| History of Saturday Night Live series: |
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1975–1980 |
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For much of the 1980-1981 television year, SNL was in turmoil and many critics wrote the show off as a pale imitation of its former glory. Jean Doumanian took over the show for Season 6, hiring a completely new cast and new writers, but it was plagued by problems from the start and deemed a commercial disappointment[1] by both critics and in the Nielsen ratings.
Lorne Michaels had originally wanted to make Al Franken (writer from 1976–1980; cast member between 1979–1980 and 1986–1995) his successor as executive producer after he left, and all was in place to do such until the May 10, 1980 broadcast. During a Weekend Update segment, Franken delivered a harsh criticism of then-NBC President Fred Silverman. The commentary angered Silverman so much that any chance of Franken becoming an executive under Silverman's watch was gone.
Jean Doumanian was a talent scout for SNL in the early days and was one of the few members of the staff who remained after Season 5. In Fall 1980, Doumanian accepted the job as the new executive producer. NBC almost immediately cut the show's budget from $1,000,000 (about $2,649,417 in 2010 dollars) per episode to about $350,000 (about $927,296 in 2010 dollars) per episode. Further, Doumanian had only two months to discover and prepare a new cast and crew; she claims she received virtually none of the support that was promised to her by either the network or her staff.
In September 1980, talent coordinator Neil Levy received a telephone call from 19-year old Eddie Murphy, who had begged the producer to "give him a shot" on the show, but was rejected since "the black cast member had already been chosen."[2] Murphy pleaded with Levy that he had several siblings banking on him getting a spot on the show. Levy finally auditioned him, and recommended him to Doumanian. Doumanian, after seeing Murphy's audition, advocated for Murphy with the network, and Murphy was cast as a featured player.
The first episode, renamed Saturday Night Live '80 in the opening credits, aired November 15, 1980 and featured an all-new cast – Charles Rocket (groomed to be the new break-out star), Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthius, Joe Piscopo, and Ann Risley rounded out the new "Not Ready For Prime Time Players". Yvonne Hudson was hired as a featured player the week before Murphy and became SNL's first black female cast-member. Elliott Gould had agreed to host the first episode.
Contributing to the sense that Season 6 was doomed, in the first sketch the cast shared a bed with Gould and introduced themselves – Charles Rocket proclaimed himself to be a cross between Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, and Gilbert Gottfried (prior to adopting his signature screechy, obnoxious voice) referred to himself as a cross between John Belushi "and that guy from last year who did Rod Serling, and no one can remember his name" (referring to Harry Shearer).
At the end of the show, Gould stood on stage and quickly introduced himself to the cast one more time by first name and declared "We're gonna be around forever, so we might as well..."
The McDowell episode was notable in that Eddie Murphy made his non-speaking network television debut in a sketch called "In Search of the Negro Republican". He made such a positive impression that he would be called on for more in later episodes, and was made a full cast member by the season's seventh episode.
On February 21, 1981 the show featured a parody of the "Who Shot J.R.?" craze from the hit TV show Dallas. In a cliffhanger titled "Who Shot C.R.?", cast member Charles Rocket was "shot" in the last sketch of the episode, after a running gag in which other members of the cast shared their grievances about Rocket with one another. Onstage for the goodnights, Dallas star and that week's host, Charlene Tilton, asked Rocket (who was still in character and sitting in a wheelchair) his thoughts on being shot. "Oh man, it's the first time I've been shot in my life", he replied. "I'd like to know who the fuck did it." The cast, along with some of the audience, reacted with laughter and applause.
This was not the first nor last time the expletive would be uttered live on SNL but Rocket's epithet, unbeknownst to him, would cost him his job. Almost the entire cast and crew lost their jobs on the show.
By 1981 SNL had been overtaken in the ratings by ABC's derivative Fridays, which at the time was garnering more critical acclaim as well. These factors gave the impression that NBC might cancel the show. SNL was given one more chance when Dick Ebersol was hired to replace Doumanian. He was the young apprentice the network hired away from ABC to develop SNL in late 1974; he was responsible for hiring Lorne Michaels that year, and now was given the task of saving the once-acclaimed show from cancellation.
