Perhaps the most well known thing about Saturday Night Live is its show-opening phrase “Live! From New York! It’s Saturday Night!” It is both a declaration of where and how the show is being broadcast as well as a call to arms to get ready for the next hour and a half of television. But there are times when the show has not been all three of those things. True, there are repeats, as well as numerous compilation shows, often airing in primetime and built around either a specific performer or theme, such as an hour special featuring all Christmas sketches. And then there are the times when the show was live but outside of its usual harbor of either Saturday night or originating in New York City. Mostly forgotten, they still are interesting exercises in trying to expand the show’s brand outside of its ninety minute weekend timeslot.
Live From Mardi Gras
What a difference a year can make. In the early fall of 1975, no one was sure that NBC’s new live late night variety series Saturday Night was going to survive its initial thirteen week run, least of all the network brass. But it not only survived, but it quickly became a hit, bringing edgy, counterculture comedy to a youthful demographic that had never been really served by the television next works in this way before. Catch phrases and punchlines from the show quickly became part of the cultural zeitgeist and the cast had begun fielding offers for bigger things. Additionally, the show swept at the 1976 Emmy Awards, taking home trophies for Outstanding Directing in a Variety Series, Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program for Chevy Chase and Outstanding Variety Series. And as the second season moved from 1976 into 1977, it was even weathering the departure of Chase after its first six episodes. Michaels could just about do anything he wanted, and since the rest of NBC was pretty much in the dumps, the network brass were likely to indulge him.
So he decided to take the show on a road trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
Perhaps it was an act of hubris that led Michaels to think he could present a two-hour prime time special that would air live from outsides the confines of 30 Rock’s Studio 8H in a city during its biggest and craziest tourist event. The NBC brass believed he could do it though, and soon after the Fran Tarkenton-hosted episode on January 29, Michaels and crew, armed with a budget of $700,000 from the network, began to descend on New Orleans to prep for the show, which would go out live in just three weeks’ time. The basic plan for the show seemed simple enough – Have the cast appear in a number of sketches located at various points around the city and have musical guests, and New Orleans natives, Gary Neuman and soul group The Meters perform from the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts. Sometimes guest host Buck Henry would join cast member Jane Curtain to provide humorous color commentary on the annual Bacchus Parade, a bit that the broadcast could fall back to in case there was an issue with any of the other live pieces. A few short films and pre-recorded bits were also on standby. Although there would be no formal host for the show, the cast would also be joined by Eric Idle, Henry Winkler and Laverne And Shirley stars Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall.
Things, however, did not go quite as planned. Cooperation from the city started off strong, but seemed to disappear as it grew closer to the actual air time. The writers found themselves somewhat stymied over coming up with material built around the exterior locations in the city. The cast was starting to discover their stardom outside of New York City as fans flocked to personal appearances they made in the week before the broadcast. Producing the show was proving to be a daunting task, one which Michaels may have underestimated.
But was the actual aired live show as much of a disaster as legend seems to have it? Not quite, but not for lack of trying. The cast and crew’s ability to navigate the crowded streets between sketch locations in a timely manner was severely underestimated, with Williams missing one of her appearances altogether. Production value on many of the remote sketch segments was below the show’s normal standards and some of them pieces just didn’t work. The Meters wound up getting cut, though they would get to perform on the regular show a few weeks later. And the backup plan of cutting to Curtain and Henry commenting on the parade fell apart when the parade was stalled a mile away due to an accident. As it did, writer Alan Zweibel was just off screen furiously writing jokes for Henry and Curtain to kill time with.
Overall, the show barely hangs together. If some folks were tuning in to see this cast for the first time, they probably couldn’t be blamed if they wondered what all the fuss was about. On screen was barely contained chaos, and for most of the show’s two hour runtime, it was not very entertaining chaos outside of the performances by Newman and Weiss’s short films.
Mostly forgotten about today, the Mardi Gras Special is a bit of a curiosity. In the crowd reactions to the SNL cast members trying to perform their sketches at various city landmarks, it does capture how famous the cast had become in just a year and a half. It perhaps also highlighted to Michaels how fragile the show could be and that at any moment the entire enterprise could collapse on live television. It is fitting that the show would never try something as ambitious as this again, choosing to remain in the safe confines of the 30 Rock building in midtown Manhattan.
