Starting in a week or so, Comedy Central loses their package of Saturday Night Live reruns to the E! network. As a last hurrah, the former is airing what they're billing as "The 50 Greatest SNL Episodes" in five 10-hour blocks, one block per day starting tomorrow. It probably won't be the fifty best since E! already has custody of the first five seasons, and Comedy Central doesn't have the last few years, either. So I guess it's actually the fifty best of the years 1980-2001, as ostensibly determined by this online ballot at the Comedy Central website. (The voting seems to be closed now, judging by the fact that the voting function on that site is no longer operative.)
So what will Comedy Central be running? So far, they seem to be keeping it a secret but I wouldn't mind seeing some of the episodes they haven't rerun in a long time. The shows done during the absence of Lorne Michaels have rarely been seen the last few years. For some reason, both Comedy Central and the NBC All Night rerun (early on Sunday A.M.) have occasionally announced an episode from those seasons and instead aired one from the Michaels years. It was like they tried to sneak one in and got caught before they could broadcast it. They've also given the shortest of shrift to shows from 1986-1993, airing only a couple of selected ones over and over.
No word yet on which ones E! is going to run, but the channel seems so fixated on who's hot this week, you suspect they'll concentrate on the ones spotlighting current stars. I hope not because there was some really good work on episodes featuring people who don't have a big, heavily-promoted movie or CD coming out next week.