They thought they were just making some jokes and blazing up the occasional reefer.
But the original cast members of “Saturday Night Live” were really blazing a trail of envelope-pushing, in-your-face comedy that the stodgy television elite wasn’t prepared to deal with, and still struggles with 30 years later.
The birth of what is now the fourth-longest-running active television show on the air was relatively unremarkable.
“We went in with no aspirations, no sense that this would go anywhere,” 1975 cast member Chevy Chase says. “And that we had a chance, at least for a year, to parody and take down television.”
We get a chance to see how it all started in a two-hour retrospective, “Live From New York: The First Five Years of Saturday Night Live,” which airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on KING-TV, Channel 5.
This is not a clip show.
Packaged with bits of music from some of the performers who graced the stage at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, we get first-hand stories of how the show came to be and what happened behind the scenes.
From the assembling of the writing team and the cast, to some of the earliest hosts sharing their impressions and memories, the fast-paced presentation is something to watch for anyone who has ever had any interest in the show.
It shows how something truly inventive and lasting came to existence at the hands of a bunch of inadvertent pioneers.
Other shows have lasted longer.
But “The Tonight Show” is a simple talk-show format, “60 Minutes” is a news show and “Monday Night Football” is just a night when a football game is on.
“SNL” has been a constantly evolving stream of creativity that has certainly had some big ups and downs over three decades, but owes its success and durability to the strong roots that were planted by the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players.
“I knew that if I could do the show that I would watch, or that I thought was good, that it would be successful,” executive producer Lorne Michaels says in the special. “I never questioned that it would be a hit if I could actually get it on (the air).”
It didn’t start off so rosy.
Early reviews were horrible, with some saying, “irreverence is not enough,” and calling the show “mostly a tedious failure.”
“That was the season that NBC fell to third for the first time in its history,” said Dick Ebersol, NBC’s director of Saturday late night programming from 1975 to 1980 who eventually took over the show for a few years in the early 1980s when Michaels briefly left.
“If it had been the typical fall season in 1975,” Ebersol said, “I could see us not having made it.”
Thankfully it did, and who knows why? The special doesn’t profess to offer the recipe for success. It simply shows us the pieces that were in place.
There was rampant drug use, there were affairs between writers and cast members and there was the instant celebrity bestowed upon the previously unknown comics.
There’s no clear formula for why it worked. If there was, “SNL” would have long ago been replaced with any imitator that’s came along in its wake.
It’s never been flawless. The initial cast had just as many jokes fall flat as any cast since.
But the 30 years of “SNL” is just one long string of those great moments. And Sunday night, we give a nod to the first ones.
Columnist Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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