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In Season Eleven, Lorne Michaels tried something new with Saturday Night Live: he brought in a cast full of movie stars who hadn’t previously performed sketch comedy. And the results showed.

Michaels famously ended the season with a sketch that trapped the cast and writers in a burning room, with only Jon Lovitz escaping the fire. As Season Twelve begins…

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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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In this episode, available for free to all listeners, we discuss Season Ten, the season of Saturday Night Live in which Executive Producer Dick Ebersol brought in a slew of high-priced, proven talent to give the show a boost.

Those new cast members included Billy Crystal, who effectively became Eddie Murphy’s replacement in Season Nine, hosting two of the final five shows and showing up as a special guest in another. Ebersol also brought on Martin Short, who had a suitcase full of plug-and-play recurring characters from his years on SCTV.

Ebersol also mined the previous year’s smash hit movie This Is Spinal Tap for talent, bringing on performer Christopher Guest and former SNL cast member Harry Shearer. As you may recall, Shearer did a mercurial stint on the show in Season Five, where he battled the writers and other cast members. Season Ten turned out to be no different; by episode ten, Shearer had quit the show.

The season relied heavily both on pre-filmed bits and sketches starring recurring characters. Episodes were loaded with sketches featuring Ed Grimley, Joe Franklin, Jackie Rogers, Jr., Fernando, Frankie and Willie, and on and on.

Even with all the new cast members, a handful of performers from the previous season returned: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Gary Kroeger, Mary Gross and Jim Belushi were all back. But if they intended on ascending to the top of the show after the departure of Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, they were mistaken.

The “B-Team,” as they were called, were completely shoved to the side in favor of character bits by Crystal and Short. Finally, in their last season on the show, JLD and Gross developed their first real recurring characters, two unfortunately stereotypical Latinas named Chi Chi and Consuela. They are among the worst recurring characters in SNL history.

Ultimately, this writer’s strike-shortened season ended up being the only year the heavy-hitters performed on the show. Yet because of its recurring characters and reliance on pre-filmed bits, it is often ranked as one of the greatest SNL seasons ever.

But is the product on-screen worth such praise? Listen to find out, and subscribe to hear our recaps of seasons 1-9!

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Replacing Eddie Murphy is no enviable task, but in Season Nine of Saturday Night Live, producer Dick Ebersol attempted to do just that.

Before the season, it was clear that Eddie - now the biggest comedy name in the world - wouldn’t be able to make all the shows. So Ebersol and Murphy struck a deal - Eddie would tape a number of sketches before the seaso…

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In many ways, Season Eight (1982-83) is the natural progression from Season Seven. Eddie Murphy continues to grow, eventually taking over the show to the point at which he actually hosts the show while being a cast member.

(This is almost entirely the result of a mix-up in which Nick Nolte, Murphy’s co-star in 48 Hours was supposed to host but pulled out. Nonetheless, the choice of Murphy to host and the fact that he launched the show by declaring “Live From New York, it’s the Eddie Murphy Show” caused some hurt feelings among the other cast members, specifically Joe Piscopo, who wanted to host the show as his Frank Sinatra character.)

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To take advantage of this deal, which will last until October 16, just click on the special d…

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While an atrocious season of SNL makes for painful viewing, it also happens to make for a fun, lively episode of “Wasn’t That Special.”

This week’s show picks up where the last one left off: Both producer Lorne Michaels and the original cast are gone, with Jean Doumanian taking the reins and picking an entirely new set of cast members.

The show immediatel…

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Season Five was a watershed moment for SNL; at the beginning of the season, the cast said goodbye to original cast members John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and at the end of the season, the remaining founding players left (including Bill Murray, who joined in Season Two.)

On this episode, we discuss what the loss of Aykroyd and Belushi meant for Bill Murray…

In this free episode with Season 17 SNL cast member Siobhan Fallon Hogan, we discuss her time as a cast member, including the prank she played on Michael Jordan, her ability to spot Succession star Kieran Culkin’s talent at age nine, the in-jokes she used to share with Chris Farley, her recurring role on Seinfeld, and the sketch on SNL she refused to do.

Fallon Hogan also discusses her new film Shelter in Solitude, (out October 6), including the challenges of creating a motion picture from beginning to end and what she learned from appearing in blockbusters like Forrest Gump.

Fallon Hogan can be found on Instagram at siobhanfallonhogan.

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To the regular SNL viewer, it appears everything is humming along just fine in Season Four: The entire cast is back, ratings are up, and they are attracting A-list stars like the Rolling Stones to host.

But the behind-the-scenes story is very different. The previous summer, Animal House became a runaway hit, making John Belushi a household name. This not…