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| Available at Amazon.com |
It may be hard for some to believe—especially for people born after the show began—but the first cast change for Saturday Night Live nearly killed the show.
Today the show seems like a cornerstone of NBC and the thought of it not airing every Saturday seems wrong, like some fundamental aspect of the universe is being taken away. However, that very nearly happened in 1980 when the original cast (Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Garrett Morris, John Belushi, etc.) along with producer/creator Lorne Michaels left for other career opportunities.
A mountain of criticism was heaped on the new producer Jean Doumanian and the new cast that took over. Some of it was deserved, but too much was due to these poor people following an insanely talented and successful cast and producer. The new cast and producer were offered as sacrificial lambs, and with the exceptions of Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy, Doumanian and the rest of the new cast were fired after that first year. After that the cast became a revolving door where performers either left to pursue movie careers, or were simply fired because of the show’s poor ratings and even poorer reception by the media. The high point of decade had to be the year featuring Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest; unfortunately, they only stayed for that one year. It wasn’t until the late eighties when Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, and Dennis Miller—to name a few—joined the regular cast that SNL really started getting back on track.
Anybody who loves Saturday Night Live will enjoy this documentary. It’s fascinating to see how the venerable show nearly died after its first five years, and it’s equally interesting to see the number of stars who flopped when they were cast members, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The cast and crew recollections were funny, sometimes sad, and many times slightly bitter. Most of the comments ran somewhere along the line of they either couldn’t get the writers to work with them, or that it was the Joe Piscopo/Eddie Murphy show, the Billy Crystal/Martin Short/Christopher Guest show, or the Jon Lovitz/Phil Hartman show and so on.
Interspersed with the interviews are some classic SNL skits like Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood and Martin Short’s character, Ed Grimly, but what really makes this documentary stand out is how well the music clips highlight and set up the mood for each segment. All in all, this is a very well put together documentary and one that any SNL fan would find interesting.
The video was presented in full frame 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The video was clear, even the clips from the shows, and there were no viewing problems. The audio was presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 with English as the only language track. Like the video, the audio was clear and there were no problems hearing or understanding what was being said.
Bonus Featurette (running time: 87 minutes)
Basically this is just a second documentary covering some of the long-running issues that SNL has always had to face: network censors, the difficulty for women and African Americans to get any air time, and the battles between writers and actors. There’s a bit of a feeling that the producers didn’t quite know what to do with this material, but it’s definitely worth watching.
I don’t recommend buying this because of the lack of replay value, but fans of SNL should probably rent this at least once.
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Universal Home Entertainment presents Saturday Night Live: Lost and Found-SNL in the ’80s. Directed by Kenneth Bowser. Running time: 87 minutes. Unrated. Released on DVD: March 4, 2008. Available at Amazon.com.
About Josh Begley
