Whatever its origins, and they’re complicated and debatable, “Saturday Night Live” was “a lone pioneer staking out virgin territory,” determined to be “television’s antidote to television.”
So said James A. Miller and Tom Shales in their history of this cheeky, groundbreaking show. Their point is nicely illustrated in “Live from New York: The First Five Years of `Saturday Night Live'” (8 p.m. Sunday, WMAQ-Ch. 5), Kenneth Bowser’s informative, necessarily nostalgic look at a program boasting such irreverent delight and such immeasurable influence on American comedy.
This is not the kind of sentimental trip back so typical of TV retrospectives, the sort of thing in full evidence in the recent love fest to “Happy Days.” This review of the show’s first five years (October 1975, to May 1980) — the days of Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin and Bill Murray — is something of an exploratory documentary, replete with interviews of the survivors as well as plentiful clips. As welcome as it is, the two-hour salute has its shortcomings. The interview segments are typically TV brief, more often bringing up provocative points and ending them with a quick, one-line comment.
In a cryptic note on the show’s live-and-let-live attitude toward its participants’ drug use, for example, producer Lorne Michaels, its longtime guru, notes only “the value system turned out to be wrong.”
Chase, Aykroyd, Newman and Morris all participate, but Murray and Curtin don’t. There’s too little of Steve Martin (almost a regular), too much of Penny Marshall (a minimal participant) and only one tiny glimpse of the late Madeleine Kahn, another seminal guest. There’s no mention at all of the Muppets.
But Bowser’s selections are from the more obscure, less celebrated skits, allowing only quick nods at such familiar routines as the Coneheads, the Bees, the Samurai and the “cheezborger” diner. A lot of these clips, in fact, help illustrate his excellent points about the varying strengths of the different players and about the free rein Michaels allowed the women, including the show’s women writers, interviewed plentifully here.
Newman, for example, one of the least celebrated of the originals, shined in one-time-only caricatures: She deliberately avoided, we’re told, the ongoing shtick so typical of the rest of the cast. Bowser also does a superb job setting the stage and exploring the show’s revolutionary contributions, from its return to live broadcasting, downright atavistic at the tape-heavy time, to its Baby Boomer zeitgeist, its belated effort to do for television what movies of the late ’60s did for Hollywood: confound the aging, stuffed-shirt execs, and turn things over to “the kids.”
The kids were all right. Perhaps the best aspect of the documentary is its sly success at demonstrating this is not a case in which our memories are better than the reality.
Even brief excerpts of “the wild and crazy guys” or Radner jumping up and down on her bed as a pre-adolescent urchin bring back laughter and, as with almost any airing of Belushi, a few bittersweet tears. (He was not only hysterical, but he brought a Chicago sensibility to a nationwide audience, a veritable Nelson Algren of humor.)
They were “the Beatles of comedy,” cavorting in “a huge playpen,” according to this retrospective, and in that golden era, they owned their medium.
