Saturday Night Live

Well, the former is certainly true, but while I wouldn't say the latter is explicitly true, they sure didn't have much else going on for about a year there.

phil hartman biggest SNL mvp

He might still be my favorite performer overall but he unfortunately didn't make much of a splash outside of the show. I'm so glad he went out still doing quality work on Newsradio and The Simpsons, though.

of those kept along with macdonald, spade (who negotiated to do less and then quit - they happily would have let him do more) and mckinney, molly shannon had already started and tim meadows had been on the show for several years. in 1986-1987 they kept lovitz, dunn and dennis miller - lovitz having earned an emmy nomination.

i don't know if it's just my complete lack of nostalgia for the early-mid 1990s (which surely has less to do with the "inherent" qualities of that decade and more to do with my having been a teenager at the time) but i think about SNL of that period and just think of the worst aspects of many of those actors' schticks.

imo there's no question that the peak era is the hartman/lovitz/nealon/dunn/hooks/jackson/miller/myers era. the cast immediately after is pretty strong too, but a definite step down.

Yeah, I don't think that cast has been or is ever likely to be topped.

the 1985-86 season ended with the cast being stuck in a fire and lorne only saving jon lovitz, in the mid-90s, that would have been david spade, not norm. after all, dennis miller survived the fire too.

86-90 era is my favorite too, though i mostly experienced it through hour-long re-runs on comedy central as a teenager, which is probably the best way to see snl

the white era

boooo

eh just ribbin you guys - there's good stuff in there for sure but it's peaks seem lower than the peaks of other eras imo

yeah when i've seen random 85-90 clips thanks to netflix and "nbc vintage" there was plenty of yeesh to be found

It's always been hit-or-miss. SNL's inconsistency is part of its charm, imo.

It helps the highlights shine all that brighter.

The best eras of snl imo

1. hour-long reruns on comedy central in the 90s
2. the first few seasons after i was allowed to stay up for new episodes, before i started having better things to do on a saturday night
3. the invention of the dvr

I have a certain fondness for eras that rely on these really strong anchor guys who can be relied on to make p much anything entertaining - Hartman, Kenan Thompson, Will Ferrell, Aykroyd etc.

Kenan did some serious heavy lifting through some dull sketches last week.

i'm going to miss kenan so much when he leaves, honestly would love for him to beat darrell hammond's record

My favorite era (after the boilerplate "when I was in jr. high/high school" response) is that period a couple years back when everyone started uploading their VHS copies of old episodes. I love being able to watch an entire old-school season as it originally aired. Eff a bowdlerized rerun.

Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph all on the show at the same time is something that will probably never be paralleled as far as concentrated funny/smart on SNL goes.

I'm looking forward to when this VH1 Rewind marathon gets into the weeds of eras I never really got to see full episodes of - ie, the mid-80s

The best eras of snl imo

1. hour-long reruns on comedy central in the 90s
2. the first few seasons after i was allowed to stay up for new episodes, before i started having better things to do on a saturday night
3. the invention of the dvr

I might be slightly older than you but the nick at night compressed episodes from the 70s cast were essential for me. Where else would I have seen this shit:

http://cdn.hark.com/images/000/093/757/93757/original.jpg

Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph all on the show at the same time is something that will probably never be paralleled as far as concentrated funny/smart on SNL goes.

yeah all these ladies + Ferrell was such a comedy goldmine

i find it really unnerving how quiet the audience could be back in the day, whether its the joy of millenials or the improvement of applause-sign technology you never get those "fuck this scene, fuck all these scenes, OH YAAAAY COFFEE TALK, fuck you i'm sitting on my hands" stretches of deadly silence you used to see

http://snl.jt.org/caps/characters/RaDr-Qrplt_xk.jpg

From what I understand, the apparent lack of applause is sometimes just a sound issue.

well they had a fuckton more sound issues twenty years ago then

My favorite era (after the boilerplate "when I was in jr. high/high school" response) is that period a couple years back when everyone started uploading their VHS copies of old episodes. I love being able to watch an entire old-school season as it originally aired. Eff a bowdlerized rerun.

― Runny Trumpet (Old Lunch), Friday, January 30, 2015 1:34 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I bought the 3rd season DVDs, primarily for the Sun Ra and Elvis Costello performances, and some of the episodes were strictly dullsville. But there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it: you'd think the Madeline Kahn episode would be hilarious and the Hugh Hefner one would suck, but weirdly, the opposite was true.

And the Ray Charles-hosted episode should be required viewing for all hosts. Oh, you want to skip rehearsal and rely on cue cards? Yeah, Ray didn't have that option.

I'm pretty bummed that they stopped the season sets. The first five years aren't exactly my favorites but I bought them (twice, after selling off the first set during lean times) and would've kept buying them as long as they kept putting them out.

I had the first season set but so much of it sucked. would've preferred 2&3 of the original cast, which I saw a bunch in re-runs as a teen

dvd market cratered, but they should offer them in some kind of digital/streaming package.

Hopefully Shout! Factory will pick up the reins eventually.

And, yeah, season one is pretty much abysmal.

the Paul Simon stuff is good

Lorne or whoever isn't gonna shell out for music rights just for streaming. There were (are?) a bunch of seasons on Netflix, but the lack of music clearances meant that some episodes were 20 minutes long.

SNL should just create their own app and put it on Roku, AppleTV, Amazon Fire, or whatever other device people use to stream content. If HBO is going to do it, SNL surely could. There are 40 seasons of episodes now. That's plenty of material to justify its own app.

NBC would probably object, no?

I don't think that would get them around the music rights problem

I guess it would depend on subscription projections and how much they think people would pay.

Yeah, the music rights stuff is such a drag.

Really could make an argument that SNL eps, good or bad, are as good a historical document of an era as any and should be available to anyone with a library card

So anyone can see The Night of the Masturbating Zombies

I pray for the kids of today who don't get to see that sketch before they're old enough to really understand what's going on. Such a formative experience.

I think SNL moved from Netflix to Hulu at some point, because I signed up for Hulu specifically hoping I could watch the old "Who's More Grizzled?" sketch one night. It wasn't included in the episode it was supposed to be in, so I canceled immediately and removed the app.

This really is a case against contemporary copy rigs law if there ever was one

this eps been p funny

lmao @ whos more grizzled anecdote btw

damn if that d'angelo performance wasn't one of the best things on SNL ever

"charade" was fantastic

This is old news apparently, but I just noticed today that Cecily Strong is slated to host the 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/cecily-strong-white-house-correspondents-dinner-113019.html

man catching a bunch of this VH1 Classic marathon has really soured me on several "eras" - the Bush years are depressing from end to end, although mostly for what was going on in the country. Knowing how things turned out and seeing people trying to milk Iraq invasion etc for laughs is just hard to watch. Non-topical stuff from that period fares better.

And then going back to the early 90s things get super-grim again but this time it's because of the cast and, I guess, the writing. I'm referring to the Sandler/Spade/Farley/Meyers era where you've got a bunch of guys who really just can't do character acting at all (well, Meyers can to a limited extent) and sketches end up relying a *lot* on endlessly repeated catchphrases and recycled jokes. Every Matt Foley sketch is exactly the same, for example. Wayne's World sketches recycle jokes mirthlessly. Sandler and Spade can't be bothered to do anything resembling acting. It's just embarassing.

I'm curious what episodes they're going to cherrypick from the 80s, since I've never seen a bunch of those episodes as I was too young and they were not endlessly re-run.