a result, they overplay his importance:
America after Watergate was ready to proclaim a new clown prince, someone whose very freshness and confidence was a relief and a renewal. In 1975, Chevy Chase was it.
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| Chevy Chase performs one of his patented pratfalls to open the second-season premiere of 'Saturday Night.' This was a source of friction: Chase's openings, however bruising physically, gave him a leg up notoriety-wise over his castmates. GIF from https://gifer.com/en/Cjy3 |
Yet having seen the shows Chase appears on, I can agree with Hill and Weingrad that he was not only the dominant player but the early key to “Saturday Night’s” outsized popularity.
“Even if a joke wasn’t working, [Chase] had a way of looking knowingly at viewers with an eyebrow raised that was totally disarming,” they write. Later, they add that a good deal of “potentially offensive material” could get by the censors when delivered by Chase, “by nature of his innocent delivery and his prep school looks.”
Chase proved an ego tsunami, however; not only was he a handful, but his early success on the show fueled resentment from castmates. This is where the “Backstage History” promised in the subtitle comes into play. People dish on Chase, and each other, often without attribution.
I found this a problematic aspect of an otherwise terrific book: Too much unsourced commentary gets filtered through the narrative. Doing this, the authors pinpoint sources of conflict on the show. But I wondered whether hyperbole by some of the more creative voices began to hijack the account.
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| Gilda Radner as frequent 'Weekend Update' commentator Rosanne Roseannadanna in 1979. On Radner, Hill and Weingrad write: She was far from arrogant, on or offstage, and she didn’t face the
camera without fear, but the fear didn’t come across. A fetching vulnerability
did, and it was that persona that made her a star. Image from http://www.jewishhumorcentral.com/2019/11/throwback-thursday-comedy-special-gilda.html |
Michael O’Donoghue, a key writer in the early shows, gets off so many outrageous one-liners I found myself seeking out his next quote and forgiving his nastiness way too easily:
“It does help when writing humor to have a big hunk of meat between the legs, I find. That may sound sexist, and I say it only in the kindest way, but Mr. Ding Dong, I think, has a lot of comedy genes in there.”
Hill and Weingrad detail the brilliant sketches, the popular ones like the Land Shark and the Coneheads as well as less-celebrated but equally vital sketches like those that centered on pedophilic Uncle Roy, which shocked many but opened some eyes, too. But it wasn’t all sunshine and lollypops at Manhattan’s 30 Rockefeller Center, where the show was broadcast.
With fame came drugs and ego, two negatives that work to give the narrative a dark undertow. Chase became a prime victim of both, while his castmate John Belushi, stuck behind Chase’s shadow for the first season, turned out even worse in both departments, running down female writers and famously becoming a drug casualty three years after leaving the show.
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| John Belushi, playing a samurai character inspired by Toshiro Mifune and a regular presence on 'Saturday Night,' takes frequent guest host Buck Henry's criticism of his sandwich too personally in a 1976 sketch. According to the book, Belushi's ability to make people laugh was a product both of outsized talent and considerable personal charm. Image from https://tvcolumnist.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/saturday-night-live-rye-by-the-sword-2/ |
Michaels himself went from an accessible guru to a comedy khedive, hobnobbing with the rich and hosting a fancy party on Long Island where all the guests were asked to wear white. “One of Lorne’s pet theories had always been that Saturday Night was not so much in the business of television as it was in the business of rock and roll,” the book notes. A certain unreality took over.
There were worse things than being under the control of an aloof narcissist. After Michaels quit after the fifth season, he was replaced by Jean Doumanian, the show’s talent coordinator. She had little clue about either TV production or comedy but was certain she had the answers anyway. She didn’t, and Saturday Night’s account of her downfall is a caustic capsule of all that can go wrong when taking on a successful operation.
The book is at its best when detailing “Saturday Night’s” initial season; the next four come across as something of a blur. But it rallies with Doumanian’s lone season, and the ascent of Eddie Murphy as the show’s next breakout star. The sourcing is better here, while the anecdotes maintain the high level of saltiness found in the rest of the book.
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| Eddie Murphy as three of his most-loved 'Saturday Night' characters: Gumby, Mr. Robinson, and Velvet Jones. While Chase dominated the original show, Murphy's celebrity was even greater, as he became the first (and to date, only) cast member to host a show. Image from https://ew.com/tv/2019/12/20/iconic-eddie-murphy-saturday-night-live-characters/ |
Despite its many negative takes, Saturday Night the book is mostly a celebration of the show as an entertainment juggernaut and cultural touchstone. It even works as a business account of how smart out-of-the-box thinking reinvigorated an established but tired medium.
At the time they were writing this book, a bestseller about Belushi’s addictive lifestyle and fatal overdose, Bob Woodward’s Wired, was on people’s minds and made Michaels and others from the original show less eager to talk to the authors. Hill and Weingrad don’t ignore the drug problems Woodward played up, but they provide better context, and a sense of the real pressure cast and crew worked under.
People
wanting to know the full story about the show’s nearly-half-century lifespan must look
elsewhere. But if you want to know how “SNL” …sorry, “Saturday Night” came to
be, and survived its first speed bumps, this is a fantastic place to begin.
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