Sabin wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2024 1:51 pm
SCTV is a big blind spot for me. The sense I got is that it was the most respected and creative late night comedy show in contrast to the more boisterous SNL of the late 70's and the downfall early 80's.
On the possibility you're interested, an "it's a bit more complicated than that" short history.
No show was ever considered more cool/creative than Saturday Night Live during those late 70s years. It arrived as NBC Saturday Night in Fall 1975 (only got relabeled Saturday Night Live because everyone kept calling it that; "SNL" didn't come along till well past the initial heyday). It didn't catch on immediately; it wasn't till after the new year that suddenly you found all your friends were watching it. The show initially had a lot of variety show filler -- skits by the Muppets, films by Albert Brooks. But it quickly became apparent the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and the often outrageous sketches, were the selling point of the show. This was the first instance of the counter-culture taking over a TV show on its own terms; no "grown-up" sanding off the edges of the humor.
The response was enormous. The show swept the Emmys in 1976 (they were held in Spring, then), and the by-late-night-standards ratings soared. For the remainder of the decade, the show was the original must-see-TV, especially for the still-young boomers. As someone very much in that demo, I can tell you that, no matter where you were/what you were doing on Saturday night, when 11:30 rolled around, you found a way to get to someone's apartment to watch the show. Parties were interrupted as everyone gathered around the TV set -- something I'd never seen before, and haven't seen since.
Sometime around 1978/79, SCTV appeared. It wasn't a network show, and it didn't have a desirable time-slot -- in NY, it ran on local channel 9, at 1AM...right after Saturday Night Live. Because we were young/night owls, many of us started staying with the show after Belushi and gang signed off. The show seemed cheaper/more raggedy at first -- though the talent of people like John Candy jumped out at you.
Two things happened to up SCTV's rep: it finally got a network slot (NBC) -- still not prime (12:30 AM Friday night-into-Saturday), but with far more visibility. And, over at Lorne Michaels' fief, the original cast departed -- first Belushi and Aykroyd, then the whole gang. That show still maintained an audience -- and made a huge star of Eddie Murphy -- but much of the rest of the cast was viewed as lackluster, and the devotional quality the show had had began to gradually fade.
Meantime, SCTV hit its stride. It did sketches that were far more esoteric than anything Saturday Night Live had attempted -- The Network Battle of the PBS Stars; (Martin Short as) Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs Elysees; The Bowery Boys in the Band -- as well as cross-genre stuff, like The Andy Griffin Show, which re-imagined Mayberry with Merv Griffin in the Sheriff Andy role; or Woody Allen/Gregory Peck auditioning for the role of Travis Bickle. They also used ambitious, lunatic framing devices around the sketches: one week, it was SCTV fixing the Emmys so they won every category; in another, it parodied The Godfather, with station Manger Guy Caballero (Flaherty) as the Don, dealing lethally with rival cable companies.
It was during these years that SCTV picked up its reputation as the cooler, more creative show. It was also far more of a niche item: it had devoted watchers (including me), but never did much in the ratings, and was not long after replaced by Friday Night Videos, which well outperformed it. The show moved over to Cinemax -- the first instance of a network show moving to cable -- at which point I (cable-less) lost touch.
You definitely should look for some samples of their work, if only to understand why so many of us have so much affection for the performers who came out of the show.
