In honor of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th Anniversary, we will be going through its rich and varied history and breaking down its legendary run into easy to digest eras. Some eras might last for years, others only one season. But each era is one that either marked a change in the show, were driven by a remarkable personality of a star, or marked a special part of the history of the program. Today, we find how Dick Ebersol dealt with Eddie Murphy’s departure–by hiring an All-Star group of performers.
Saturday Night Live producer Dick Ebersol had a problem. His biggest star, Eddie Murphy, had gone off to Hollywood to make his money in the movies. It was a problem that plagued show creator Lorne Michaels famously twice during his own tenure as producer. Once, when Chevy Chase left, he found a great replacement in Bill Murray. When John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd left three years later, it didn’t fare as well as Harry Shearer wasn’t as good a fit as Murray.
So, Ebersol had a precedent as to how replace Murphy. He had to find a comedian as good as the young superstar. Knowing that would be hard, if not impossible, to do, Ebersol decided instead to bring in an all-star crew to replace him.
Who was this A-Team he brought in to replace Murphy (And Joe Piscopo, who left when Murphy left, and Robin Duke, Brad Hall and Tim Kazurinsky, who were fired)? Let’s take a look:
- Billy Crystal: Famously bumped from the show’s very first episode, Billy Crystal had become a star as a stand-up comedian in the intervening years. His stand-up led him to a role on the soap opera parody Soap and a starring role in the film Rabbit Test. Crystal had hosted SNL twice before he joined the cast.
- Christopher Guest: Christopher Guest was a successful actor on the stage, in film and on the radio by the time he came to SNL. He had small roles in Death Wish and Heartbeeps. He worked with Chevy Chase and John Belushi on National Lampoon’s Lemmings stage show. He was one of the “Prime Time Players” on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. He was coming off the successful rock parody, This is Spinal Tap before joining SNL.
- Martin Short: Martin Short made a name for himself in the Canadian TV and Theatre fields, including a legendary 1972 production of Godspell which also featured Victor Garber, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Dave Thomas and had Paul Shaffer as its musical director. American audiences perhaps knew him best as a cast member of SCTV along with John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Levy, Thomas and others.
- Rich Hall: Like Guest and Short, Rich Hall came to Saturday Night Live from one of its competitors–ABC’s Fridays. Hall also worked on Not Necessarily the News where he came up with “Sniglets,” words used to define thing that did not have a dictionary definition but should have. He put out a number of books on the subject over the 1980s
- Harry Shearer: We talked about him before, and we’ll talk about him more in a couple paragraphs, so let’s leave it at that for the time being.
Ebersol added another cast member–Pamela Stephenson. While Stephenson might have been well known in her native New Zealand, she is most famous in the US for the two actresses she beat out for the job–Geena Davis and Andrea Martin. Considering the talent gap between Stephenson and the two women she was chosen over; it makes me wonder what Ebersol was thinking. However, as site editor Rich Drees pointed out to me, Stephenson was coming off what he considers groundbreaking work on the British news satire program Not the Nine O’Clock News, where she worked with Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. So it’s not that Stephenson wasn’t talented, but she was far behind the talent of either Davis or Martin, in my opinion.
Regardless, this new line up got dubbed Ebersol’s “Steinbrenner Team,” after New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s tactic of hiring the biggest name free agents for the Yankees year after year,
Whether Ebersol intended it or not, this cast marked what would be a permanent change in the show. It could no longer claim to be the scrappy, avant-garde, outsider driven sketch show. It was now an institution run by adults. Compare the introductory cast photo above and the one from the first season. The first season photo shows a cast that might have been captured just as they left a dive bar after last call, a group of people who might mug you as much as make you laugh. This season’s cast, with its button-down shows, blazers and sweaters, looks like it just came off a corporate retreat as much as a comedy stage.
Which isn’t to say that the season wasn’t funny. It was, in many ways, one of the funniest. It featured my favorite SNL sketches of all time on it: “Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad.” It’s a bit problematic to view nowadays, with Billy Crystal in full blackface as Sammy Davis Jr and Christopher Guest as an ambiguously gay South Asian stereotype, both which might be the reason why it can’t be found on the Peacock stream for the season, it still has some whip smart writing in it.
It wasn’t all champagne and roses. Harry Shearer was once again a source of discontent. He had major creative differences with Ebersol, resulting in him being suspended from the show by Ebersol in January of 1985. He wouldn’t appear in another episode that season, or any other season for that matter.
Most of the cast had signed only one-year contracts to be on the show. Guest, Short and Hall would not be coming back, as they did not like the weekly grind it took to put on the show. Ebersol was faced with once again having to start over from the ground up to replace his departing stars.
He was considering an idea of turning Saturday Night Live into a variety program akin to The Ed Sullivan Show with Crystal, David Letterman and Joe Piscopo as rotating hosts. That would have been the dumbest idea ever, in my opinion, and a career killer for Letterman. Whatever direction, Ebersol wanted a few months off to retool the show before starting the next season.
NBC decided that if they were going to retool, they wanted to retool with Lorne Michaels. Michaels was brought back, and the Dick Ebersol era was over.
Michaels swept out all of Ebersol’s people and started over again. He took a page from Ebersol’s book and built up his cast with people who had already established themselves. It didn’t work out all that well. We’ll talk about Lorne’s non-so-triumphant return in our next installment.
