33anda3rd wrote:The SNL that's best is the SNL you grew up on. Ask someone in their early 30s, they'll endlessly praise the Will Ferrell/Molly Shannon/Cheri Oteri/Chris Parnell/Chris Kattan years. Ask someone 10 years older and it's the Farley/Sandler/Spade/Rock frat boy fart-joke SNL that was best. Mid-late 40s and it was the Eddie Murphy/Joe Piscopo years. And so on.
Early 30's here and the Farley/sandler/meyers/carvey/nealon/Hartman etc were the golden age of snl IMO....the next wave wasn't bad but ferrel propped them all up IMO
Same. In part because those guys were sort of perfect for adolescents, though I still think they're genuinely funny.
Also the Ferrell era they ground things into the dirt. Those years also suffered from recovering from some really lean Koechner/Breuer years.
I was a big SNL nerd for years. Somehow I was allowed to watch SNL starting when I was 5 or so. I remember Murray, Ackroyd, and Steve Martin's guest appearances pretty well. Most of it was obviously over my head, but I remember Martin especially. Probably because his stuff was so weird yet broad and I remember singing King Tut a lot and doing the Wild and Crazy Guys bit which in retrospect is amazingly inappropriate.
Oddly I have no memory of the Jean Doumanian season which was considered infamously lame. I might have some memory of what Murphy and Piscopo did that season. The year after that when Dick Ebersol took over from Doumanian, I remember it pretty well. I remember Tim Kazurinksy and Mary Gross both having pretty good bits on the news. It's strange, but Julia Louis Dreyfus was completely unmemorable other than she was always "the wife" or "the girl" in the sketch. Probably didn't have anything good written for her. Piscopo kind of became a joke after his tenure, but my recollection is that he and Murphy were pretty great together and of course Murphy was the best part. Hard not to like all his stuff, which I don't think needs listing. Best part of his career, IMO. Even over his standup.
My favorite season was Ebersol's last year producing, with Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Harry Shearer, Chris Guest, Rich Hall, etc.... Much more professional cast as those were already known comedy names. They also did a lot of filmed sketches, which were really good. The synchronized swimming mockumentary, the 60 minutes expose of the novelty company, Rich Hall's shoes with the automatic door pads glued to the bottom. I loved the "I hate it when that happens" sketches Crystal and Guest did where they'd talk about doing inexplicably masochistic things to themselves. "I took a model of the Empire State Building and started shoving it in my ear..." I liked how absurd it was. Also liked Short's Ed Grimley and Jackie Robinson Jr sketches, which I didn't know at the time were characters he originated on SCTV.
The year after that Lorne Michaels came back and hired a bunch of actors - Anthony Michael Hall, and Robert Downey, Randy Quaid. Hartman, Lovitz, and Dennis Miller also came on that year. On paper that looks pretty good, but it was awful.
The group after that is probably my second favorite : Hartman, Miller, Carvey, Lovitz, Nealon, Jan Hooks, and then later Mike Myers. Myers, Hartman and Carvey were all doing great stuff. Myers was another who was at his best on that show, vs his movies. Never understood how Victoria Jackson got or kept her job though.
I liked Sandler, Spade, Schneider, and Farley okay. It seemed to me like that group in particular ran a lot of things into the ground, and Sandler eventually started getting on my nerves. But they had some great sketches too.
I thought it got better with Ferrel, Oteri, Molly Shannon, Kattan, etc.... Always thought Maya Rudolph was really underrated after she came on. Seems like after that they started rotating cast more regularly, with more individuals coming and going, and not doing the big overhauls.
I think I kept up with it until Fey and Amy Poehler left. I liked Hader and Wiig, but was just starting to lose interest in staying up for it. Ten years earlier I would never have thought that could happen. Actually looking at it now, that lines up with the first kid coming along in age, which explains a lot.
A while back I realized that as I advance into my forties, "Saturday Night Live" is keeping me at least partially tethered to pop culture, things that otherwise I'd miss. I don't know if I'd have ever heard of that Gangnam Style dude if I didn't watch SNL. Of course, I do still almost always fast-forward past the musical guests, unless it's a hot babe like that Charli XCX chick.
ghostrunner wrote:I liked Sandler, Spade, Schneider, and Farley okay. It seemed to me like that group in particular ran a lot of things into the ground, and Sandler eventually started getting on my nerves. But they had some great sketches too.
I tend to associate that group with the others you mentioned right before- Nealon, Hartman, Carvey, and Mike Myers. But then, I pretty much stopped watching in 1995.
MrSaigon wrote:
Also the Ferrell era they ground things into the dirt. Those years also suffered from recovering from some really lean Koechner/Breuer years.
"Koechner year", I think you mean And I liked Breuer's Goat Boy and Heavy Metal News guy.
I started watching it 5 years ago, but Mrs Mortimer and I then downloaded / watched the show from 1995 on. The Ferrell / Fallon years I thought were fantastic, not just for the cast but the writers - Adam McKay, Tina Fey.
As far as modern people go, I think Wiig, in terms of "actual talent compared to level of adoration from Lorne Michaels", is the worst long-term cast member the show's ever had and her regular dropping in on an already stuffed cast will hurt the show eventually because they just aren't developing any stars.
ghostrunner wrote:The group after that is probably my second favorite : Hartman, Miller, Carvey, Lovitz, Nealon, Jan Hooks, and then later Mike Myers. Myers, Hartman and Carvey were all doing great stuff. Myers was another who was at his best on that show, vs his movies. Never understood how Victoria Jackson got or kept her job though.
That's my favorite group. It's the group that was on the show when I was in middle school, at that phase where you watch SNL and then go quote it at school with your friends the next day. I don't think I knew a kid who didn't do a Church Lady from like '86-'89.
The Eddie Murphy years were the ones where I was young and would watch SNL knowing that if my mom came in the room she'd turn it off. Like the early Letterman show, it felt dangerous, like something I shouldn't watch because my mom didn't want me to.
I liked the Farley/Sandler/etc. years when I was in high school and they were on. Looking back, they're still hilarious. It was completely sophomoric and infantile (the Denise show where Sandler freaks out over his ex is amazing and a great paradigm for those years) and SNL was such a boys club at that time, but it was so funny. I've liked most of the years, generally, there's only a few in there where I look back and think "SNL sucked that season."
And I liked Breuer's Goat Boy and Heavy Metal News guy.
