SNL: Killed by too many standup comics

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on May 4th, 2007

That’s one of the theories posited in “SNL in the ’90s: Pop Culture Nation,” the “documentary” produced, written and directed by Kenneth Bowser to air on NBC this Sunday night.

Writes Bill Harris for Jam! Showbiz:

The question, of course, is how it all went wrong.

SNL symbolically hit the wall in late 1997 and early 1998, when Farley and Hartman died. But both of them already had left SNL, where ratings had been in a free-fall since the mid-1990s.

Pop Culture Nation does not sugar-coat SNL’s demise in that era, and offers some explanations: Too many cast members had come from standup rather than sketch comedy…[…]

Apparently, though, that theory is contradicted by another that holds that the finest cast the show ever had was one in the mid-90’s– a cast that was populated mostly by… standup comics! (Dennis Miller, David Spade, Chris Rock, Dana Carvey, Norm MacDonald, Adam Sandler, etc.)

Reviewers speak of the show’s “remarkable endurance,” but, as anyone who has watched any of George Romero’s classic films, it is terribly difficult to kill the already dead. The show’s success as an actual, funny sketch comedy show has always been a distant second to it’s extremely efficient functioning as a farm system for NBC and Hollywood.

Pardon us if we’re less than excited about Bowser’s TV special. It might have something to do with having read “Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live,” the excellent account of the early days of SNL by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad. Watching this docu would be akin to eating a footlong hot dog after just having read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair.

Read the Jam! review here and the Variety review here.

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