In his first week, Ebersol fired Gottfried, Risley, and Rocket, replacing them with Robin Duke, Tim Kazurinsky, and Tony Rosato. At the end of the season, he would eliminate the rest of the 1980 cast except for Murphy and Piscopo; he had wanted to fire Dillon as soon as he took over, but could not afford a replacement for her. Ebersol originally wanted to bring in John Candy and Catherine O'Hara from SCTV; Candy turned down the offer and Rosato joined instead. O'Hara initially accepted, but she changed her mind after Michael O'Donoghue – SNL's original head writer, who had been brought in to rejuvenate the show – screamed at the cast about the season's poor writing and performances. Robin Duke was added to the cast when O'Hara suggested her instead. Emily Prager and Laurie Metcalf joined as featured players, but were not retained after their first appearance.
Ebersol's first show aired April 11, with appearances by Chevy Chase on Weekend Update, and Al Franken asking viewers to "put SNL to sleep". Ebersol, wanting to establish a connection to the original cast, allowed Franken's mock-serious routine on the air.
Ebersol had promised Franken and Tom Davis that in addition to appearing on the April 11 show, they could host the next week, with musical guest The Grateful Dead. During the following week, with a writer's strike looming,[3] Franken and Davis wrote material and mailed it to themselves so that their postmark could be used to prove they did not violate the strike. After seeing copies of the material, Ebersol (never a fan of Franken & Davis') caved to the writer's strike and called off the rest of the season, promising the duo they could host the season premiere that fall. As the summer ended, Ebersol, confident in his new cast, decided he no longer needed a link to the original cast. Franken claims Ebersol never returned his calls, and Franken and Davis never hosted SNL. Al Franken wouldn't return to SNL until four years later, as a featured cast member.
Other episodes cancelled due to the strike were scheduled to air on May 9, 1981 (with host Steve Martin, an SNL favorite) and May 23, 1981 (with another frequent SNL host, Buck Henry). Martin wouldn't return to host SNL until 1986.
By Fall 1981, Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy were the only performers from Doumanian's cast to appear on SNL for Season 7. Murphy became a break-out star under Ebersol, and his soaring popularity helped restore the show's ratings. He created memorable characters, including the empty-headed former child movie star Buckwheat and an irascible, life-size version of the Gumby toy character, complete with life-size star ego. Murphy also performed an uncanny impression of Stevie Wonder (Wonder sportingly hosted in 1983 and appeared in a fake ad for the "Kannon AE-1" camera, which is "so simple, even Stevie Wonder can use it".[4]) Piscopo was also popular, renowned for his Frank Sinatra impersonation, as well as his characters Paulie Herman and (with Robin Duke) Doug & Wendy Whiner.
Other new cast members for the 1981 season included Christine Ebersole, Mary Gross, and 1979 featured player Brian Doyle-Murray, who ran the Weekend Update (under the title Saturday Night Live Newsbreak & Current Affairs) desk for one season. Also returning were Second City veterans Robin Duke, Tim Kazurinsky, and Tony Rosato, who had debuted April 11. In the spring of 1982, Ebersol traveled to The Second City in Chicago to scout for more talent. Tired of recently losing key players to NBC (such as Cheers George Wendt and Hill Street Blues' Betty Thomas), the Second City top brass directed Ebersol around the corner to the Practical Theatre Company, where he hired Gary Kroeger, Brad Hall, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who later married Hall) to join in the fall. Second City alum James Belushi arrived three shows into Season 9 due to stage commitments in Chicago.
Ebersol ran a very different show than Michaels had in the 1970s. Many of the sketches were built less on "smart" and "revolutionary" comedy that was abundant in the early days and followed a much more "straightforward" approach. This shift alienated some fans and even some writers and cast members. Ebersol was eager to attract the younger viewers that advertisers craved. He dictated that no sketch should run longer than five minutes, so as not to lose the attention of teenagers. Many writers felt that Ebersol was simplifying the humor of the show by demanding more appearances of recurring characters for cheap laughs, among other things, leading to somewhat inconsistent writing. Unlike Michaels, Ebersol never had been a writer, and unlike Doumanian, he never claimed to be. He determined which sketches made it to air, and often made his decisions based not on creative content but budget or ease of production. Cast and writers often wondered if "Dick" (as nearly all of them called him) actually knew which sketches were funny and which were not.
