Live From New York - James H. Miller [6]
To those who work on the show, success and failure become close to matters of life and death. It’s all there in the argot; a good joke “kills,” while a bad sketch “dies.” Having an audience “crushed” by material is devoutly to be wished. Many a sketch will “kill at dress” — meaning get big laughs at the dress rehearsal staged in front of a separate audience a few hours before the real show — only to “die on-air” when it’s the show for real.
Among Michaels’s nemeses over the years have been network censors, less conspicuous now but a constant source of friction at the outset; network executives who hated the program or wanted to produce it themselves; hosts who panicked at the last minute and wanted to bolt, or who canceled just before their week’s exhilarating ordeal was about to begin; and an uncountable number of protests and condemnations from special interest groups offended by this sketch or that portrayal or a news item on “Weekend Update” — or the way a seemingly imperiled pig squealed during a sketch about a TV animal show.
Even in its maturity, if that state was ever actually reached, the show remained a troubled child. Brandon Tartikoff, for years NBC’s much-loved uber-programmer, reluctantly canceled the series in the mid-1980s, only to give it an eleventh-hour reprieve. Essentially, the warden made the fateful last-minute phone call to himself.
The show made stars of unknowns and superstars of stars. There were also those who entered anonymous and left the same way. Some were made famous, some were made bitter, some were made rich. Some found nirvana and others a living hell. They never really knew, going through those portals, how or if they would be changed as a result. But they virtually all had one thing in common, even if they had joined the show simply because they needed work and liked to eat: It was much more than a job. They were the chosen because it was the chosen. They could look down on people working even on the most successful prime-time sitcoms or dramas because Saturday Night Live was something entirely unto itself, a towering edifice on the landscape, a place of wonder and magic, a sociopolitical phenomenon.
With the arrival of SNL, the TV generation, at least for ninety minutes a week, could see television not just as a window on the past or a display case for the fading fantasy figures of their fathers and mothers, but as a mirror — a warped fun-house mirror perhaps, but a mirror just the same, one reflecting their own sensibilities, values, and philosophies. Television, which had shown them the world, had heretofore neglected to show them themselves.
Amazingly, the show continues to rejuvenate itself. In the early 1990s, all the old “Saturday Night Dead” gags were revived as the series suffered a drastic artistic setback. Critics and competitors rushed forward to declare it antiquated, unfunny, and, worst of all, unhip — and this was the show that had made it hip to watch television in the first place. But by the end of the decade, the century, and millennium, Lorne Michaels and his cast and crew had managed another fantastic resurrection, helped by the exploitable absurdities of politics. In the election years of 1996 and 2000, a cast of young, fresh writing and performing talent proved it knew where the laughs were, and found them.
When Saturday Night Live began, its competition was mostly local programming — syndicated shows and old movies — since ABC and CBS, then the only other networks, went dark late Saturday nights. Today SNL faces an onslaught of competition in its time period from dozens of channels, including many cable networks and broadcasters fighting for the same demographically desirable, youngish audience that SNL helped define. And yet, though the competition has multiplied exponentially, SNL still dominates. Its viewership now includes parents who have children as old as the parents were when they first watched the show. Or older. They may say it isn’t as good as it was then — but they