This weekend sees the kick-off of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th season. And outside of a few news magazine programs, SNL has for a while now been one of the longest running television shows in the history of the medium. That is no mean feat, considering the amount of times the show was on the brink of cancellation only to come roaring back to popularity thanks to a cast change or the introduction of a new recurring sketch character who catches the audience’s interest.
And during these five decades, the show has very clearly shaped American comedy in a number of different ways. What started out as a show birthed from the heart of the counterculture has become one of the most iconic comedy institutions of all time.
Needless to say, fans of pop culture or comedy history have a lot to explore within the show’s five decades long run. And with its fiftieth season kicking off, it is understandable that many would want to dig into the show’s past to revisit old episodes that they remembered watching when they originally aired, catch up on eras of the show they may have missed or just explore how the show changed over time. That’s been the impetus for us here at Film Buff Online to do with what will be a series of articles running weekly which will examine the show’s history and influence from a number of angles over the course of its fiftieth season.
Unfortunately, that is not quite as easy as one would think. Sure, the show is available through online streaming on NBC-Universal’s Peacock app and other outlets like Hulu and Amazon Prime. Unfortunately, not all of the episodes are fully available thanks to a couple of issues that affect their being watchable by the public.
Music Rights
One of the biggest issues impacting the streaming of Saturday Night Live episodes is that of music rights. Each and every song that is used on the show that is not original to the show itself had to be licensed from its owner, whether it be prerecorded or a live performance from a musical guest. During the time it was originally being created, SNL was paying specific amounts for the right to use the songs that it could be heard on the show during its initial broadcast, reruns and syndication.
However, for a majority of the show’s existence, the idea of physical home video and streaming television did not even exist, so no rights for those technologies were ever negotiated. This is an issue that has impacted the potential home video releases for a number of television shows produced all the way up until the 1990s. (We’re looking at you, classic late 1970s radio station-set sitcom WKRP In Cincinnati.) Often original music would be cut or replaced with more generic library music for a home video release or else the distributor goes through the trouble and expense of re-licensing the music for release on the new medium. (We’re looking at you, Shout Factory’s DVD expensive, but totally worth it, WKRP In Cincinnati DVD season sets.)
Now there are a number of Saturday Night Live seasons where this isn’t a problem. The first five years of SNL, which many consider the “classic” or “best” era of the show are available for streaming with every music cue and performance intact. But that is because Broadway Video, SNL creator Lorne Michael’s production company that basically owns the show, went and cleared all that music for a series of home video releases starting in 2006. Presumably, the streaming rights for that music was also renegotiated at that time, as this era appears in full online.
Fortunately, more recent series apparently have expanded their licensing rights to songs used and performed on the show to include streaming rights. Starting with season 40, no show appears to have had song cut from its initial airing for its streaming iteration.
Context
But the incomplete nature of much of the show’s run due to music rights issues is only one of the roadblocks for the aspiring Saturday Night Live historian. An other, and sometimes more difficult thing to surmount, is context.
The peril of satire is that it ages and sometimes not well. And that is very evident when one takes a deep dive into SNL history. SNL has always been a creature of its moment, finding much of its humor in the news and culture of the day. It has been that way since its very first episode, with parody ads of products like Schick razors and vitamin supplement Geritol and Chevy Chase’s first Weekend Update kicking off with a string of jokes about then-President Gerald Ford.
Over the years, the show has commented on and found comedy in hundreds of things that were part of the pop culture zeitgeist from staid talk show host Tom Snyder to MTV’s TRL to the 1998 “Gap Swings” commercial to Betty Rollin’s autobiography First You Cry to Baby Fae to Michael Dukkis’s failed presidential campaign and so many other culturally ephemeral things. Let’s face it, there was a lot of pop culture that happened over the previous half-century. Now, for someone my age who has lived through a good chunk of this American history, having a good recall for what is being referenced is not a problem. But for those who happen to be younger, there may be contextual barriers to be overcome. And even if one academically knows who someone like Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt is, they might not know about the mood among many Americans who didn’t like Watts’s decidedly unfriendly attitude toward environmentalism, itself a strange personality trait to have as a Secretary of the Interior.
Satire is also very much dependent on recognition of the thing being satirized. True, sometimes a joke will contain the context needed in order to understand the punchline. But often, it may rely on the audience making the leap in knowing the subject of the humor without explanatory setups as its target is part of their greater cultural landscape. And without that greater osmosis from having lived through the time that the joke was originally being made, it might not strike as hard for some people.
How This Affects You
Suppose you’re a Chris Farley fan and want to see his very first appearance in a sketch on the show.That would be the first episode of season 16, which also featured the first appearances of incoming cast members Chris Rock and Julia Sweeney and the promotion of writers Rob Schneider and David Spade to the cast.
Sounds like a pretty significant show in SNL’s history, right? So there should be some good representation of that episode available,right?
Wellllllll… Unfortunately, this is where both of these issues come into play.
The only official version of the Season 16 premier available for viewing is the one that exists on the Peacock streaming service. It is only 30 minutes long, a little less than half of a standard episode’s 107-minute runtime without commercials. A review of the show reveals that the streaming version only has the show’s cold open, host Kyle MacLaughlin’s monologue, Dennis Miller’s Weekend Update segment, the first installment of Mike Meyers’s “All Things Scottish” sketches and MacLaughlin singing a delightfully morbid song about how cows are slaughtered called “The Cattle Song.”
