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.
Ben Stiller wanted to be Albert Brooks.
Well, who doesn’t? But Stiller wanted to be Brooks in one specific way–he wanted to provide filmed comedy pieces for Saturday Night Live, like Brooks did in the early days of the show’s existence. The problem is that SNL didn’t want him to do that.
It was a bold and arrogant career move for Stiller, who at the times was best known as the son of the married comedy team of Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. He had done some guest appearances in TV shows such as Kate & Allie and Miami Vice and in films like Empire of the Sun and Hot Pursuit. Brooks was also the son of a famous radio comedian, Parkyakarkus. But Brooks was renowned as one of the best stand-up comedians of the day when he got the SNL job and was well known inside and out of the industry. It was pretty presumptuous of Stiller to think he could walk in and do filmed pieces from the get-go.
Lorne Michaels thought so as well. He offered Stiller a featured player position. Stiller tried it out but only lasted four episodes. Stiller wasn’t suited to the live nature of the show and quit.
That would have been enough to kill another person’s career. Stiller bounced right back and got a show on MTV in 1990. This would be the first The Ben Stiller Show. It was part of the network’s vidcom initiative where they would wrap comedy shows around the latest music videos. The concept was that Stiller was an egotistical star of a sketch program. It only lasted six episodes before it was quietly moved off of the schedule.
Failing out of SNL and having an MTV series quiet cancelled should have spelled doom for Stiller. But he got another chance. This one turned out slightly better. Slightly.
The Ben Stiller Show only last 12 episodes, but all of them were hilarious. It is of those classic cases where the length of the show did not indicate the importance of the show. For instance, the show was co-created with a 24-year-old Judd Apatow, the same Judd Apatow who later go on to create The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Stiller’s costars were Janeanne Garafalo, a pre-NewsRadio Andy Dick and a pre-Breaking Bad Bob Odenkirk. All went on to bigger and better things.
The shows are a product of their time. The parodies are a bit dated and very Fox Network-intensive. But they are all incredibly well thought out and funny. Its humor wasn’t for everyone (“The humor was lost on me” said advertiser Paul Schulman at the time) but it was the stuff that Stiller wouldn’t be able to do on SNL if he tried. Charles Manson as a Lassie-like family pet. Oliver Stone opening a theme park built around his movies. A family sitcom where the patriarch was a dirty sock puppet. It was esoteric and weird but if you bought into it, you’d laugh you ass off.
It was all filtered through Stiller’s unique sense of humor. A sense of humor with one foot in Hollywood’s classic past and the other in its postmodern future. This is exemplified by the sketch in the pilot on U2’s early days. Stiller was doing his excellent Bono impersonation, relating that the band’s first manager was a Mr. Kinkaid (Dave Madden). Stiller wasn’t concerned that a good portion of his audience might not know that Mr. Kinkaid was also the manager of The Partridge Family in the 1960s sitcom of the same name just as he wasn’t concerned that people familiar with The Partridge Family might not be familiar with Bono’s tics and affectations. But if you were familiar with either, you got the joke and if you knew both the joke was twice as funny.
The show got better as it went along and reviews were good (or, at least reviews from reviewers who were on the younger side of 40 liked it.) But it still ended up being rated 113 out of 113 rated shows in the 1992-1993 season. This brings us to the part of the write up where we look at why a show with so much talent tied up into it failed.
To start, Stiller complained that as of mid-September, Fox still hadn’t aired promos for the show. On top of that, most write ups detailing Fox’s new Fall shows said that the show was about Stiller trying to put on a variety show out of his apartment (the prevalence of this description leads me to believe that this was the original format for the show’s framing sequences instead of what they ended up with–Ben Stiller walking around Los Angeles interviewing his fellow cast members and other celebrities.)
But the most damaging thing was the show’s time slot. The show aired at 7:30pm EST on Sunday–competing with the second half of the juggernaut that is 60 Minutes. Even if the show had a strong lead in (The Ben Stiller Show‘s lead in was a show called Great Scott!, a sitcom where a 15-year-old Tobey Maguire played a high school student whose Walter Mitty-esque fantasies complicated his life. It was cancelled after six episodes), it would have had a hard time succeeding in the time slot.
Fox only aired 12 of the show’s 13 episodes. The last episode wasn’t seen until Comedy Central picked up the show to air in reruns on its network. Stiller once again failed upward after this, moving on to direct and costar in the Gen X Slacker Romance Reality Bites in 1994. He followed that with directing The Cable Guy in 1996 and then starring in There’s Something About Mary in 1998. That set him up as the superstar he is today.
The Ben Stiller Show was one of the wittiest shows on television, the textbook definition of being ahead of its time. Killed by a network that didn’t understand it, its legacy lives on in its creator and the cast members who went on to have successful careers. And it might not have even happened if Lorne Michaels let Ben Stiller do movies for SNL.
