Nov. 9, 1985—Five years after
Lorne Michaels (pictured) stepped away from his creation, Saturday Night Live aired its
first episode back under his guiding hand, allowing the late-night staple to once
again take its place among the greatest TV showcases for comic talent next to
Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Tonight Show under Johnny
Carson.
Michaels’ resumption of his duties as executive
producer came after the show, under its two previous heads, had been in danger
of losing its reputation for irreverent skewing of American culture and politics
by improv-trained comic actors, standup comics and jaundiced writers.
Expectations were high, then, on his return—probably too
high to be met immediately, even with the comparative luxury of a season
premiere more than a month later than in previous seasons.
Reviews for this episode
(guest-hosted by Madonna, with musical guests Simple Minds) were rocky, with
the opening skit (NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff stating that urine drug tests
would be given to the new cast members) running into particular flak. In fact, the
entire 11th season is regarded by many fans as among the worst in the
show’s history.
But Michaels’ reputation was high enough that he was able to buy time, and a year later he had figured out how to right the ship.
Like a new company head coming in from outside, Michaels
took the reins back at SNL after being assured he would have a free hand
in choosing his team. And that meant in its entirety. Not a single cast member
was retained from the prior season.
And so, show fans bid goodbye to Jim Belushi, Billy
Crystal, Mary Gross, Christopher Guest, Rich Hall, Gary Kroeger, Julia
Louis-Dreyfus, Harry Shearer, Martin Short, and Pamela Stephenson.
They said hello to
Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Nora Dunn, Anthony Michael Hall, Jon Lovitz, Dennis
Miller, Randy Quaid, Terry Sweeney, and Danitra Vance.
The subsequent fame of Cusack and Downey shed a retrospective
glow to the 11th season that wasn’t there at the time. The new crew
did not mesh particularly well right away.
Rather than cast young relative unknowns who nevertheless
had worked together previously, as with the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players,
Michaels preferred several members who had already made a name for themselves onscreen,
such as Randy Quaid and Anthony Michael Hall. This particular change in his methods was not successful across the board.
It was a close call, but NBC was willing to give
Michaels another chance, and the executive producer felt he was not at a point
where he could walk away from it. Severe difficulties had resulted back in 1980
when failure to come to terms on Michaels’ contract negotiations (along with
burnout) led him led to walk away from the weekend institution.
Michaels’ follow-up venture, the prime-time comedy
series The New Show, failed a year and a half after his departure. Success
in reviving SNL would also revive his reputation.
NBC had had it even tougher: Jean Doumanian, the show’s
head for the sixth season, was axed after only 10 months on the job (in a December
2016 Hollywood Reporter interview, she cited the handicaps she was
under—the need to replace an entire cast and crew that left with Michaels,
along with a lower budget than her predecessor enjoyed—while detractors pointed
to the nickname “Ayatollah Doumanian” as evidence that she was not cut out for
the role).
Her replacement, Dick Ebersol, retained only
Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo from her cast. Though some of the new cast members
succeeded, it really was Murphy’s brilliance that almost single-handedly saved
the show over the next four seasons.
By 1985, tired of the brutal schedule and
of retooling the show yet again (with yet another round of recasting, along
with switching to mostly prerecorded segments), Ebersol and NBC called it a
day.
As mentioned earlier, Michael’s initial preference in
1985 for a more recognizable cast did not represent an advance on the Ebersol
regime. And, as New York Magazine’s Brian Boone noted in 2013,
the rest of that season featured so many creative misfires (e.g., Francis Ford
Coppola as guest host) that only an 11th-hour
plea by Michaels persuaded Tartikoff not to cancel the show for good.
But other changes that season, over the course of time,
produced an upturn in the show’s favor:
* Lovitz and Dunn created several of the
show’s more enduring characters, including Tommy Flanagan the Pathological
Liar and film critic Ashley Ashley;
* Miller re-established “Weekend Update” as a focal
point for the show’s political satire;
* Al Franken returned as a writer and featured
player;
* Videotaped dress rehearsals furnished Michaels
with multiple options: for fixing technical issues, experimenting with
different line readings, or using unaired segments when a particular sketch was
judged not worthy of being rerun.
Moreover, with a complete overhaul that actually
worked this time—including new cast members Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan
Hooks, and Kevin Nealon—Michaels succeeded in bringing the show out of its Dark
Ages and into its Renaissance.
Now in its 46th season, SNL is
the longest-running weekly late-night show in the history of television, and Michaels
himself has become an institution, given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
nation's highest civilian award, in 2016 by Barack Obama.
