The header for this article on Saturday Night Live is a bit melodramatic, but the piece itself isn't bad. It gets some stuff wrong and some stuff right.
It's true that they're doing a lot of pandering to a small subset of terminally online liberals. Much of this can be put down to airing on NBC at a time when all the major broadcasters are committed to propping up the limp corpse of the Biden Administration. My caveat there is that politics as such has never been the show's strong suit. There have been some good impressions (i.e. Will Ferrell's George W. Bush) and the occasional winner of a political sketch, almost by accident. But the more interesting material has always lain in the weird concept stuff, the skits that run at 12:51 when only a few diehards in the audience are still fully awake. That the political humor is sucking more ass than usual is a problem, but not a fatal one.
A more serious problem is bloat. For most of the past decade Lorne Michaels had settled on 16 cast members as a maximum for what the 90 minute format could comfortably hold, and that sort of worked. But for the last couple of years the cast has been ballooning. Last season it had 20 performers. This season there are 21, everyone from last year except for two people, and with three more added. And this has happened because longtime veterans who should have moved on long ago get money thrown at them so they'll stay indefinitely. The result is that Season 47 frequently looks like DVD extras of Season 40.
2 comments:
It didn't take much reflection for us to remember we hadn't watched any SNL since the early days before the first cast had moved on to other things. I even remembered the names of those original members - Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, and Laraine Newman. Truth to tell, I had forgotten Laraine's name and totally forgot about Michael O'Donoghue, the head writer. The Not Ready for Primetime Players were a pretty amazing group and I can only imagine now how they would have played a skit about themselves 47 years later still performing every Saturday night. I certainly see your point about bloat and the article to linked to didn't make me feel as though we'd missed anything.
The weird thing about the early SNL was that it was still live tv. I spent some time this afternoon trying to find George Carlin's opening monologue on that first show and, a certain amount of persistence having paid off, you can see it here. The other one I couldn't resist sending you a link to was a later episode when Richard Pryor made his first appearance.
The show has obviously changed a lot over the decades and now, like so many things, it's basically just the name of the shop.
I don't think Lorne Michaels ever meant the original cast to be the only cast, like say Monty Python. But there probably wasn't a lot of thinking about the future involved. Everyone was running around just trying to make deadline, hoping it would be funny, which it frequently was. As this process entailed a lot of cocaine consumption you could say it was a more depraved time, but it was also a more innocent one in other ways. After this much time and the kinds of network politics that are in play it must be difficult to do anything halfway spontaneous.
The live thing was a hard sell, I know. I remember seeing the whole first episode at some point, I think when Carlin died. His monologues were very funny, although for some reason he didn't appear in any of the skits. Either there wasn't time to rehearse him or they hadn't figured out the format yet. And yes, Pryor was very funny on his show, which also had this classic.
A lot of things are just the name of the shop now. SNL does still discover funny people but doesn't necessarily find the best use for them.
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