They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Over its 50 years on the air, Saturday Night Live has been flattered by the numerous imitators they spawn. Some might have lasted only a season, others became institutions in and of themselves. This feature will look at the most notable spawn of SNL over its fifty years of existence.
Saturday Night Live is directly responsible for SCTV’s success, but not in the way that you might think. The satiric sketch program did not exclusively come about because Second City was sick and tired of SNL stealing all their Chicago-based cast members over the years. First off, the TV show was spun off of the organization’s Toronto branch and, second, it started in 1976, only a year after SNL premiered and before their raids of Second City personnel became all that common. Lorne Michaels stealing Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner from the Toronto branch did have a little part in SCTV‘s creation, but it was mostly to take advantage of the burgeoning Canadian television market.
Andrew Alexander and Second City co-founder Bernard Sahlins decided they wanted to spin the Toronto cast out into Canadian TV. They just had to come up with a concept for it. The Toronto Cast and Second City bigwigs had a brainstorming session to figure out how an SCTV program would work.
The person who came up with the winning concept is under some debate, but it likely might have been either Second City advisor Sheldon Patinkin or improv comedy legend Del Close. Whoever came up with the concept was a genius. The SCTV show would be about a small-time television station in the fictional town of Melonville. The cast would portray an esoteric bunch of people who worked at the station, many times more than one role in the series.
The concept was broad and brilliant. It provided a framework where the group could parody and satirize anything. TV shows. Office politics. Local TV ads. Hollywood celebrities. Pop culture icons. Phony talk show hosts. Anything was fair game. The only limits were their imaginations.
And their imaginations were pretty good. The initial cast from 1976 featured John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas, and American transplant Harold Ramis. Ramis left the cast during the second season, staying as head writer until season three when he left with Candy and O’Hara. They were replaced Tony Rosato, Robin Duke, both Second City alums, and Rick Moranis, who came from the world of radio.
Their imaginations played out in the irreverently silly sketches featured in the show. Rock stars NBC forced on the cast would get “blow’d up real good” on “Farm Film Celebrity Blow Up.” There would be an ad for a traveling production of Peter Pan with John Waters muse, Divine (John Candy), as Peter. Behind the scenes of Michael McDonald (Rick Moranis) singing his background track on Christopher Cross’ “Ride Like the Wind”–only forgetting he had more lines to sing in the song and having to rush back into the recording booth. It was some wacky, anything goes collection of concepts, but it was almost always hilarious.
It was in 1981, before season four of the Canadian version of SCTV began when the Saturday Night Live connection stepped in. Dick Ebersol, NBC’s head of late-night programming, had a 90-minuite hole to fill on Friday nights. Ebersol had cancelled the rock concert variety program, The Midnight Special, which had aired on Fridays after The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson since 1972. However, before Ebersol could develop a replacement for it, the garbage fire that was Jean Doumanian’s time at Saturday Night Live exploded, necessitating Ebersol to go hands on to save SNL. Having no time to create a new show from scratch, Ebersol pulled in SCTV, which had been airing in syndication in some U.S. markets, to plug in the hole.
Ebersol stole away Rosato and Duke from the program to replenish his SNL cast. Candy and O’Hara came back to replace them. This means that the first cast for SCTV when they came to NBC was John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas, and Rick Moranis. They say that the 1984-1985 season cast of SNL was the Steinbrenner team because it resembled the high-priced, All-Star teams George Steinbrenner used to hire for his New York Yankees. If that is the case, then this SCTV cast was “Murderer’s Row,” named after the 1927 Yankees team that fielded six Hall of Famers, including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. This SCTV cast was all killer, no filler. It couldn’t get any better. Except, that it did. Martin Short would join the cast the next season.
The fact that every cast member listed above went on to do something after their time on SCTV illuminates one of the main differences between it and SNL. That they were all stars at the show was because there was a more egalitarian set up at SCTV. It was never a case of whether or not a cast member would be on a particular episode, it was a case of how many characters would be playing. It was a more collaborative atmosphere than the dog-eat-dog one at SNL. They all worked together to make the best show possible, therefore, they all had the chance to shine.
The cast had to work overtime to have a show ready for their NBC debut, even working 7 days a week to get it done. Even still, they had to fill up the run time sketches cut from previous seasons. But it did manage to get on the air, and the rest is history.
The show was a critical darling from the get-go. Gary Deeb called it “the best new comedy show in years.” Tom Shales named it “one of TV’s funniest shows” even going so far as to suggest that it be given the chance to replace SNL.
The show also spawned a global phenomenon with two throwaway characters. The CBC asked the show to create a sketch with some Canadian content to cover the two minutes difference between American and Canadian runtimes (The Canadian show ran with two minutes less commercials). Thomas and Moranis, chagrined that the mostly Canadian cast wasn’t Canadian enough for the CBC, decide to create characters that would mock the stereotypical Canadian. Thus, the toque-wearing, beer-swilling, back bacon-frying, dim-witted Bob and Doug McKenzie were born.
However, instead of being an inside joke that could have been ignored, the pair became the most popular part of the show. NBC executive saw some of the Bob and Doug sketches and insisted they be included in the American version of the show. The sketches became a hit. The McKenzies were popular enough to get their own comedy album (with a guest appearance by Rush’s Geddy Lee, no less) and their own feature film, Strange Brew.
But while the show was popular enough to generate pop culture icons such as the McKenzie Brothers, it didn’t reflect in the ratings. The killer time slot (12:30 am to 2 am) was a deterrent to the show getting the proper audience to justify its $300,000 an episode ($952,000 in today’s money) budget. NBC cancelled SCTV after two seasons and replaced it with the cheaper to produce Friday Night Videos. The show continued on for another season on Cinemax, but by that point only Flaherty, Levy, Martin, and Short remained in the cast.
While SCTV only had a small time in the national spotlight, its legacy carries on to this day. It is almost as influential in the world of sketch comedy as Saturday Night Live is, as can be seen in shows as diverse as The State, The Ben Stiller Show and The Kids in the Hall. The cast members moved on to create and be featured in some of the most memorable films and TV show in entertainment history; films like Uncle Buck, Ghostbusters, Father of the Bride, Splash, Beetlejuice, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Home Alone, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Little Shop of Horrors and the improv mocumentaries of Christopher Guest, as well as TV shows like Freaks and Geeks, Grace Under Fire, Schitt’s Creek and Only Murders in the Building. If you like any of those titles I just mentioned, you have SCTV, and by proxy Jean Doumanian screwing up SNL, to thank for it.
SCTV might have been a spawn of SNL, but it is a force in its own right. It has well earned its place in comedy history.
