NBC has been running and rerunning a limited number of vintage SCTV episodes in the Later slot, every night after Conan O'Brien. I'm told that they're not airing a wider array of episodes because, being up in Canada and all, the original series was very lax about clearing rights to the songs they used. Ergo, to broadcast certain episodes these days would require skillful negotiation and some hefty fees, so we get the same ones, over and over. Some (not all) of them are actually worth it…though you won't be enjoying them for long. NBC has decided to take Later back to the talk show format and to bring in Carson Daly to sit behind the desk, commencing early next year.
This is an interesting move and I can't say I really understand it. Before they began running SCTV, NBC was trying out different hosts in the job, reportedly to try and find the perfect one. What they wound up discovering was that it really didn't matter who hosted the thing. The show got a 1.5 rating no matter who sat in the big chair. It would have gotten a 1.5 if you'd hosted it or I'd hosted it or your Aunt Tillie had hosted it. Didn't make any difference. The ratings only fluctuated when a superstar guest appeared or when Mr. O'Brien provided an unusually strong lead-in. After a year or three of immaterial host tryouts, NBC announced they would use the time slot to test out new concepts and innovative programming…and they promptly came up with the new and innovative notion of airing reruns of an old show they already owned and had on the shelf. The SCTV reruns, by the way, have been pretty consistently getting a 1.5 rating, what a surprise.
So why dump free (or almost free) programming that gets a 1.5 rating to bring in a show they'll have to spend money to produce and which will get a 1.5 rating? The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that they have bigger plans for Mr. Daly…as they once did for Greg Kinnear and a few of the temps who replaced him. In any case, you won't be without access to SCTV for long. They're finally about to release some episodes on VHS and DVD — and we can only hope they haul out some that haven't been repeated into oblivion lately. The Godfather parody with Guy Caballero as the Don was brilliant but it loses a little something the nineteenth time you see it. Except for the part where Eugene Levy plays Floyd the Barber.