So a good portion of the episode has already been excised, presumably over music rights issues. As with all of the musical performances of this era, musical guest Sinead O’Connor’s two performances aren’t here. (The same goes for the singer’s far more controversial appearance in October 1992. References to it the following week in Joe Pesci’s tough guy monologue remain intact though.)
The Peacock streaming version of the episode is also missing Mike Myers’s “Sprockets” sketch (the fifth installment of this) which featured MacLaughlin, a sketch where Phil Hartman’s Frank Sinatra gives advice to Dana Carvey’s George Michaels and a sketch where cast newcomer Chris Rock makes his SNL debut playing 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell getting lyric suggestions from clueless white guy record executives. All three are victims of the crime of having copywritten music in them.
But the most obvious omission from the episode is the sketch spoofing guest host MacLaughlin’s hit TV series Twin Peaks. The music rights issue strikes again since the sketch opens with a portion of the show’s atmospheric title sequence complete with composer’s Angelo Badelemnti’s haunting score, rendering it unstreamable.
And oh yeah, that’s the sketch where Chris Farley makes his Saturday Night Live debut. Sorry about that Chris Farley fans.
Now it should be noted that four other episodes from the season are edited even worse, putting the Kyle MacLaughlin installment in the bottom 20% for the season. And one of those other episodes? The October 27 episode with guest host Patrick Swayze. Unfortunately for our hypothetical Chris Farley fan, that means his iconic “Chippendales Audition” sketch he performs alongside Swayze is also cut, presumably because of its use of the band Loverboy’s “Working For The Weekend.” Strangely enough, though, the isolated sketch is available on Saturday Night Live‘s official YouTube channel with the song intact. It does raise some questions as to how the music was able to be cleared for YouTube but not for Peacock, where it would allow fans to view the sketch in the context of the entire episode.
So suppose you are a resourceful Chris Farley fan/comedy historian and you do manage to find a complete copy of that season sixteen opening episode. (And it’s out there, trust us.) What then? Well, the material itself might be a bit of a barrier in appreciating it.
The sketch is a pretty note-perfect spoof of Twin Peaks, with a number of jokes referencing very iconic Twin Peaks elements. You have MacLaughlin playing his character of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper recreating his habit of dictating his case notes on a small portable tape recorder to “Diane,” presumably his secretary back at his home office. (Yes, we know we learned more about who Diane is in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, but that was 27 years off at the time of this sketch.) Kevin Nealon enters as the show’s Sheriff Harry S Truman and tells Cooper that Laura Palmer’s killer has been found and that it is Leo Johnson. Next a sheriff’s deputy (played in a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-him cameo by SNL writer Conan O’Brien) brings in “Leo Johnson”, aka new cast member Chris Farley, who confesses to the murder before shouting “And bring me a beer!”
MacLaughlin as Cooper ignores Leo’s confession and instead tells Harry of some other wildly tangential ways he thinks will illuminate who the killer is. Most of the rest of the SNL cast cycle through the sketch playing various Twin Peaks characters including Phil Hartman as Ray Wise’s Leland Palmer, the distraught father of the show’s central murder victim Laura Palmer, Victoria Jackson as the sultry Audrey Horne and Mike Meyers as the Little Man From Another Place.
Now, if you were watching the show live that evening in 1990, you were probably familiar with many of the Twin Peaks elements being satirized, even if you didn’t watch the show. Twin Peaks-mania seemed ever present in the culture at the moment. The show had debuted just six months earlier, becoming an instant hit. As the whole country tried to figure out “Who murdered Laura Palmer?” It was a craze that gripped the culture similar to another fictional mystery that SNL would reference in the infamous “Who shot Charles Rocket?” runner of the season six episode with Dallas star Charlene Tilton guest hosting.
But if your first exposure to Twin Peaks is not through watching the series at the time it aired or even catching up with it later via home video but by seeing this sketch just on its own, it most likely will come off as completely incomprehensible or delightfully chaotic at best. There are no verbal set-ups to any of these jokes, only punchlines. The set-ups are the pre-existing knowledge the audience should have about Twin Peaks. Farley yelling “And get me a beer!” at the end of his confession can just seem like a weird, out-of-left field thing to say if you aren’t familiar with scenes from the show where the character would say similar things while verbally abusing his wife, Shelly. But for those in the know, it works as a great punchline to Farley’s overall shouty line reading.
Editing
There is one final thing that can stand in the way of doing a serious deep dive into Saturday Night Live‘s history and that is the show itself.
At times, SNL has been a bit revisionist with its own history, sometimes editing episodes after their live broadcast. Now we are not just talking about versions of the show that were edited down into hour or half-hour installments for syndication over the years. But there have been times when the show has switched a live sketch with a recording of the same piece from the show’s dress rehearsal earlier in the evening or reordered the rundown of the show before the episode is sent back out as a repeat.
This kind of revisionism does distort the individual show’s original flow and pace, making it harder to truly evaluate why some segments worked when others did not. Additionally, there have been a rare few pieces that have only aired once before being excised entirely from repeats effectively being memory-holed. (We will be discussing those sketches in an upcoming installment of this series.)
To be sure, the issues with trying to revisit older eras of Saturday Night Live either for nostalgia or deeper historical review can be daunting. We should know, we’ve been working on this series for a couple of months already and these are issues that we have been encountering over and over again. But hopefully, being aware of them has helped us improve both our coverage of the show’s history over this coming season but of your enjoyment from your own explorations of the show’s fifty year history.