The Mardi Gras special is not very well represented online. There seem to be no clips on the show’s YouTube channel. However, it is available in full on the season two DVD box set for the curious.
Primetime Extra
In the year 2000, a seismic shift was just just starting that would reshape the television landscape – the rise of reality television. Much cheaper than scripted fare, and not subject to pesky writers or actors strikes, the major broadcast networks saw traditional game shows and high concept competition shows as fresh programming that could lure viewers back from the numerous cable outlet options they have splintered out to. One of the surprise hits driving this trend was the competition series Survivor. Debuting in May 2000, the series which pitted a number of players against each other in survival games in various wilderness locales. The first season was such a big hit, its network CBS quickly ordered a second to air the following January. And in the face of such a juggernaut, the other networks knew that they had fight back.
During the all-important Sweeps ratings month of February 2001, NBC decided to take on the Survivor juggernaut by programming three “super-sized” episodes of their hit comedy Friends, adding ten minutes to their normal thirty-minute runtime. To fill out the remaining twenty minutes of that hour, NBC ordered up two Saturday Night Live mini-episodes under the subtitle “Primetime Extras.” (The third week saw a twenty-minute behind-the-scenes look at Friends hosted by Conan O’Brien.
Since these two mini-episodes contained all new material to be performed live, it would mean extra work for the cast and crew of the show. While the first of the two fell on a week when the show had a rerun scheduled for that Saturday evening, the second fell just a few days before the main show’s return after three weeks off. So it is not surprising that the two episodes leaned heavily into pre-existing characters and sketches that had already been proven on the regular live show.
Both shows started off with cold opens centering on newly inaugurated President George W Bush, before going into a title sequence that parodied Survivor’s. Each episode was anchored by a Weekend Update segment with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. The first episode featured Will Farrell and Ana Gastyer appearing as their perpetually unhip music teachers, the Culps, while the second features another installment of a fan favorite, “Celebrity Jeopardy.” The second installment ended with Ferrell making crude advances to that Saturday’s guest host, Jennifer Lopez. In a fun bit of continuity, that Saturday’s cold open featured Ferrell apologizing to Lopez for his behavior earlier in the week.
Weekend Update: Thursday/Summer Edition
With the proliferation of weeknight, late night talk shows that trade in topical humor, the one big challenge for Saturday Night Live‘s “Weekend Update” segment is finding jokes in the events of the week that haven’t been told before. One way to be able to keep pace with the those other shows in the lead-up to a very contentious 2008 Presidential election was to spinoff Weekend Update into a series of three half-hour prime time episodes. And when the first batch proved to be a ratings earner, the network would go back to the idea three more times.
Similar to the pair of Primetime Extra specials from 2001, the first three batches of special Weekend Update editions would be produced while the regular show was also in production. Participation from the cast outside of the regular “Weekend Update” hosts was therefore limited. Regular Weekend Update hosts Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler would anchor the 2008 trio of episodes, and though she would depart at the end of the 2008-2009 season for Parks And Recreation, Poehler would return to behind the desk for two of the 2009 Weekend Update Thursday specials. For the first season Darrell Hammond, Fred Arminson and Chris Parnell stepped in to appear in the first episode, alongside a cameo from Bill Murray. Will Farrell and Tina Fey would also drop by to play President George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. Darrell Hammond, Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader would all pop up in the 2009 episodes as well.
Unfortunately, the 2009 iteration of Weekend Update Thursday did not hit the high ratings that the 2008 version did, so plans to do more into the new year were quietly scrapped. But that did not mean the network was entirely sour on the idea. It was revived again for the next presidential election in September 2012 with a pair of episodes again anchored by Meyers.
The most recent return of Weekend Update prime time episodes came in August 2017. This time the show was anchored by regular WU hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che. This time, with no election looming, the three episodes were more of a warm-up to the regular SNL season, which premiered just a few weeks later. Former Weekend Update anchors Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers all returned for bits in the second episode while Alec Baldwin would show up in the third playing Donald Trump.
