This is why you form a production company, and hire a CEO who handles those tasks, so you can do the fun stuff.
I know we all like to see these things as one-person operations. But they aren't.
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Tina Fey could take over ‘Saturday Night Live’ for Lorne Michaels: source
- Thread starter Y2kTheNewOldies
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This is why you form a production company, and hire a CEO who handles those tasks, so you can do the fun stuff.
I know we all like to see these things as one-person operations. But they aren't.
Lorne was the one who would tell the brass to kick rocks. He gives his writers the ability to push the limits.
Different people use different techniques. Once again, just because Lorne is retiring from EP doesn't mean he goes to pasture.
he'd have to move back to NYC
Ebersol understood Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, that was enough. He also had the brilliant move to bring in Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Christopher Guest, brought Harry Shearer back when most of the cast had left.
Excellent point. Jean Doumanian crashed the car. Ebersol put it back together, but Don's right---he wasn't equipped for it long term. Lorne coming back is why the show's still here.
That isn't really a well remembered cast on SNL.
The turn happened during the Phil Hartman era.
Keep in mind that, during that era, it was basically the Eddie Murphy and to a lesser extent Joe Piscopo show, with a lesser-remembered supporting cast. That's probably why @radio2023 called out those 2 specifically in his post. While I agree that many of the cast from that era were forgettable IMO, lots of Murphy's characters were memorable: Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood, James Brown's Hot Tub Party, Buckwheat has been shot, Gumby, the sketch where he and Piscopo dressed as Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra do their own comedic take on "Ebony and Ivory" and the one where Murphy dressed up as a white person to highlight what would now be called "white privilege".
Murphy was there 2 years? How long did Piscopo stay.
According to the interwebs they were both regular cast members from 1980 - 84.
Four seasons for both Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.
Same length as Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi and Bill Murray, twice as long as Chevy Chase, and only a year less than Adam Sandler, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Norm Macdonald, Jon Lovitz, Chris Farley, and Jane Curtin.
Yes, the whole "stay for 10 seasons" started with Tim Meadows, though Kevin Nealon and Hartman were there for 9 and 8 seasons, respectively. Even Victoria Jackson squeezed 7 years out of it, though she kind of out of place during her last year there.
That depends very much on who's doing the remembering, and if I recall, you're not old enough to have seen it in first run.
Here are the top 5 seasons, by average Nielsen rating for the episodes that season:
- Season 5: 1979-’80 (13.5)
- Season 4: 1978-’79 (13.1)
- Season 3; 1977-’78 (9.8)
- Season 6: 1980-’81 (9.5)
- Season 18: 1992-'93 (9.1)
- Dana Carvey (final episode: February 6, 1993)
- Chris Farley
- Phil Hartman
- Mike Myers (on leave until December 5, 1992)
- Kevin Nealon
- Chris Rock
- Rob Schneider
- Julia Sweeney
You can’t compare ratings the same now to back then. Nothing will get a 9 share anymore.
Let’s take the 89 season and call that the start of the modern era of SNL. It was a different show. The first 5 seasons and what you see today are drastically different.
You're right it's not possible to compare ratings from different eras. Shows like "All in The Family" and "MASH" (even Seinfeld in the 90s) delivered huge numbers. People were also watching at the same time. Viewing is fragmented now without the "shared experience".
I consider the first 5 seasons of SNL the best. It may be biased, because I watched them live. I drifted away from the show later only watching sporadically. The #1 show on network TV now has ratings that would have got it cancelled in another era. That's how much things have changed...
The point is, because of your own experience, you give the Murphy-Piscopo era less credit than it deserves.
"Share" is not what we are looking at, but what we should be using for comparison. There are always 100 shares of TV viewing. "Rating" shows percentage of the universe, viewers and non-viewers and dramatically shows the decline in real-time viewing.
If we use "rating" we should (were it available) use "live and 24 hour" to gather DVRed views... even "Live and 7 day". Today, many people record this type of show and view them when more convenient. I always record things like CMA Awards or the Oscars or Premios de Juventud.
When I moved to LA from Puerto Rico (where SNL was not available at the time) I "followed the crowd" and watched a few shows. It was culturally to distanced from my taste; what people commented on news groups (yes, we had Compuserve and AOL and others before the Internet) as being tremendously funny left me totally flat! I've not watched it since, so my observations are based on numerical comparisons, not content.
As they should be different. 1989? Whatever arbitrary reason for picking that year, 34 years darn well better be creating a different show in some ways. That’s how it got to this point.
More tedious is the cliched “it hasn’t been good since xxxx” where xxx is typically when the complainer aged out of the core target.
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