You're Wrong About Saturday Night Live

Plus, a Saturday Night movie pre-listening assignment

(Edie Baskin/Warner Bros./Archive Photos/Getty Images)

As we barrel towards both the premiere of Season 50 of Saturday Night Live and the release of the Saturday Night movie, podcast co-host Christian has written a piece for National Review explaining what people get wrong most about SNL. In it, he explains that there are really two SNLs: the show as it actually ran and the show as we remember it - and those two versions can be completely different experiences.

Here’s an excerpt:

People grade cast members and seasons based on recurring characters. This makes sense — it’s the characters that truly stick with us. So we immediately think of John Belushi’s Samurai or Chris Farley’s Matt Foley (the “van down by the river” guy) or Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson when we do a mental scan of the show to remember good and bad seasons.

For people who haven’t actually watched many SNL episodes, this is the way they judge the quality of past versions of the show. They remember Martin Short’s Ed Grimley and Billy Crystal’s Fernando, for example, and their brain tells them that must have been an all-time great year (it was 1984–85) for the show. Not included in their recollections are all the filler sketches in between the most memorable bits. That’s why season 10 in fact ends up being near the bottom in our historical ranking of seasons.

Further, recurring characters can also be a curse. “Hey, I loved Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri doing the cheerleaders bit,” you might say, but would you love watching the same bit with virtually the same jokes five times? Ten? Fifteen? (The cheerleaders ended up running seventeen times.) When done too many times, a great bit can turn into a slog. (Chris Kattan’s characters Mango and Mr. Peepers were beaten to death during his time on the show.)

When we look back at past seasons, we’re also tempted to grade its quality based on what the cast members did in places other than SNL. For instance, the Rolling Stone list ranks John Belushi the No. 1 cast member of all time, even though he missed much of the first four seasons because he was either off making a movie (Animal House, The Blues Brothers) or having drug problems.

There is no doubt Belushi was a star, and we remember him as such even more so because of his untimely death in 1982. But a great deal of his fame was the result of his movie career and his “everyman” aura, which fans loved. The guy had real, relatable problems and was open and honest about them. But when you watch what is on the screen during the first four years of SNL, you see that he’s no better than the fourth- or fifth-best cast member on the show, behind Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and one-season wonder Chevy Chase.

Similarly, the Rolling Stone list preposterously places Tina Fey as the third-greatest cast member of all time despite her limited screen time. Fey was brilliant on her show 30 Rock, and she has shone in her stints hosting awards shows and in her return SNL cameos as Sarah Palin; but as a cast member, she was effectively limited to hosting Weekend Update, the ten-minute mid-show news break. Others working on the show mention what a great sketch writer she was (and she did write some all-time great bits), but her limited screen time can’t possibly justify her high rank. (Incredibly, given her portfolio on the show, the cast member in show history she most resembles is Norm Macdonald, whom Rolling Stone ranks as the seventh-worst cast member of all time.)

Our faulty memories can also downgrade cast members who were much better than we remember. I kid you not when I say that in a cast that included Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Chris Rock, the most consistent sketch player was actually Rob Schneider, who exuded a skill and professionalism none of the others could match.

While the previous cast boasted female players like Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn, Victoria Jackson (Rolling Stone rank: fourth to last) actually earned more screen time than either of the other women and was far more talented than her babyish voice would have you remember. And in the Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman cast (perhaps the best of all time), Jon Lovitz frequently showed himself to be the equal of either of the other legends on the show.

You can read the full piece here (it’s a gift link) and see if you agree with commenters like this guy:

Speaking of the Saturday Night movie, it is scheduled for release on October 11 and covers the lead-up to the first episode of the show that aired in 1975.

We covered the lead-up to the first show in the lead-up to our first show last year. It’s free and available to everyone and can be found here.

Also, we covered the very first episode (and season) and that, too, is free and available to everyone. You can listen here.

At some point, we will likely do a podcast covering the movie and what it got right and what it got wrong. But stay tuned.