Saturday Night Live | |
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Season 6 | |
No. of episodes | 13 |
Release | |
Original network | NBC |
Original release | November 15, 1980 – April 11, 1981 |
Season chronology | |
The sixth season of Saturday Night Live , an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between November 15, 1980, and April 11, 1981. Jean Doumanian, who had been an associate producer for the first five seasons of SNL, was given executive producer responsibilities after Lorne Michaels left the show, along with all the cast and almost all the writing staff. (Michaels would return five years later.) Doumanian's first—and only—season in charge was plagued by difficulties, from a reduced budget to new cast members who were compared unfavorably to the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Critical reception was strongly negative and ratings sank. [1]
After cast member Charles Rocket swore on air in the February 21, 1981 episode, NBC president of entertainment Brandon Tartikoff fired Doumanian and hired Dick Ebersol to improve the show. The show went on a brief hiatus as Ebersol retooled the cast, firing most of Doumanian's hires with the exception of Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Denny Dillon, and Gail Matthius. He also added alumna from The Second City. Ebersol's first produced episode aired on April 11, 1981, but the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike began that night, forcing the season to an early end. Over the next several months, Ebersol would retool the cast and crew further, with Murphy and Piscopo being the only cast members from the Doumanian year to survive the overhaul.
This season was alternatively known as Saturday Night Live '80.
Executive producer Lorne Michaels cited burnout as the reason behind his desire to take a year off, and had been led to believe by NBC executives that the show would go on hiatus with him, and be ready to start fresh upon his return. [2]
Jean Doumanian hired Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthius, Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Ann Risley and Charles Rocket (who was groomed to be the new breakout star) as repertory players, and Yvonne Hudson, Matthew Laurance and Patrick Weathers as featured players. In doing so, she passed on such then-unknown performers as Jim Carrey, Mercedes Ruehl, Sandra Bernhard, John Goodman and Paul Reubens. [3] [4] Andy Kaufman offered to contribute a weekly segment but was turned down. [5] Jean Doumanian sought a non-white cast member to fill Garrett Morris' previous role. As SNL historians Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad phrase it,
Jean still needed an ethnic, and a special series of auditions was set up to find one. For two days in mid-September some thirty black actors and comedians filed through the writers' wing on the 17th floor [of Rockefeller Center] to read for Jean and her people. At the end, Jean told her group she was leaning toward hiring a stand-up by the name of Charlie Barnett. But talent coordinator Neil Levy had another black performer he wanted her to see, a kid from Roosevelt, Long Island, named Eddie Murphy. [6]
Some accounts (including Neil Levy's) state that Jean Doumanian preferred instead Robert Townsend. Nevertheless, Eddie Murphy was added (as a featured player) starting with the fourth episode, after much convincing from her colleagues and staff. [7]
Dick Ebersol's first produced episode was on April 11, 1981. [8] After Ebersol's first episode, the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike started, forcing the show into a hiatus during which it was extensively retooled. Before the next season, Ebersol also fired Denny Dillon and Gail Matthius, leaving Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo the only remaining cast members from Jean Doumanian's tenure. [3] [9]
The first episode, renamed "Saturday Night Live '80" in the opening credits, aired Nov. 15, 1980, and featured an all-new cast – Charles Rocket (groomed to be the new breakout star), Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthius, Joe Piscopo, and Ann Risley rounded out the new cast. [10] Yvonne Hudson was hired as a featured player and became SNL's first black female cast member. [11] Elliott Gould had agreed to host the first episode.
Contributing to the sense that season six was doomed, in the first sketch the cast shared a bed with Gould and introduced themselves – Charles Rocket proclaimed himself to be a cross between Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, and Gilbert Gottfried referred to himself as a cross between John Belushi "and that guy from last year who did Rod Serling, and no one can remember his name" [12] (referring to Harry Shearer). [11]
At the end of the show, Gould stood on stage and quickly introduced himself to the cast one more time by first name and declared "We're gonna be around forever, so we might as well..."
