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STEVE HIGGINS, Producer:

We hear that “it isn’t as good as it used to be” thing constantly. I think it probably started on show two in 1975. It’s a matter of time before we’re going to read “Saturday Night Dead” in the papers again.

A funny thing happened when I got here — Lorne mapped the whole thing out. He told me, “Here’s what’s going to happen: Ohlmeyer’s going to be gone — he’s giving us grief now, but he’s going to be gone — and somebody else will come in, and by that time the show will be at its height again, but then two years later it’ll come down again because the avalanche will start. You’ll see ‘Saturday Night Dead,’ we’ll see that for a while, and then it’ll be, ‘The show is funnier than it’s ever been,’ and then it’ll be, ‘The show is worse than it’s ever been.’”

And it’s worked out exactly like that. And you go, okay, if you’re caught up in this historical cycle, you just try to stave off that “the show’s not as funny” crap. And the thing is, you wouldn’t go to a carpenter’s house and go, “Wow, what a crappy job you did on your shelves.” Or say to a doctor, “How many patients have you killed?” But people feel free to comment in ways that make you go, “Where do you think you get the nerve?” I think they think they own the show.

You know what? If you like everything in the show, then that’s not a good show. If you love every single thing, there’s something wrong. It’s like pushing the envelope, which is a horrible term, but it’s about making that tent big enough so that everybody’s included, so that there’s something for everybody in the show. You should like most of it. But there might be some performance piece that you go, “I just don’t get that,” and it killed and the audience loves it and you go, “I guess that worked.” And that’s one thing that Lorne is good at. He’ll put enough in that there’s always some plus side to it.

JAMES DOWNEY, Writer:

Certainly the people at the network did not like the show at all in 1993, 1994, those seasons. When the new group came together in 1995, taking myself out of it, I think that, as much as innocent people were implicitly scapegoated, it was probably necessary that the word be out everywhere that, “No no no, they cleaned house. All the dead-wood’s gone. They have a whole new cast. It’s all new.”

Starting around ’95, Saturday Night Live became very much a performer’s show. There were new innovations limiting what writers could do. Writers had to write one piece for a character and then they could write a premise piece. It was enforcing the idea that “the cast isn’t here to bring to life the writers’ notions; the writers are there to supply material for the characters that the cast already does.” That was a big shift.

That’s the biggest way the show has changed: It’s come way back to the idea of being a performers’ show that features characters. You see the same characters a lot. Writers are the people who never want to repeat stuff. If you’re in a writers meeting and your quote-unquote idea for the week is, “I think we can do another Mango,” you would be groaned out of the room, whereas performers like repeating stuff and they don’t tend to hear, “Why do you guys keep doing Cheerleaders?” When they walk down the street, they get recognized as being on the show, and by and large the people who come up to them don’t come up to them to give them shit, they come up to say, “Hey, we love the show.”

If someone ran an analysis of the show, I would bet if you take everything in the history of the show that’s even been on three times and then from that master list figure out, of the repeat characters, which have racked up the most appearances on the show, I would be willing to bet that of the top ten, seven of them would be from this last period. Things like Mango, Cheerleaders, and so on, whereas in the entire history of the show, there were only four Czech brothers pieces. There were only, I think, seven Conehead sketches. But I promise you there were fifteen Cheerleaders. There had to be. If you said there were eighteen, it wouldn’t surprise me.

PAULA