A little more about that industry-shaking first telecast of what was later called Saturday Night Live. As I've mentioned before here, it's interesting how much Lorne Michaels had to fill that ninety minutes. We tend to think of that program as mainly a sketch show but in addition to comedy sketches, the first episode featured…
- Stand-up comedy. George Carlin hosted and he did three stand-up spots. There was a monologue by Valri Bromfield and Andy Kaufman did his record pantomime to the theme from "Mighty Mouse." (An additional stand-up spot didn't get in. Just before airtime, a kid named Billy Crystal was told he'd have to trim his routine to the bone and at the advice of his managers, he walked.)
- Two musical acts: Janis Ian and Billy Preston performing two numbers apiece.
- "The Land of Gorch" featuring the Muppets.
- A film by Albert Brooks.
- A spot with Paul Simon plugging his appearance the following week.
- Five pre-recorded parody commercials.
- Weekend Update with Chevy Chase.
Not only that but though the sketches were few in number, he had nine performers available to be in them…
The roster of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players changed a bit in the following weeks. George Coe was on the show a couple more times but I think he was only in the opening titles once. Michael O'Donoghue was on and off this list but after the fourth or fifth show, no longer billed, even though he was on the show a number of times. Some people think the show was thrown together at the last minute but let's take a look at the TV Guide listing which had to be submitted around ten days before the show aired…
That's reasonably accurate. Apart from the misspelling of Dan Aykroyd's name, there is the omission of O'Donoghue, Coe and Chevy Chase from the listing…and Chevy got more camera time on that episode than the others in the N.R.F.P.T. Players. Knowing how agents will often fight over the order of clients' billing, I'm wondering how the on-screen list was ordered. The TV Guide listing looks like they just took the first six names from the same list and alphabetized them.
But you can see that the challenge of that first show was not so much of what to do on it but what to throw out. And it was then being sold as a variety show with music rather than a comedy show with music breaks. The following week with Paul Simon hosting and musical guests Randy Newman, Phoebe snow, Art Garfunkel and the Jesse Dixon Singers, it was a music show with sparse comedy spots. It took a few week to figure out what the show was.
The current SNL always feels too overbooked to me. This season, the "repertory company" (no longer the Not Ready for Prime Time Players) usually has twelve names plus there are five or six "featured players" and a couple of writers who always seem to sneak in. Even with that, the most visible, notable sketches often cast most of those 17 or 18 performers aside in favor of an Alec Baldwin, a Steve Martin or anybody else with the mantle of Movie Star. In what were for me the show's best years, the stars each week were one guest host plus eight rep company folks and three or four featured players.
I tend to not watch it as a program anymore. I watch excerpts on YouTube. A friend of mine who watches every episode thinks it's still a pretty good show but "there's rarely anything entertaining after Weekend Update and if the cold opening is bad, most of what follows will be, as well." And though he watches every week all the way to the end, he still doesn't know who some of those people are.