Fifty Weird Years of “Saturday Night Live”

It is customary for a person in a situation like mine—preparing to hold forth on “Saturday Night Live”—to divulge which performers would make his ideal cast. The gist of the exercise is to admit particulars of taste, or, more harrowingly, depending on how much the show informed his early identity, to paint a personality portrait before going on to issue judgments. Like so many other once cool, now kooky members of Generation X, the venerable comedy cabaret is fifty years old. Half a century is just long enough for individual details to age into overarching symbols, for casts and one’s preferences among them to amount to a generational statement.

So, just for the record, here goes: For his dead-eyed gaze and surprisingly precise physicality, for his ludicrous, barking way of voicing a phrase, I will always pick Will Ferrell first to play on my team. Eddie Murphy came to “S.N.L.” supremacy in the “lost years” of the early eighties, during which the founding producer Lorne Michaels had vanished from the scene and was briefly replaced by Dick Ebersol, so Murphy’s contribution—I think he saved the show from obscurity—sticks out awkwardly, like a loose thread in brilliant color, against the otherwise seamlessly woven lore of Lorne. But it’s hard to name a person in the history of modern show biz, let alone “S.N.L.,” with more sheer stage presence than Murphy. Every time he showed up as James Brown or Gumby or the wholesome, slum-dwelling host of “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood,” he reminded viewers of “S.N.L.” ’s liveness, alerted them afresh to the fact that this was happening on a stage somewhere, and that that stage had been set on fire by this ingenious, wiry, heedlessly nervy kid.

I want Ana Gasteyer, a performer of many talents—operatic singing and a cockeyed, inscrutable gaze—to show up out of nowhere and make strange sketches even stranger, and Phil Hartman, regrettably gone now, to play the befuddled straight man, setting up zanier counterparts in his inimitable mock-buttoned-up way.

Give me Ego Nwodim—my favorite player of recent seasons—for her high-concept and subtly dark celebrity impressions and her portrayals of contemporary middle-class manners. (Her character Lisa from Temecula, who loves her steak well done and rattles the dinner table as she hacks away at it, is a masterpiece in miniature.) I consider Kenan Thompson, who starred in the kids’ variety show “All That” and has spent twenty-two years on “S.N.L.,” to be the most accomplished sketch-comedy actor in America since Carol Burnett. He can open his eyes wide, just reacting, and make a whole sketch worthwhile.

All this is to admit that I was conditioned by the show itself to prize what works: I want zany, I want smart, I want some inside-out way of knowing about the world.

To celebrate “S.N.L.” ’s big anniversary, NBC has released “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night,” a series of four tonally varied short documentaries about the show’s history. These are, appropriately, works of highly informed nostalgia. The first installment, for instance, focusses on the process of auditioning for the show.

Familiar performers—Amy Poehler, Heidi Gardner, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, and Pete Davidson, among others—talk about that most consequential moment of their professional lives, when they were young vulnerables hanging on to the hope of being cast. (One of “S.N.L.” ’s compounding quirks comes from the fact that it’s been on the air for so long; most of its performers and writers grew up watching and idealizing it, which means that the show, initially meant to look outward and parody the wider world of mainstream television, is now largely a work of meta-commentary, a product of watching “S.N.L.” and arriving at a point of view on what the show itself should be.) In the audition footage, the actors’ nerves are on full display, their aspiration almost unbearable to watch. Gardner, a charming performer whose “Update” bits always make me smile, cries as she recalls how much pressure she was under, and how bravely she faced it.

There’s an entertaining installment about Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken’s titanically popular sketch “Recording Session,” known, these days, as “More Cowbell.” The big revelation is that Walken thinks the silly bit—which ran in 2000 and was built around the donking percussion in the song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” by Blue Öyster Cult—ruined his life. People still come up to him in restaurants, saying their meal needs “more cowbell.” He apparently declined to be interviewed for the documentary. A deftly made, anxiety-inducing hour about the writing staff makes plain just how ruthless the show’s weekly rhythms are, and how thankless and frustrating a task writing—even for an audience as big as “S.N.L” ’s—can be.

But the most interesting episode is the final one, about the “Weird Year”—the 1985-86 season, which marked Michaels’s return. In his absence, the show had veered from its early rebellious, countercultural stance and come to rely on polished performers such as Martin Short, Christopher Guest, and Billy Crystal. As happens in almost every decade, the public and the critical class—“the critics” are invoked as bullies who don’t like other people’s fun—called the show’s whole purpose into question. Maybe the format was dated, the idea, after a decade, finally exhausted.

Michaels came back, at the urging of the NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff—who had a hand in such hits as “Cheers,” “The Cosby Show,” and “Seinfeld”—and fired the previous year’s entire cast. He hired upstart non-comedians including Robert Downey, Jr., and Anthony Michael Hall, as well as comics like Damon Wayans, Dennis Miller, and Nora Dunn. From the beginning, the season seemed doomed. The younger cast members—Michaels’s ploy was to emphasize youth—weren’t natural sketch performers. The material was highly conceptual, perhaps too arty, and sometimes even strangely dark. Hosts including Madonna and the famously ornery Chevy Chase couldn’t figure out how to play with the newcomers. Michaels invited the magic-comedy duo Penn & Teller on to do a bit in which Teller was submerged in a glass box full of water and seemed to nearly drown.

One source of reassurance was the emergence of Jon Lovitz, whose knowing old-school staginess, subtle physicality, and natural way with characters like Tommy Flanagan, a likable pathological liar, made him a quick star. Wayans, on the other hand, was warned by his friend Eddie Murphy that unless he took control and wrote his own sketches he’d be typecast in hackneyed Black roles. Murphy’s prophecies bore out—some of the most excruciating footage in the docuseries is of Wayans playing a shuffling, subservient stereotype—and Wayans opted to flame out on his own terms: he improvised during a sketch, a big no-no, and was fired almost instantly by Michaels.

The ratings were abysmal and the bad reviews kept coming. But the ensuing desperation bore fruit in new experiments. One episode, hosted by the “Cheers” actor George Wendt, was “directed” entirely by Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola intruded during Wendt’s monologue and in several sketches, turning the show into a disquisition on the vulnerability of working in the arts. The Coppola conceptual gambit didn’t “move the needle,” and the show survived only by a hair.

The upshot of the “Weird Year” installment is embodied in its conclusion—Michaels largely clears house again, and, by hiring experienced sketch performers such as Dana Carvey, establishes a successful template. And, yes, it’s indisputable that, by 1986 or so, the “S.N.L.” formula had largely been perfected. It engages and satirizes—without seeming to frankly rage against—the politics of the moment, introduces new performers to the Hollywood firmament, and, every once in a while, invents a comedic template to echo, via endless reiteration, down the years. I still watch. It’s like catching the local news—a way of keeping up with what somebody else thinks.

But I did find myself wishing that “S.N.L.” would allow itself another “Weird Year.” More awkward fits and high-flown ideas might toss the show back into a crisis, take its focus off its own rituals and legends, and send it searching the outside world for worthy targets, things to get truly and rightly pissed off about. The mood in the country these days might be better suited to a hotheaded Wayans than to the smooth competence that the show, to its credit, long ago achieved.

If, in the wild spirit of the seventies, “S.N.L.” was created to provide an alternative to the mainstream Bob Hopes of the world, its next challenge might be to surprise its audience, to confound the expectations it has worked so diligently to set. It’s possible to over-perfect a recipe. And it’s hard—maybe thrillingly so; we can only hope—to run counter to a culture you helped create. ♦