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The eleventh season of Saturday Night Live started entirely from scratch, save the return of the show’s original creator, Lorne Michaels. With producer Dick Ebersol and big-name cast members like Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest out the door, Michaels brought in a number of Hollywood stars with almost no sketch comedy experience. And their presence was met with a torrent of negative media criticism.

Anthony Michael Hall, Randy Quaid, Joan Cusack, and Robert Downey, Jr. (what ever happened to that guy?) stepped on to SNL from movie screens. Jon Lovitz came to the cast from the Groundlings in Los Angeles. Terry Sweeney was a veteran of New York City drag shows. And Danitra Vance was a cashier at Bloomingdale’s in New York when she found out she got the job.

But perhaps most impactful was the addition of Pittsburgh-area stand-up comic Dennis Miller to the Weekend Update desk. Miller immediately transformed the moribund news break into a lively, entertaining stand-up bit that would serve as the blueprint for generations of news-comedy television shows.

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The other cast members’ lack of sketch chops showed early and often. The very first show, hosted by Madonna, is widely regarded as one of the most tasteless, rotten episodes aired in SNL history, and the critics turned against the show en masse. By the middle of the season, the show was effectively down to four main players - Lovitz, Quaid, Dunn, and Cusack - leading the show to start being in dual hosts, in order to beef up the talent.

Despite the show’s struggles, there are occasional pinholes of light. This is the season Tom Hanks first hosted the show, and demonstrated why he may be the best host in the show’s history. Jon Lovitz featured two characters (Master Thespian and Pathological Liar Tommy Flanagan) he had brought from The Groundlings, and within weeks Americans across the country were yelling “acting!” and “that’s the ticket!”

In fact, the show was so underwhelming for most of the season, Michaels ended the season with a sketch in which the entire cast is trapped in a room that is on fire. (He pulls Lovitz, by then the star of the show, out of the room, but leaves the rest of the cast.) The sketch is meant to be a cliffhanger; for viewers, it was more likely cathartic.

We discuss all these topics and much more on this week’s episode of “Wasn’t That Special.” Please subscribe and join us for a trip through every year of SNL. Listening to the podcast will make you an SNL expert, and most likely make you twice as attractive…that’s the ticket!

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