In September 1980, talent coordinator Neil Levy received a telephone call from 19-year-old Eddie Murphy, who had begged the producer to "give him a shot" on the show, but was initially rejected since "the black cast member had already been chosen." [13]
On February 21, 1981 the show featured a parody of the "Who Shot J.R.?" craze from the soap opera Dallas . In a cliffhanger titled "Who Shot C.R.?", cast member Charles Rocket was "shot" in the last sketch of the episode, after a running gag in which other members of the cast shared their grievances about Rocket with one another. Onstage for the goodnights, Dallas star and that week's host Charlene Tilton asked Rocket (still in character and sitting in a wheelchair) his thoughts on being shot. "Oh man, it's the first time I've been shot in my life", he replied. "I'd like to know who the fuck did it." [14] [15] The cast, along with some of the audience, reacted with laughter and applause, but inside the control room, there was no laughter. Director Dave Wilson, fearing that the show was finished for good, simply threw his script papers in the air and said "Well, that's the end of live television" and walked out of the room. [16] As a semi-joke, on the following week's episode hosted by Bill Murray, Murray snubbed Rocket for his behavior the previous week and told him to "watch his mouth and clean it up". [17] [18]
After Bill Murray hosted the following episode, the next episode was scheduled for March 14, 1981 and would have been hosted by Robert Guillaume and Ian Dury and the Blockheads. [19] Subsequent reruns of the episode partially edit the good nights segment to remove the announcement for next week's episode. The cast and writers were also unaware that Brandon Tartikoff, the head of programming for NBC, invited Dick Ebersol, the original developer of SNL, to watch the show in secrecy in the control booth and was totally in despair over how the quality of the show sank. [20]
Doumanian was officially replaced by Ebersol after the Murray episode. [21] In his first two weeks, Ebersol fired Gottfried, Risley, and Rocket, [22] replacing them with Robin Duke, [23] Tim Kazurinsky, [24] and Tony Rosato. At the end of the season, he would eliminate the rest of the 1980 cast except for Murphy and Piscopo. Ebersol originally wanted to bring in John Candy and Catherine O'Hara from SCTV; Candy turned down the offer. O'Hara initially accepted the job, but changed her mind after a production meeting where Michael O'Donoghue, the original head writer for SNL and had been hired to save the show, screamed at the cast and writers for the show's poor performances and sketches. [25]
Ebersol's first show aired April 11, with appearances by Chevy Chase on Weekend Update , and Al Franken asking viewers to "put SNL to sleep". [11] Ebersol, wanting to establish a connection to the original cast, allowed Franken's mock-serious routine on the air.
Ebersol had promised Al Franken and Tom Davis that in addition to appearing on the April 11 show, they could host the next week. During the following week, with a writer's strike looming, [26] Franken and Davis wrote material and mailed it to themselves so that their postmark could be used to prove they did not violate the strike. [27] After seeing copies of the material, Ebersol (never a fan of Franken and Davis) caved to the writer's strike and called off the rest of the season, promising the duo they could host the season premiere that fall. [27] As the summer ended, Ebersol, confident in his new cast, decided he no longer needed a link to the original cast. [27] Franken claims Ebersol never returned his calls, and Franken and Davis never hosted SNL. Franken would not return to SNL until four years later, as a featured cast member.
Other episodes cancelled due to the strike were scheduled to air on April 25, 1981 (with host Dan Aykroyd, former cast member), May 9, 1981 (with host Steve Martin, an SNL favorite), May 16, 1981 (with host Brooke Shields), and May 23, 1981 (with another frequent SNL host, Buck Henry). [28] Aykroyd wouldn't get a chance to host until the 28th season finale in 2003, Martin didn't come back until 1986, Shields has yet to host, and Henry never hosted again.
Repertory players
| Featured players
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bold denotes Weekend Update anchor
Repertory players | Featured players
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Brian Doyle-Murray returned as the only writer from the previous season. Barry Blaustein, David Sheffield, Pamela Norris and Terry Sweeney were also hired; the latter would become a cast member in 1985. Musician and Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour writer Mason Williams was the season's first head writer but left after clashing with Doumanian. [30] Jeremy Stevens and Tom Moore joined as head writers for the remaining Doumanian shows. Michael O'Donoghue was rehired after Doumanian's firing. As was future head writer/producer Bob Tischler.
This season's writers included Larry Arnstein, Barry W. Blaustein, Billy Brown, Ferris Butler, John DeBellis, Jean Doumanian, Nancy Dowd, Brian Doyle-Murray, Leslie Fuller, Mel Green, David Hurwitz, Judy Jacklin, Sean Kelly, Mitchell Kriegman, Patricia Marx, Douglas McGrath, Tom Moore, Matt Neuman, Pamela Norris, Michael O'Donoghue, Mark Reisman, David Sheffield, Jeremy Stevens, Terry Sweeney, Bob Tischler, Mason Williams and Dirk Wittenborn.
