Entering its 50th year, the show is neither as good nor as bad as we remember it.
Entering its 50th year, the show is neither as good nor as bad as we remember it.
I t has been said that one should never argue about anything that can be looked up, as the liveliest debates are over beliefs that can’t be proved true or false. In arguments over intractable positions based on memories and feelings, there are no winners or losers.
This is why, for the past half century, many of America’s best ongoing barstool debates have involved Saturday Night Live, a sketch comedy show that, as of this weekend, turns 50. You may have found yourself arguing over which full cast was the best, or which former cast members belong on the SNL Mount Rushmore, or which sketches were superior to all others.
As Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy counseled over the origin of the name “San Diego,” we must “agree to disagree.”
But as the show reaches its 50th season, it’s important to note that there are really two SNLs. First, there is the SNL that we all remember watching as youths and into adulthood. The SNL with our favorite recurring characters and cast members firing off catchphrases that are still burned into our brains. The one that we would quote at school to make the kids who weren’t allowed to stay up that late jealous.
But then there is also the SNL as it actually ran. The one you can watch in 2024 to see if certain past sketches and cast members still hold up. Oftentimes, this SNL can be completely different from the one that lives in our memories.
But it is SNL as we remember it that dominates modern-day conversations about the show. Over the next few months, we’ll no doubt see “best of” lists ranking every aspect of SNL, but these are typically done by people who viewed the show only sporadically, if at all. A few years ago, Rolling Stone ranked (at the time) every cast member who had been on the show, and the list was so egregiously wrong it was as if it had been written by someone whose only memories of the show were from listening to an uncle rattle off his favorite sketches.
To combat the issuance of terrible pronouncements about the history of SNL, I have embarked on a project to watch every episode of every season of the show, ranking every sketch and cast member. I’ve also been podcasting a summary of every season, with my co-host Scot Bertram, an actual radio guy.
To date, Scot and I have watched the first 32 full seasons of the show. And from what we’ve learned so far, here are the biggest things that people get wrong about SNL:
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.
How do our memories of SNL affect our appreciation of the show as it currently airs?
If your memories of past seasons are just the highlights, then you will tend to think of a past season or cast as the glory days. You may think, “That was a great season when Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake did ‘D**k in a Box’ and Peyton Manning hosted a great episode.” But, in fact, it was a pretty average season overall. And probably not much better than the ones that are currently airing. Nonetheless, every year someone writes that SNL “used to be funny” and that the show should be “put out of its misery.”
If anything, watching all the old episodes boosts one’s appreciation for the show as it is today. Is there too much politics to open the show every week? Yes. Do they allow the lefties on the show to proselytize on Weekend Update about abortion and transgender issues? They certainly have.
But the show has always been political, and it hasn’t always been hilarious week after week. It’s had its barely visible one-year cast members (like Pamela Stephenson) and its enduring geniuses (like Will Forte). Anything that lasts for 50 years is going to do some things badly, but perfection is an unreasonable standard.
SNL is constantly adapting and regenerating itself. In 1995, it looked like the show was done for good after executive producer Lorne Michaels fired Chris Farley and Adam Sandler, but the very next year a young comedian named Will Ferrell walked in and carried the show on his back for seven years.
When the first episodes of SNL began airing in 1975, they were purposely ephemeral. Like toys found in cereal boxes, they weren’t meant to last. But the show was renewed year after year for 50 years, gaining a cultural importance that the people behind it hadn’t even imagined.