Live From New York - James H. Miller [272]
I was planning on doing this when I grew up when my mom was still alive, but there’s definitely no question that comedy got me through a lot of horrible stuff that I went through as a kid. If my mom didn’t have a natural gift to be a singer, I think she would have been a comedian. That’s nice to know.
All television shows obviously live or die by ratings. Fortunately for Saturday Night Live, its ratings built steadily from its first year — already successful — to 1978, a peak year in terms of creativity and Nielsens as well. For that season, SNL averaged a 12.6 rating and powerhouse 39 share (a rating is a percentage of all TV homes, and a share is a percentage of TV homes with their sets on at that time). By contrast, for the 2000–01 season, SNL averaged a 5.4 rating and 15 share, but the drop isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, because when the show began it had virtually no competition but old movies on local stations. There weren’t hundreds of cable channels; cable was mostly recycled movies, with little original programming.
Jean Doumanian’s experiment in failure, the 1980–81 season, scored the lowest SNL ratings in four years, even though the number of NBC affiliates carrying the show had grown. Dick Ebersol’s first year scored a lower average than Doumanian’s, but arguably the audience had been chased away and needed to be lured back by positive word-of-mouth. Ebersol kept the audience from slipping away further but did not equal the best ratings of the first five-year period.
Lorne Michaels’s return to the show in 1985 didn’t electrify the nation either, and the ratings remained virtually the same as in Ebersol’s last year. They rose during the rest of the decade as Michaels reasserted himself and the show regained its status. Throughout the run, of course, the show has been treasured by the network for the demographic profile of its viewers — youngish and affluent, the advertisers’ favorites — and today networks read demographic tea leaves more religiously than they do the numbers of total viewers and households. Saturday Night Live, for better or worse, was instrumental in bringing this about.
Through good times and bad, Saturday Night Live has remained NBC’s highest-rated late-night show, and once it was established, it became responsible for hundreds of millions in annual profits. It has never lost money, though some network executives claim it came close.
Today’s seasonal averages of a 5.4 rating and 15 share may seem low compared to the 12.6 and 39 of 1978–79, but Saturday Night Live’s ratings are still considered excellent and its demographics exemplary. An attempt by ABC to imitate the show in 1980 with a shrill Los Angeles– based series called Fridays lasted only two seasons, but at one point in its first season it briefly outrated Doumanian’s version of SNL. In recent years, SNL has handily bumped off such wannabe competitors as a Howard Stern comedy show aired by CBS affiliates, and it easily out-paces, in ratings and virtually every other way, Mad TV on Fox.
WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive:
What’s truly amazing is that it’s reinvented itself so many, many, many times. And what’s equally amazing is that I was a viewer when it first premiered, and I’m a viewer now. I spent a lot of years at NBC — it was part of the crown jewels of the network — but just as a pure come-to-the-set-for-the-joy-of-it experience, I’ve been there through all those eras. I’ve been there and watched my children now come there. And there’s precious few things in television that have accomplished that.
JAMES DOWNEY:
I think these days Lorne probably takes the network’s calls more. I think Lorne’s personal tastes are probably much closer to performers than to pure writers. To the extent that the network doesn’t agree with the writing