“Saturday Night Live” has a ratings problem. The recent episode hosted by the former cast member Bill Hader had the fewest viewers within the industry-cherished eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic in the show’s forty-year history, tying an episode from last May. The two previous episodes of the new season performed only slightly better. Even accounting for the loss of live viewership to the Web, these are low figures, and part of a downward trend. Around the Internet, commenters have offered their diagnoses: the current version of the show is too political, or it’s not political enough. It has too many black performers, or too few. The comedy is too insular, or it’s too broad. But the most common complaint is: “The show hasn’t been funny in years.”
Having not been a regular viewer recently, I wanted to experience the worst-rated “S.N.L.” episode of all-time. It looked like most of the one thousand six hundred and sixty-four episodes that came before it. There were hits and misses among the sketches: the cold open of Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang wasn’t very funny, but the bits featuring Hader’s old characters, including the jaded newsman Herb Welch and a shell-shocked war-veteran puppeteer named Anthony Peter Coleman, were great. Hader, who Bill Murray recently said “did the best work anyone ever did on that show,” has been away for a little over a year, and the worst part of his return was how it underlined that his talents have not yet been replaced. Over all, the most jarring experience in watching this season is an evitable one: as a whole, the cast looks pretty young, which is what happens when the viewer goes away and gets older.
Matters of time have never been simple for fans, enemies, and frenemies of “S.N.L.” It is one of the few TV programs that people care about long after they’ve stopped watching it. People still talk about John Belushi as though it’d all been crap since then. Younger people do that with Dana Carvey or Will Ferrell. There is a kind of roving, free-form debate as to when exactly the show was last funny. Was it three seasons ago, when the cast featured Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, and Seth Meyers? Or was the last truly funny moment in 2008, when Tina Fey played Sarah Palin? Was it fifteen years ago? Twenty? It seems possible that when “Saturday Night Live” first débuted, in 1975, there were people in the audience who swore that it had somehow been better the year before.
When you reread the past, “Saturday Night Live” has been dying since the year it began. Chevy Chase left after the first season and a few years later explained to the Times, “By the time I left, I thought the show had already begun to overstay its welcome. I was wrong about that, as it turned out. But for me, the novelty had worn off. The topics that were picked apart in the first year were no longer so important. The show became more outrageous and less topical.” That un-novel cast of Season 2 featured Belushi, Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner.
Chase was being interviewed by the Times for a 1981 piece, which declared that the “show seemed like nothing so much as an unfunny parody of its predecessor.” To be fair, the Times was correct in noting a decline: the producer Lorne Michaels had left before the season, leaving it in the hands of a new producer and a mostly new cast. But the paper was still early with the eulogy. The intervening years—before Michaels returned, in 1985, and helped steer the show toward its second Golden Age—have been written off in the official narrative as mostly unfunny and lost, but it was those years that gave us Eddie Murphy as James Brown, Little Richard, and Buckwheat.
By 1995, the next time that “Saturday Night Live” was being read its own obituaries, Murphy’s contributions had been absorbed into the canon of the better, funnier stuff that had come before. In a famous takedown for New York, Chris Smith wrote of a cast that included Chris Farley, David Spade, and Adam Sandler:
The next time that the show is deemed near-death, Sandler’s performances from the nineties will likely be cited as an example of how good things used to be. Fans of “S.N.L.” have long memories, but often they get the stories wrong. The way in which people have spoken about the show owes much to the mystique that Michaels has nurtured all these years: if you work hard to make a silly and mostly disposable sketch show seem like an American institution, people may eventually believe it, and start talking about it as if it were as venerable as the Federal Reserve.
What continues to be surprising is the finality with which people predict the show’s demise. Each time that “S.N.L.” brings in a new cast, or suffers a drop in the ratings, or else detaches from the zeitgeist, we forget all of the changes that have allowed it to stay on the air for forty seasons.
There have been overhauls in the writing room and massive changes to the cast. In 1985, Michaels brought in a new cast made up of Hollywood actors to save the show from cancellation. After that season flopped, and with cancellation again looming, he changed course, replacing them with a group of relative unknowns, including Carvey, Phil Hartman, and Jan Hooks, with stronger backgrounds in improv. In 1995, huge stars like Sandler and Farley were fired, and Michaels’ job was reportedly threatened by NBC executives, which led to the hiring of another new group of unknown improv players. In the middle of the last decade, when digital comedy on the Internet was making “S.N.L.” look stodgy in comparison, Michaels brought in The Lonely Island team, led by Samberg, to produce shorts for the show—“Dick in a Box” was born. Similarly, in 2013, the creators of the Good Neighbor Web sketch group were hired.
Michaels, meanwhile, has become an object of fascination as a kind of controlling, unyielding producer king. Yet the quality that has best defined his show over forty years is its ready malleability—which the show itself has never been shy in pointing out. At the start of the 1986 season, Madonna, who was hosting, read a fake letter from NBC executives apologizing for the previous cast: “It was all a dream, a horrible, horrible dream.”
Because of these well-documented shifts, “Saturday Night Live” is often framed as careening between comic brilliance and utter, despicable torpor. But most years, it occupies a safer, less exciting middle ground, churning along, creating a kind of ambient national laughter, occasionally propelling a few cast members into wider stardom. If its death is perpetually being exaggerated then so are its golden ages: even in the best of times, the show has nearly as many misses as hits—especially in its last half hour—and everyone from Aykroyd to Ferrell to Amy Poehler has performed in his or her share of stinkers.
Yet, what has given “S.N.L.” the ability to be at once mediocre and vital is the fact that it still airs live on network television. Even if some of the show’s funnier bits are now pre-recorded, it’s one of the last examples of mass entertainment, other than sports and political debates, where it truly feels as if anything absurd or hilarious or amazing or awful might happen.
The final death of “S.N.L.,” then, may coincide with the death of live television itself. “S.N.L.” has faced challenges from other shows in the past, but, now, everything that is funny anywhere, at any time, is a challenge. On television, Comedy Central’s “Key & Peele” and “Inside Amy Schumer” can make the sketches on “S.N.L.” look slapdash and tame; the topical sharpness of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” often makes Weekend Update seem meek and scattered; and surreal shows like “Drunk History” and “Nathan for You” produce moments of left-field oddity that rarely make it past “S.N.L.” ’s dress rehearsals. And that’s just what’s on television, never mind the surfeit of great series and amateur comedy creations on the Web. Many of these are carefully shot and meticulously edited, giving them a polish that surpasses what can be managed on a weekly, live stage show. And, like with “S.N.L.,” we can watch them whenever we want. And so, as fewer people arrange their lives to be on the couch on Saturday nights, the limitations of the live form begin to seem less thrilling, and more like a liability. If forty seasons have taught us anything, it’s that “S.N.L.” always finds a way to survive. But “Live from New York, it’s Monday morning on your computer screen” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
