Live From New York - James H. Miller [220]
Early in the nineties, NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer and other executives had begun taking a more aggressive interest in the show, concerned about ratings and giving Michaels lots of unsolicited advice on such matters as who was funny, who wasn’t, who should be fired, and suggesting innumerable cosmetic changes. From the beginning, Michaels had resisted NBC’s attempts to use the show as a promotional tool — balking, for example, when the network implored him to book Erik Estrada, the star of NBC’s CHiPs, as a host. Ohlmeyer, whom Ebersol had tried to hire to direct Saturday Night Live back in the formative days, thought superstars Adam Sandler and Chris Farley were among those who should go. He didn’t “get” them and told Michaels they should be fired. NBC brass said the show had grown too costly and accused Michaels, in effect, of coasting. Ohlmeyer even said he thought Michaels spent too much time on the beach at St. Bart’s, one of his repertory of longtime haunts, and not enough time streamlining the show. Michaels theorized that one reason for the executives’ greater interest in the show was that they felt emboldened by the success they had with Friends in prime time; network executives gave themselves credit for putting that ensemble together and then wanted to take a stab at casting Saturday Night Live too. An executive with delusions of creativity, like a wounded pig, is a dangerous animal.
The show suffered a run of bad luck and bad timing. Dana Carvey’s departure at the end of the 1992–93 season had been particularly crucial because he took such a large collection of characters and impressions with him; he was a whole stock company himself. Phil Hartman left a year later and gave interviews in which he made nasty cracks about the quality of the show’s writing, even though he’d thrived in sketch after sketch. Rather suddenly and concurrently, the press turned hostile, dredging up the old “Saturday Night Dead” slurs to say the show was stale and giving SNL a relentless trouncing even when the cast was still stellar. Michaels experienced the worst reviews of his career and found some of the attacks distressingly and discouragingly personal. One reviewer wrote that the show had been “a lifeless, humorless corpse for two years, and now it’s starting to stink.” Others were similarly hostile, if not quite so inelegant: “Saturday Night Live is showing its age,” “about as amusing as a state funeral,” “the show needs a kick in the pants,” “Nobody’s laughing anymore. You watch it now and sullenly stare at the television.”
In addition to all that, there was dissent from within — crabby campers who joined the cast and almost immediately developed grievances and complaints. If Saturday Night Live was in yet another transitional phase, these particular growing pains were agonizing, and the more injured the show looked, the more network honchos stepped up their attack, even to the point of leaking to reporters that nothing about Saturday Night Live was sacrosanct or untouchable — Lorne Michaels pointedly included. Michaels may have begun to look back fondly even at 1985, the low-rated year he returned as executive producer; it probably looked good compared to 1994, for him the worst year in the show’s history.
For the moment, the fashionable thing was to knock Saturday Night Live. The sport became so popular that even certain members of the cast joined in.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Phil Hartman was here eight years. After most shows, he and I would sit together at the party, and there