Saturday Night Enlivened.

Review by Mike Gange

Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
As told by its Stars, Writers and Guests.
Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller
Little Brown, $36.95, 594 pages

When I was in second year university, in 1975, I was invited to a house party by some of the coolest kids on campus. The place was really hoppin’, with talkative campus athletes and academics, loud music and a fridge full of beer. But at 12:30, everything suddenly stopped. Someone snapped on the TV and we dragged chairs around or sat on the spartan linoleum floor to watch. There was a little opening skit, no credits, no theme music, then somebody on the cast said "Live from New York, its Saturday Night."

My first experience with NBC’s TV show Saturday Night Live mirrors the experience of a whole generation of viewers. We heard about it by word of mouth, and we were blown away by its power, its speed and timing, its comic genius and the way it thumbed its nose at our elders. We had to watch it live, because there were no VCR’s, no replays, and no sneak previews giving us a glimpse of what was to come that week. Part of the attraction of the TV show was how outrageous it was and yet, how cool it was.

In Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live veteran reporters Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller become editors, letting the cast, crew and guest stars who have been involved in the show over its 25 year history candidly tell their stories about how the show came about, how they worked through many all-nighters to finish a comedy sketch, and how the writers and actors collaborated and competed to get their sketches on the air. Their comments illuminate the pressures the performers and writers felt in trying to relentlessly re-invent fresh comedy sketches week after week.

Tom Shales, who has written for a number of news outlets, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Washington Post, and James Andrew Miller, who has also written for various publications and is the author of Running in Place: Inside the Senate, have included thousands of interviews that truly show the successes and creative differences that permeated through the TV show’s history. Shales and Miller have wisely left the musical side of the show to another book and another time. But they don’t shy away from letting those involved with the show share their uncensored feelings. And what tales they tell on each other, including: Chevy Chase was an insufferable egomaniac; John Belushi went from sweet and inventive to bombastic and out of control as his drug use got worse; Chris Farley idolized Belushi so much he taped his eyebrows up to look more like him.

Over the years, the TV show Saturday Night Live had its high and low moments. At its best, it recorded a 36 share, meaning 36 % of the viewers who were watching TV at that moment, were watching Saturday Night Live. It has won nearly 20 Emmy Awards and some of its skits have become comedy classics. But in some years, as ratings plunged and that once irreverent humor gave way to immature stunts and gross out gags, NBC programming executives considered cancelling the show, although they had nothing else to replace it with.

This book, Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live has its high and low moments too, and they mostly parallel the times the show was at its best and worst. That unevenness of story telling is something one expects award winning writers, like Shales and Miller, to be able to fix. On the whole, it’s entertaining gossip, but a comedy TV show that redefined the word "cool" deserves more serious analysis.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.