Despite these oppositions, there was little argument that Ebersol possessed a keen sense of business politics, which eventually helped revive a show that would have otherwise died at the hands of an inexperienced producer. Having come from the ranks of "the suits" himself, Ebersol was adept at dealing with the network. Later in his tenure, Ebersol was generally handling much of the business aspects and day-to-day production affairs, leaving producer Bob Tischler in charge of most of the creative facets of the show.
Unlike Lorne Michaels, Dick Ebersol had no difficulty firing people. Among the first casualties after the 1981 season were Rosato (who later said that the firing was the best thing to ever happen to him) and Ebersole, who got the axe because of her frequent complaints that the women on the show had little airtime and what they did receive cast them in sexist and humiliating light. Michael O'Donoghue was fired in the middle of Season 7 after repeated arguments with Ebersol over the creative direction of the show, and because of his abusive treatment of the cast.
On air, SNL was mostly a two-man show from 1981–1984, with Murphy and Piscopo playing a bulk of the lead characters. This was not unprecedented – Chevy Chase had become the breakout star of Season 1, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi became the dominant forces upon Chase's departure, and Bill Murray would play nearly every male lead during Season 5. But Ebersol made it clear from the beginning that his strategy was to showcase Murphy and Piscopo as much as possible. All other cast members played mainly supporting roles and were treated with very little patience by the producers. Writers often noticed that Ebersol would criticize their scripts for not featuring enough of Murphy and Piscopo, even though they were already the leads in most of the sketches.
With the release of the film 48 Hours, Murphy's star began to eclipse that of Piscopo. Murphy's co-star in the film, Nick Nolte, was scheduled to host the show, but canceled at the last minute due to a hangover after a night of partying at Studio 54. Ebersol offered Murphy the chance to host, a move that Piscopo would perceive as a major slight. Piscopo would later claim Ebersol used Murphy's success to divide the two erstwhile friends and play them against one another. Others countered that Piscopo was simply being a prima donna; said one writer, "Eddie Murphy's fame went to Joe Piscopo's head."
In February 1984, Eddie Murphy left the show. His appearances for the remainder of the season consisted of sketches he had pre-taped in September 1983. Duke, Piscopo, Hall, and Kazurinsky were not invited to return after Season 9. Piscopo was offered a chance to guest host during Season 10, but declined.
Upon the departures of Murphy and Piscopo, Ebersol, having lost his key players, began rebuilding the cast for Season 10, enlisting what is in retrospect known as the "All-Star" cast. Along with veteran players James Belushi, Gross, Kroeger, and Louis-Dreyfus, Ebersol added somewhat, for the first time in the show's history, well-known names to the repertory. This new cast included Soap star Billy Crystal; Martin Short, who had made a name for himself as Ed Grimley (a character he would bring to SNL that year) on Canada's SCTV; Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer (who was also a cast member in 1979) from The Credibility Gap and This Is Spinal Tap; Pamela Stephenson from Not the Nine O'Clock News & Superman III; and Rich Hall from HBO's Not Necessarily the News.
The newcomers helped put together a memorable year of hit sketches and widely accepted recurring characters. As Louis-Dreyfus noted in a November 2005 retrospective, the newcomers, particularly Crystal, Short, and Guest, all but took over the show, relegating her and most of the rest of the cast to supporting roles. Short has noted that his one year at SNL brought him more fame than his entire stint on SCTV, but it was Crystal who became the show's break-out star. Crystal had been scheduled to appear in the first SNL in 1975, but walked when his airtime was whittled away during rehearsal. Already known to some for his stand-up comedy and his role as Jodie Dallas in Soap, Crystal became the show's latest sensation, bringing the catch-phrases "It is better to look good than to feel good" and "You look mahvelous!" (both uttered by his "Fernando" character) into popular culture.
