Wasn't That Special: 50 Years of SNL Podcast

Any viewer of Season 26 of Saturday Night Live may alternate between loving it or hating it based on the episode or even the sketch they are watching. This, of course, happens in every season - there are high and low points to every year. But Season 26 can be sliced into many halves, each of which appear to be running away from each other.

There are, for…

When Saturday Night Live celebrated its 15th anniversary in 1989, it was the first time the show could stop, take a breath, and brag about its accomplishments. After the fifth season, it looked as if the show was headed for certain cancelation. After the tenth season, SNL was still on uneven footing, recycling its entire cast for Season Eleven.

But after Season Fifteen, it appeared the show had finally hit its stride. And even after some rough years in seasons 19 and 20, by Season 25 it was clear this was a show that wasn’t going anywhere.

So before the 1999-2000 season started, viewers got a three-hour retrospective of the show’s first quarter century, replete with sketches from each five-year segment of the show’s history. On this week’s free podcast, we run down all the bits and segments that ran during the show, then, as we did with the fifteenth anniversary show, we unveil our top five favorite sketches and episodes from the previous ten years.

Enjoy this complimentary episode, and if you want to know more about each and every season of SNL, please join us by becoming a paid subscriber. You now have a quarter-century of material to get through, so it’s well worth your time.

Who we choose as the greatest Saturday Night Live cast member is still up in the air, but as we enter the 25th year of the show, it is clear that no cast member has been as dominant for as long as Will Ferrell. In 1999-2000, Ferrell began his fifth year on the show, rescuing from near-cancelation after Season 20, and he only appears to be getting strong…

There are celebrity cameos on Saturday Night Live, and then there is the cameo that occurred on the show on May 8 of 1999, which may have been the most surprising of all. When a dark-haired woman appeared in the middle of a sketch about Bill Clinton’s activities after he left the White House, the audience engaged in subdued applause, as it seems they co…

Saturday Night Live has always been dependent in some ways on the cultural and political events surrounding the show, but never was that more true than in Season 23. Midway through the season, the show roared to life with news that President Bill Clinton had engaged in an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The show’s writers took every oppor…

Do you like recurring characters on Saturday Night Live? Do you like seeing those characters over and over again, episode after episode?

Then SNL Season 22 is for you, my friend. If Season 21 was a return to many of the traditional devices that made SNL work in past years (recurring characters, celebrity impressions, commercials), then Season 22 is a dou…

After the disastrous Season 20, there is no way Saturday Night Live could return to its former glory, is there?

Is there?

As it turns out, there was a way. The show’s regeneration was found in a group of former Groundlings, most notably an unknown Irvine, California-based comedian named John William Ferrell.

In Season 21, Ferrell joined the SNL cast with C…

Remember Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s? Chris Farley! Adam Sandler! David Spade! How could it miss?

Well, Season 20 is how it could miss.

Beset by competing personal agendas, terrible press, and a plagiarism scandal, the show was ripped apart in 1994 and 1995, with all the behind-the-scenes drama affecting what was on the screen.

New cast member Janeane Garofalo, effectively hired as a replacement for the departing Julia Sweeney, immediately (and not without cause) began complaining to the media about treatment of women and gays, objecting to the crude humor she was seeing being written. Meanwhile, the press started hammering the show, leading to a famous New York Magazine piece in March 1995 that shredded the show’s disengaged cast and writers, many of whom were already looking forward to their careers in Hollywood (Sandler’s Billy Madison and Farley and Spade’s Tommy Boy came out during the season.)

Then, near the end of the season, the show suffered a plagiarism scandal when minor cast member Jay Mohr was caught lifting a full bit from a local Greenwich Village comedian and submitting it as his own sketch. The bit made it to the air and Mohr lied to producer Lorne Michaels about having stolen it. Nonetheless, the show had to settle with the comedian out of court for having stolen his act.

So what went wrong on-screen? For one, the show tried to break the mold, dismissing much of the formula that made it popular in the first place. Gone are the lovable recurring characters and catchphrases. No one on the cast can be bothered to even try a plausible celebrity impression. The hosts this season (George Foreman, Deion Sanders) are often abysmal.

In fact, the show was so bad, both Sandler and Farley are fired by network executives at the end of the season. The final sketch of the season serves as a metaphor for what happens on the show, with the blood-soaked duo throwing themselves into a polar bear pit to be mauled to death.

However, the show did feature a number of rays of light that portend well for the future. Norm Macdonald took over the Weekend Update desk, injecting it with a wickedness that it had been missing throughout the Kevin Nealon years. And midway through the season, after Garofalo left the show, new cast member Molly Shannon immediately lit up the screen, clearly caring for her performances in a way other cast members had ceased to.

While it was a terrible season, the worst years often make for the best podcasts, so we cover all this tumult in this week’s show. This one is a free show, so have a listen and please subscribe if you like what you hear!

For the intro to the Season Nineteen episode of Wasn’t That Special, we turn to a famous video of former Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi:

Indeed, Coach Lombardi. What the hell is going on at SNL?

For one, we know what isn’t going on. Dana Carvey left the show midway through last season, leaving a gaping hole in the cast. And with NBC needing t…

During Season 18 of Saturday Night Live, it is clear the classic run that began in Season 12 with the likes of Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, and others is gone. Halfway through the season, Carvey departs, leaving only Myers, Hartman, and Kevin Nealon from the late-1980’s glory years. And Myers missed a chunk of shows at the beg…