‘Saturday Night Live’ Needs Major Overhaul
“Saturday Night Live,” the television institution as well as a potent moneymaker for NBC in its 20 years on the air, needs a creative overhaul that may include everything except the show’s live format and its location in New York City, a top network executive said Tuesday.
The executive, Warren Littlefield, who is the president of NBC Entertainment, said the network had previously asked for “major changes” in the show this season. “Some of that has been accomplished,” Littlefield said Tuesday. “But there are a lot of things that were left undone. We’re having discussions internally and with Lorne Michaels about what we want to do.”
The show has been, in effect, reinvented on at least three occasions. But this time, NBC executives have concluded that the show is indeed gasping and is probably in need of a sense-of-humor transplant.
“We’re having discussions internally and with Lorne Michaels about what we want to do,” Littlefield said. Michaels created the show in 1975, has been its executive producer for most of the last 20 years and remains the show’s central creative force.
Michaels is out of the country on vacation this week and was not taking telephone calls.
It is not a steep ratings decline that is prompting the network to make changes. Indeed, though the show is down to a 7.6 average rating from a high of a 9 rating it averaged in the 1992-93 season, that 7.6 matches the number the show achieved in the 1990-91 season. (Each ratings point equals 954,000 households.)
It is also by far the strongest television attraction on Saturday nights, and it continues to make money for the network. “Saturday Night Live” still has six more original shows to broadcast this season.
Rather, Littlefield said NBC was reacting to what it perceived as a need to shake up the show creatively, before it’s too late.
Those creative problems have often been cited in the last two seasons by critics who have attacked “Saturday Night Live” for losing its satiric edge, for descending into vulgarity substituting for comedy and for being thinner on talent than ever before.
An article this week in New York
magazine did the most thorough job yet of disemboweling the show, saying that “Saturday Night Live” is in a “spiritual funk” and that for every bright spot there is a “plane load of bombs.”
Staff members say that for the first time they can remember, people with standby tickets have been able to get into the show because of empty seats.
Littlefield said Tuesday that there was “no question” that the show needed “sharper writing and a new batch of stars” and that “both those areas are being addressed.”
The timing is critical, he added, because NBC recognized that “we’re at the advent of real competition.” That competition will come as early as next fall, Littlefield said, and it may come from each of the other networks.
“We’re clearly aware,” Littlefield added, “that CBS is developing a soap opera that they will attempt to make as provocative as possible and for which they’ll try to get a lot of attention. Fox has got a multitude of projects for the time period. Late night has to be part of their business plan. And ABC is also considering its options.”
The reason for the increased competition, he said, is partly the changed atmosphere of network television, in which taking risks is simply the order of the day. But it also has to do with the perceived weakness of “Saturday Night Live” and the widespread recognition that there is money to be made if a new show can find a foothold on Saturdays after 11:30 p.m.
But Littlefield asserted that NBC was not panicking. “The one thing that gives us confidence,” he said, “is our feeling that hey, been there, done that. We’ve rebuilt the show before. So our burial is premature. We don’t intend to eliminate the format. We’re not going to stop doing ‘Saturday Night Live.’ That’s ridiculous. But it needs a lot of work.”