Harry Shearer would depart after the January 12, 1985 broadcast, citing "creative differences". Shearer would later remark "I was creative...and they were different." Shearer would go on to greater fame as a cast member of The Simpsons in which he voiced several characters including Mr. Burns and Principal Skinner.
At the end of the season, Ebersol requested to completely revamp the show to include mostly prerecorded segments. Short, Guest, and Hall had tired of the show's demanding production schedule and showed little interest in returning for another season, leaving Crystal the only "A-cast" member available for Season 11. Like Michaels at the end of Season 5, Ebersol made it known to NBC that he would only return to SNL if the network would take the show off the air for several months to re-cast and rebuild. Another idea was to institute a permanent rotation of hosts (Billy Crystal, Joe Piscopo, and David Letterman) for "a hip Ed Sullivan Show".
After briefly canceling the show, NBC decided to continue production only if they could get Lorne Michaels to produce again. Ebersol and Tischler, along with their writing staff and most of the cast, left the show after this season (those who wished to stay, such as Billy Crystal, were eventually not re-hired for 1985), which closed the book on an inconsistent, yet memorable, era in SNL history.
Lorne Michaels said that leaving SNL at the end of Season 5 would be the biggest error of his life.
Two opening montages were used for this season. During Jean Doumanian's tenure, it opened with a shot of the Statue of Liberty whose torch suddenly lights after a few seconds. Using "paint-over" type transitions, it then cuts to various images of New York with neon lights embellishing each picture. Some of the subjects included were a taxi cab, a pair of drag queens, Chinatown, Studio 54, a punk rocker, and Times Square. Dick Ebersol, however, apparently wanted a more simple opening.
For the one episode he produced this season (4/11/81), the original SNL opening theme music used from Season 1 until the first episode of this season (11/15/80) returns to accompany a different shot of the Statue of Liberty, followed by various still images taken from around New York displayed one after another. The cast is introduced using all new pictures, and plain-white block lettering reveals their name at the bottom of the picture. This opener was only used on this one episode.
Featuring
Another "simple" opening from the Ebersol era, and the only montage with Mel Brandt, an NBC staff announcer, doing the voice-over in place of Don Pardo. This opener was used more-or-less for three seasons; it began with shot of a lady lighting a cigarette, then consisted of various grainy, black-and-white video footage of the gritty, yet glamorous New York City night life (including shots of dance clubs, a man practicing karate moves in a subway car, the outside of a triple-X movie theater, a police dog, street vendors, rainy smoky streets, etc.). Despite being bland, it did, however, have what is considered one of the better opening music themes of the show, which would be used (albeit in various incarnations) for virtually every episode under Dick Ebersol's tenure.
Because "Live from New York" is not yelled, announcer Brandt says, "And now, from New York, the most dangerous city in America, it's Saturday Night Live." After the opening ended, the announcer says, "and now ladies and gentlemen, live from New York, the cast of Saturday Night Live" (only for the 10/3/81 episode) or "and now, ladies and gentlemen, live from New York, your host..." (used for the rest of the season).
With
Virtually the same montage from 1981, with a few minor changes: Don Pardo returned to do the voiceover; the opening shot changes from a woman lighting a cigarette, to a construction worker lighting his cigarette with an acetylene torch; further, the cast photos are different from the previous year, with a chalkboard NYC skyline background. Also this season the classic "Live From New York..." intro was re-introduced into the opening skits.
Brad Hall hosted Saturday Night News throughout the season. Recurring characters featured during this season include The Whiners, Mister Robinson (host of a parody of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood), and Buckwheat.
Same credits as the 1982 season. The addition of Jim Belushi is the only notable change, and the background of his photo is noticeably different.
A highly unusual, but fan-favorite opening montage. In addition to flying hot dogs, we scroll right to reveal each "giant" cast member towering over the New York skyline, and interacting with various objects along the way in a complete one-camera shot. From 1984-1986, the Statue of Liberty was being renovated in preparation for its 100th anniversary; SNL acknowledged these renovations by showing the statue surrounded in scaffolding during the opening credits for this season and the next.