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and often contrast Friends to Seinfeld by saying, “We cast Friends,” the implication being that’s why the people were more attractive. So they were very confident. It used to be that they would not offer anything except, “My God, you guys are great and we’re not here to tell you your job,” and then it became, “Just for what it’s worth, we loved that, just great,” and then it became, “I don’t know that this works,” and it finally reached a point where it became, “We don’t care that it’s popular, we don’t want you doing this because we don’t like it.” That’s not even a business value. They were so at peace with their own taste and worldview that they were willing to take an economic hit just to have something enacted. That reached its peak I would say in the ’94–’95 period.

One of the network’s ideas that they were very serious about was, why does it have to be live? And why do you need a guest host, when it’s the cast that brings the people back each week? And they bitched about how the live element made it much more expensive and complicated, and how you could go shoot all your Jeopardy sketches in one afternoon.

LORNE MICHAELS:

When it all hit, my son Eddie had just been born and there were some complications. It turned out to be nothing but there was a day and a half or two days of concern. Alice gave birth to him at twelve-thirty, I think, in the afternoon and I still managed to make read through back at 30 Rock. We had made elaborate preparations in case I couldn’t be there — altering the chain of command and all that stuff. But I got back to the office, and it was the week Sarah Jessica Parker hosted, and it was just around the time that we were just being hounded everywhere.

I don’t think I’d ever been as scared. You know, I was never scared in the seventies. I think because I was single then, I had already been through rough periods in my life and there was nothing really that was going to scare me — I mean, so what would happen? I would be broke and washed up, and I’d already had that a couple of times.

DON OHLMEYER:

Lorne and I used to have long involved conversations, almost psychoanalytical, about the problems. Sometimes identifying the problems is the most difficult thing. It’s very subjective. I would certainly never presume that I know more about doing Saturday Night Live than Lorne. I can watch the show and react as a viewer, or I can watch the show and react as somebody who is running the operation and has a vested interest in the success of the show. I can look at the numbers. I can do all these different things. But if you’re not there on a day-today basis, you don’t really know what the problem is.

Lorne knew that there was a problem, but I think he was unsure of exactly what the problem was. Objectively Lorne knew the show could be better. You had to look at what are the strengths and weaknesses of the cast, even though they’re very talented. Do we need some fresh blood? Do we need a fresh approach in the writing?

“Ultimatum” is a difficult word. No, I never gave Lorne an ultimatum. But what I basically said to him is, “The show has to get better.”

6

Still Crazy After All These Years: 1995–

It had been something of a Saturday Night massacre. Lorne Michaels was forced to fire Adam Sandler and Chris Farley (he was ordered to fire Tim Meadows too, but managed to stay that execution). Veteran Jim Downey was ousted as head writer, Mike Myers had gone to Hollywood to make movies and money. Saturday Night Live probably had nowhere to go but up, back up, rebounding as it had done so many times before. It didn’t hurt that the likes of Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri, Darrell Hammond, Chris Kattan, Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gasteyer, Tracy Morgan, Molly Shannon, Horatio Sanz, and Tina Fey were waiting in the wings.

ALEC BALDWIN, Host:

Some of the cast members and writers leave the show and do things that are elevated compared to what they’re asked to do on the show, but many of them — this is a terrible thing to say — leave there and become the very thing they made fun of on the show.

One of the oddest