Most of the writers after this season were fired except for Bluastein, Norris, Sheffield, O'Donoghue, and Tischler.
No. overall | No. in season | Host | Musical guest(s) | Original air date | |
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107 | 1 | Elliott Gould | Kid Creole & the Coconuts | November 15, 1980 | |
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108 | 2 | Malcolm McDowell | Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band | November 22, 1980 | |
NOTE: Many SNL veterans (as of 1985) considers this episode as the single worst night in the program's history. [35] | |||||
109 | 3 | Ellen Burstyn | Aretha Franklin Keith Sykes | December 6, 1980 | |
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110 | 4 | Jamie Lee Curtis | James Brown Ellen Shipley | December 13, 1980 | |
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111 | 5 | David Carradine | Linda Ronstadt The Cast of The Pirates of Penzance | December 20, 1980 | |
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112 | 6 | Ray Sharkey | Jack Bruce & Friends | January 10, 1981 | |
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113 | 7 | Karen Black | Cheap Trick Stanley Clarke Trio | January 17, 1981 | |
114 | 8 | Robert Hays | Joe "King" Carrasco & the Crowns 14 Karat Soul | January 24, 1981 | |
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115 | 9 | Sally Kellerman | Jimmy Cliff | February 7, 1981 | |
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116 | 10 | Deborah Harry | Deborah Harry Funky Four Plus One | February 14, 1981 | |
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117 | 11 | Charlene Tilton | Todd Rundgren Prince | February 21, 1981 | |
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118 | 12 | Bill Murray | Delbert McClinton | March 7, 1981 | |
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119 | 13 | None | Jr. Walker & the All-Stars | April 11, 1981 | |
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Responses to Doumanian's SNL were negative. The Associated Press , mocking the Carters-in-the-Oval-Office sketch, wrote, "The new Saturday Night Live is essentially crude, sophomoric and most of all self-consciously 'cool.' It is occasionally funny ... Under producer Jean Doumanian, Saturday Night Live will define 'risk-taking' as a little naughtier, perhaps a little raunchier; it won't wander too far off the beaten path ... They're all clones. This is television. If they can be funny once in a while, that's all we can ask." [44] Much of the criticism was directed at the style of humor, which journalists said appeared to go for shock value and came across as tasteless. [45] [46]
The New York Times said the season "looked almost exactly as it did in previous years, but actually only the shell remained". The review went on to state that the "missing ingredient was the very quality that made the old show so special: an innovative vision", and that the new show was "nothing so much as an unfunny parody of its predecessor". [47]
Hill and Weingrad summarized other reviews:
The Washington Star said the show "strained and groaned" while the humor was "almost completely lost, despite desperate attempts to wring it out of raunch." Newsday's Marvin Kitman, as expected, ravaged the show gleefully, calling it "offensive and raunchy," and worse, not funny. "This new edition is terrible," he wrote. "Call it 'Saturday Night Dead on Arrival'." [48]
Tom Shales' headline on his review read "FROM YUK TO YECCCH". The first sentence was: "Vile from New York—It's Saturday Night." The show, Shales said, was a "snide and sordid embarrassment". It imitated the "ribaldry and willingness to prod sacred cows" of the Lorne Michaels years without having the least "compensating satirical edge". It was, he wrote, "just haplessly pointless tastelessness". Shales concluded that despite one or two imaginative moments from the show's filmmakers, "from the six new performers and 13 new writers hired for the show, viewers got virtually no good news." ... Jean made it clear that she thought the writing was primarily at fault. "It's just got to be funnier," she said. Then she put a tape of the show on her videocassette machine to begin a sketch-by-sketch critique. According to writer Billy Brown, as she did she said, "Watch this. And I hope you hate it, because you wrote it." [49]
In his book What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History, author David Hofstede included this season as one of 25 runners-up to the list. [50]
Weekend Update is a Saturday Night Live sketch and satirical news program that comments on and parodies current events. It is the show's longest-running recurring sketch, having been on since the show's first broadcast, and is typically presented in the middle of the show immediately after the first musical performance. Historically, one or two of the players are cast in the role of news anchor, presenting gag news items based on current events and acting as hosts for occasional editorials, commentaries, or other performances by other cast members or guests. In modern times, dedicated anchors are chosen among writing staff, often lead writers, in lieu of cast or featured players. Chevy Chase has said that Weekend Update – which he started as anchor in 1975 – paved the way for comedic news shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
Charles Adams Claverie, known by stage names Charlie Hamburger, Charlie Kennedy, and Charles Rocket, was an American actor. He was a cast member on Saturday Night Live, played the villain Nicholas Andre in the film Dumb and Dumber, and played Dave Dennison in Disney's Hocus Pocus.
