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'Thursday Night Live' - predicting the future?

posted 15 years ago by knawdas
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I got the "Early Years" boxed set today, and I watched the 'Thursday Night Live' episode; and I was shocked to see that it had aired in September of 1980, because I was *certain* that this was meant as a spoof on SNL's 1980 season. (The SCTV episode aired a month before SNL's season premiere, in fact.)

That sketch eerily predicts the future. Of course, the references to 70's SNL are obvious (random pot humor, the black cast member playing a female maid, the alternating between "Thursday Night" and "Thursday Night Live", references to Gilda Radner, Brian Doyle Murray and Alan Zweibel, putting a caption under an audience member). But, it is also damn near what SNL became.

* A large cast of complete unknowns (the 1980 cast of SNL nearly doubled in size over time, adding more and more totally unfamiliar faces)
* Completely forced drug humor, which not only seems like a reference to "SNL '80" but also to "Fridays" and their infamous dinner sketch (which I don't think had aired yet either!)
* A joke-free cold opening with a very random and forced "Live from..." ending
* An unrecognizable host (the audience doesn't recognize Earl Camembert, just as SNL audiences didn't know who Malcolm McDowell or Ray Sharkey were - at that time, no big name was willing to host a dying show.)
* An overacting castmember - no one on "SNL '80" ever reached Robin Duke's performance in this sketch, but Ann Risley came damn close in the very first episode.
* A much too cheery female castmember doing a walk-on during the monologue - again, the season premiere of SNL '80. It does actually seem like Andrea is doing a spoof of Denny Dillon's performance in that monologue.
* The monologue being interrupted by a voice from the control booth, which, until I saw the airdate, I took as a reference to Sally Kellerman's monologue
* Forced edginess, to the point of bleeped-out bad language (SNL '80 memorably overused the phrase "hum job" in a sketch, and of course, both Prince and Charles Rocket added the f-word to SNL's vocabulary)

Obviously, there's a lot of irony in the fact that both Robin Duke and Tony Rosato would move to SNL before the end of its 1980-81 season, and that SCTV absentee Catherine O'Hara would also be hired (but immediately quit)!

[–] ebm83 15 years ago

I would love to be able to make this comparison, but it's next to impossible given the sheer unavailability of the 1980 SNL season. I have only seen the Jamie Lee Curtis episode, and even that was probably missing a couple of sketches, as this was how NBC tended to air the classic episodes a few years ago in the late Saturday/early Sunday timeslot. At least in the part of the country where I'm living, they no longer show classic episodes. The 70s seasons have been coming out on DVD, but people have already assumed that releasing the 1980-81 season would be a losing proposition. This seems entirely plausible: sketch comedies ranging from SCTV to MAD TV tend not to sell in great numbers. Hence a complete Season Three of SCTV or even Season Two of MAD TV being planned for release, then scrapped.

This is a shame, because I actually liked a lot of the Jamie Lee Curtis episode. In particular, a sketch (actually a filmed piece) about Gilbert Gottfried trying to become a star was actually really cool. Maybe my enjoying that episode had more to do with a general nostalgia for (obsession with) the early 80s than the quality of the jokes -- it's just about the ambiance sometimes.

However, if I could choose only 80s season to be released on DVD, I would probably go with 1984-85. I was able to see some of these episodes, and it was a very unique season, un-SNL-like in many ways. Sketches like "The Joe Franklin Show" were like a more conventional version of SCTV's parodies of old-style showbiz. Christopher Guest's Spanish ventriloquist character, who was like a hilariously low-key version of Senor Wences, was worthy of SCTV.