Free Post: SNL Seasons 9-13 (1983-1988) by the Numbers
Free Post: SNL Seasons 9-13 (1983-1988) by the Numbers
What does the math say about the best and worst of the mid-80s?
A Happy New Year to all our longstanding and soon-to-be subscribers! Thanks for going on this journey with us - we have a lot more down the road to offer.
In order to make sure the world has even more SNL experts among us, we are offering a special New Year’s deal: You get 20% off for the life of your subscription if you upgrade to a paid account. Just click here and pick the level of your subscription: Monthly, yearly (to save a few bucks), or the Executive Producer level, which entitles you to a ton of our extra materials, including our SNL show-by-show notes and clips packages. You’ll also get to vote in our series-end “best of” lists to wrap everything up. Act fast! The offer expires on January 4th!
Now, on to business.
We are 13 seasons into reviewing SNL, and every now and then we have fired off a free post to let everyone know where we stand. What were the best seasons? What were the best sketches?
Fortunately, we painstakingly grade each and every sketch, which allows us to codify which episodes and full seasons are worth your attention. First, in August, we showed you how seasons One through Four stacked up. Just to complete the original cast seasons, we tacked on Season Five. And then back in October, we showed you the results for seasons Six through Eight.
So how do seasons Nine through Thirteen fare in the rankings?
Well, here are the individual charts for each season, which will show you which episodes were graded the best and which episodes were the worst. Again, we grade each sketch (including “Weekend Update”) on a 1 to 5 scale, with a “1” being downright appalling, to a “5,” which is an all-time classic. (We do not grade musical performances.)
The name below the ranking is the host that week.
Season 9, 1983-84
Season 10, 1984-85 (the Billy Crystal-Martin Short single season):
Season 11, 1985-86 (Randy Quaid, Jon Lovitz, Joan Cusack, etc.):
Season 12, 1986-87 (the first season for Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks):
Season 13 (a strike-shortened season):
So that then allows us to update our season-by-season rankings, with the last two seasons we reviewed pushing their way to near the top of the list:
“Aha!” you might say (hopefully out loud and at your child’s baptism), “I listen to the podcast and they don’t rank these episodes in this order!”
That is because, although the sketch rankings are scientific, they don’t take into account VIBES. Some similarly-ranked seasons might get different spots on our lists because the quality of the best sketches was better than the quality of the best sketches in other seasons. These are, after all, averages of all the sketches in a particular season.
So, for instance, take seasons Five, Seven, Nine, Ten, and Eleven, all of which have similar grades. (Incredibly, seasons Seven and Nine have the same grade down to the hundredth of a percentage point.)
Behind the scenes, we have argued whether one season should be ranked higher than another similarly-graded season if it has better sketches at the top-end. For instance, imagine you had a season with 50 sketches graded at a “5” and 50 graded at a “1.” Then you had another season with 100 “3”-graded sketches. It seems like the season that was half-brilliant, half terrible should get the edge over the season that was thoroughly mediocre the entire way through, right? We should reward the show’s best moments.
So in order to determine which seasons were most top-and-bottom heavy, we added up all the sketches and their grades, leading to this chart, which gives us an idea of sketch quality distribution:
But, of course, each season has a different number of episodes (Season One has 24 and seasons Six and Thirteen have 13), which makes the raw numbers a bit misleading.
We can correct this by adding up the percentage of sketches of each grade within each season, leading to a chart like this:
So, take the most extreme example - Season Six - and you notice 83.1% of all sketches were rated either “1” or “2,” making it a truly dreadful season. By contrast, 63.9% of the sketches in Season Three, the best season, warranted a “3,” “4,” or “5.”
Notice also how stingy we are handing out “5” grades - the highest percentage of top grades is found in Season Three (3.1%), then Season Ten (3%), then Season Eight at 2.3%.
If the theory of quality is correct, we should then probably rank Season 5 over seasons Seven and Nine, given it has 45.5% of sketches in the top three tiers, as opposed to 42% in Season Seven and 42.4% in Season Nine. Season Eleven not only has only 36.7% of sketches in the top three tiers, it didn’t have a single “5”-rated sketch.
Further, the grades allow us to rank the greatest SNL episodes through the first 13 seasons. They are:
Steve Martin (3.87) Season 3, Episode 18
Steve Martin (3.55) Season 4, Episode 4
Ralph Nader (3.4) Season 2, Episode 11
Paul Simon (3.4) Season 13, Episode 8
Stevie Wonder (3.38) Season 8, Episode 19
Eric Idle (3.35) Season 5, Episode 2
Candice Bergen (3.3) Season 2, Episode 10
Art Garfunkel (3.26) Season 3, Episode 13
William Shatner (3.25) Season 12, Episode 8
Eric Idle (3.22) Season 4, Episode 8
Margot Kidder (3.21) Season 4, Episode 16
Sigourney Weaver (3.17) Season 12, Episode 1
Steve Martin (3.16) Season 3, Episode 9
Joan Rivers (3.15) Season 8, Episode 17
Buck Henry (3.1) Season 5, Episode 20
In past posts, we have also listed the worst episodes, but you can just look those up on your own based on the season-by-season graphs above and in past posts.
Thank you again for either being a subscriber, and if you’re not, you can see above what you’re missing. Check all this out and more by subscribing to the podcast or getting a gift subscription for someone you know who loves SNL. Take advantage of the sale NOW!