Saturday Night Live (SNL) is an American late-night live sketch comedy variety show created by Lorne Michaels and developed by Michaels and Dick Ebersol that airs on NBC. The show's premiere was hosted by George Carlin on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title NBC's Saturday Night. The show's comedy sketches, which often parody contemporary American culture and politics, are performed by a large and varying cast of repertory and newer cast members. Each episode is hosted by a celebrity guest, who usually delivers the opening monologue and performs in sketches with the cast, with featured performances by a musical guest. An episode normally begins with a cold open sketch that is usually based on political events and ends with someone breaking character and proclaiming, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!", properly beginning the show.
Jean Doumanian is an American stage, television and film producer.
Gail Matthius is an American actress and comedian. She was a cast member of NBC's Saturday Night Live during its critical and ratings low point at the time, and co-anchored the Weekend Update segment with Charles Rocket in 1981.
Anna F. "Ann" Risley is a retired American actress and comedian. She was a cast member of the TV series Saturday Night Live for the 12 episodes of the 1980–1981 season. These 12 broadcasts were the first episodes after producer Lorne Michaels left the show.
Antonio Rosato was an Italian-Canadian actor and comedian, who appeared in television and films. He was best known as a cast member on both SCTV and Saturday Night Live, and for voicing Luigi in The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World.
Denise Dillon is an American actress and comedian best known for starring as Toby Pedalbee on the HBO comedy Dream On from 1990 to 1996. Dillon was first known for her stage work and was nominated for a Tony Award on Broadway. Other television credits include spending one season as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1980 to 1981 and co-starring on the Fox sitcom Women in Prison. She subsequently continued to act in theater and both teaches and performs improv comedy.
The thirty-third season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between September 29, 2007, and May 17, 2008. Due to the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike, there were only 12 episodes produced in this season instead of the usual 20, making this the shortest season in the series run and beating out both the sixth (1980–1981) season and the thirteenth (1987–1988) season, which had thirteen episodes each and were also cut short due to WGA strikes. This is also the only season in SNL history not to have a new Christmas episode, since the WGA strike spanned from November 2007 to February 2008.
The eleventh season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between November 9, 1985, and May 24, 1986.
The tenth season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between October 6, 1984, and April 13, 1985. This was the only season to feature renowned comedians Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest as cast members, and became known as the "All-Star" cast season. Only 17 episodes were produced due to a writers' strike and budget constraints. This was the final season of the Ebersol-run era.
The ninth season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between October 8, 1983, and May 12, 1984.
The eighth season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between September 25, 1982, and May 14, 1983.
The seventh season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between October 3, 1981, and May 22, 1982. It was the first full season produced by Dick Ebersol.
The fifth season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between October 13, 1979, and May 24, 1980.
The fourth season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between October 7, 1978, and May 26, 1979.
The first season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC from October 11, 1975, to July 31, 1976. The show served as a vehicle that launched to stardom the careers of a number of major comedians and actors, including Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Dan Aykroyd.
"A Limo for a Lame-O" is a commentary delivered by Al Franken during Weekend Update on the May 10, 1980, episode of Saturday Night Live (SNL). Using the framework of his own desire to have a limousine drive him to and from his job at NBC, the network which broadcasts the program, Franken attacked network president Fred Silverman for NBC's poor showing in the Nielsen ratings during his tenure. It has been called "one of the meanest acts of character assassination in—well, the history of mean acts of character assassination."
The long-running American late-night sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) first premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, and its fiftieth and most recent season premiered on September 28, 2024. Created by Lorne Michaels, who is the original and current showrunner, its history has been shaped by its large and constantly-changing cast of performers, as well as changes in its writing staff from year to year. It has played a prominent role in American popular culture and television since its inception, and changing attitudes towards cultural diversity have been evident particularly in its recent history.