Future Is Now For Snl, Michaels
If things go even remotely well, after 11:30 p.m. this Saturday the words “Lorne Michaels” will cease to be the central focus of stories about “Saturday Night Live,” and no one will be happier about it than Lorne Michaels.
That certainly has not been the case since the show derailed itself last season and was nearly consumed in a blaze of negative reviews. NBC’s West Coast executives eventually joined in the chorus (maybe a bit too eagerly), and pointed questions finally got aimed at the guy who had hired the performers, writers and producers: executive producer Lorne Michaels.
The sheer volume and intensity of press coverage and what Michaels regards as its personal nature shook him. Yet, Michaels acknowledges serious problems last year. The failure to develop a single new comic character last season, he told reporters last week with typical understatement, is evidence of “a cast and writing staff that were not in synch.”
The cast also had ballooned beyond workable size, partly because of Michaels’ almost pathological aversion to firing people and partly because some performers stayed with the show far longer than the average tour of duty.
“It’s my fault,” Michaels said, that the cast didn’t change as much or as fast as it should have, but there is change aplenty coming.
Six new performers will join five returning cast members on the show, but even that figure is a little misleading. Two of those returning, Norm MacDonald and David Spade, will be doing their own features.
MacDonald will continue to anchor Weekend Update, for which he was widely praised last season. (Former “SNL” producer Jim Downey will return just to produce the segment.) Spade will do a weekly feature tentatively titled Spade in America, which sounds like but probably isn’t an expose of pet sterilization abuses.
Past experience suggests that neither MacDonald nor Spade will do much beyond their own regular features, which makes the ratio of new-to-returning sketch players six to three. The new bunch includes standups Darrell Hammond and Jim Breuer, Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri from L.A.’s Groundlings and David Koechner and Nancy Walls from Second City in Chicago. They join Mark McKinney, Molly Shannon and Tim Meadows.
The additions were selected from hundreds of people Michaels and NBC staffers saw at clubs in Toronto, Chicago, New York and L.A., in live auditions and interviews and on countless videotapes. The goal, Michaels said, was to end up with people who could perform live, work well with writers and create characters. Ideally there should be little overlap in the performers’ comedic tone, style and look.
The new blood already has made a difference, he said. “You can sense it here now. When the show’s the biggest thing in their lives and when nothing matters but the show, it’s a different quality of experience - and other euphemisms for ‘it’s really important and they want it to work’.”