Splitsider

One interesting aspect about reruns of Saturday Night Live is how they’re sometimes very different than what went over the air live during the original airing. The piecemeal nature of the show makes it easy to remove an entire segment from the show rundown if necessary, and the producers can easily fill time using a pre-taped bit, material that originally aired during another show or even debut a previously unaired segment. This practice dates back to the early years of the show and continues today. Some segments have been restored for syndication, the DVD and online streaming versions.  Reruns of shows after Lorne Michaels’ 1985 return have an increased amount [...]

Forget Pet Rocks and bell bottoms. If you want evidence the seventies were the strangest decade in American history, feast your eyes on The Gong Show, the brief-but-oh-so-memorable game show that aired from 1976 through 1980, in a daytime version on NBC and nighttime version in syndication. Even taking account Community, Conan, and all the other “off-beat” shows currently on TV, it still stands as among the strangest television programs of all time. And I would argue, among the funniest.

The Gong Show was initially dreamed up by mega-successful game show producer Chuck Barris (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game) as a straightforward talent competition. But, the story goes, [...]

On September 22, 1862, the men who pulled the levers of war and government assembled at the White House for a Cabinet meeting. The members arrived impatient and preoccupied with their own enormous burdens in service to the war and like 90% of people in meetings everywhere, they were anxious to get the whole thing over with. But they came anyway out of respect for the dignity of their positions expecting to conduct some business worthy of their time. Abraham Lincoln cast his eyes upon these powerful men, gathered at his word in this moment of great crisis, and he read to them a profane story about the destruction of a wax [...]

TV is usually a tightly-controlled, highly-regulated corporate appendage, except during the loose, early days of a new network, when everybody involved is still trying to find both and audience and an identity, and are left largely or somewhat to their own devices, to experiment on air, to throw stuff to the wall and see what sticks. For example, Nickelodeon. Now a perpetual glitter lip gloss commercial, the channel began in the late ‘70s as an extension of, and at first consisted primarily of, an Ohio-based puppet show called Pinwheel, along with a lot of weird European cartoons and Canadian short films.

And then there’s Comedy Central, the comedy nerd’s [...]

It's odd to think, at a time when South Park has been renewed for twenty seasons and Cartoon Network dedicates half of its schedule to adult themed programming, that for a long time, cartoons were seen as being strictly for kids, following the logic that bright colors and ink and paint appeal only to unformed minds.

It wasn't always this way: early cartoons like Betty Boop were clearly designed for adults, and the directors and animators working at Termite Terrace claim they wrote and produced the Looney Tunes simply for their own amusement. Even in the early years of television, shows like The Flintstones dealt with adult themes like [...]

The 1980s were defined by myriad phenomena, and perhaps just below the end of the Cold War in terms of cultural relevance was the growth in popularity of group aerobic exercise. The Richard Simmons Show premiered in 1980; the next year brought Physical by Olivia Newton-John.  Jane Fonda’s first video workout tape was released in 1982, and John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis starred in the film Perfect three years later.

But on April 24, 1987, the ultimate merger of mass media and body mass reduction took place when at least one television station in the United States (KTLA in Los Angeles, as evidenced by the clip above) [...]

16 years ago last Friday, comedian Charlie Barnett's life was cut tragically short, the ends to a drug and doubt-fueled means that had reduced one of the most naturally gifted performers of a generation to an AIDS-stricken, debt-ridden smack addict.

Yet in spite of the sordid details of his demise, it is his Barnett's talent, fearlessness, and generosity — to his audience, his disciples, and his craft — which carry his legacy.

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It took the Village to raise Charlie Barnett.

Born in 1954 to an alcoholic mother and mentally ill father, he lived with his grandmother in the coal mining town of Bluefield, West Virginia [...]

In 1979, ABC ordered an SNL show of its own. No variation; a straight copy. Same live format. Same type of cast. Musical guests. Fake news. Like Lorne Michaels before them, producers John Moffitt and Bill Lee scoured clubs and improv groups for talent. (Moffitt wasn't new to the process: he'd been Lorne's first choice in 1975 to direct SNL, which Moffitt turned down.) On April 11, 1980, Moffitt and Lee unveiled their LA version: Fridays. Even the name was abbreviated theft.

Fridays faced numerous obstacles. Most of SNL's original cast was still on the air, prompting negative comparisons. Critics were unkind, to the degree they gave Fridays any [...]

On December 19, 1984, after devoting entire episodes to a bar mitzvah and an intermediate school's election night, and before their episodes from an airplane and a hotel room, Late Night with David Letterman presented Christmas with the Lettermans, a one hour send-up of every single cheesy Christmas special that had ever run on television. The special, which ran unsuspectingly on a Wednesday during Letterman's usual 12:35am time slot, won Late Night the Emmy for outstanding writing in a variety or music program for the second year in a row.

The special began with NBC's classic "brought to you in living color" identification that welcomed viewers to countless peacock [...]

Meet The Daily Show's newest contributor, This American Life's Sarah Vowell. She joins the show just in time to school us about the most important holiday coming up, Evacuation Day. It's essential viewing for anyone who's sick of seeing those "Mayflower-cruising, Jesus freak corn rustlers" get all the credit this time of year. Pilgrims have had a free ride in the history books for too long, with their dumb buckled hats and refusal to share the spotlight with anyone. More like PIG-grims, right? Right!

In November 1955, Moe Howard and Larry Fine were prepared to disband the most famous comedy troupe in U.S. history. It’s hard to blame them. The Three Stooges were still reeling from the surprise death of longtime partner Curly Howard, a fan favorite who passed on three years earlier after suffering a nasty cerebral hemorrhage. Then Moe’s brother Shemp — a founding member of the group who had left but rejoined after Curly’s health deteriorated — collapsed on a Los Angeles sidewalk after a night at the fights and died of a massive heart attack. Devastated by the loss of their comrades and skeptical they could find another collaborator with [...]

According to the internet, television network executives are a bunch of deplorable scumbags. They are wretched slime, only existing to please the philistines that situate themselves in the middle of America that find Tim Allen and Jon Cryer funny. They purchase Monets and use them as target practice. They are only experts at bringing joy to the deserving loud minority that appreciate high brow things such as irony, only to take it away and watch as Tumblrs drown in their tears. Executives get their assistants to make screengrabs of the most depressing tweets about a show's cancellation to show their children on Christmas. After tousling their kids' hair they [...]

1. Fifty-nine years ago yesterday, 44 million people watched “Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” better known as, The Episode of I Love Lucy Where Lucy Has Little Ricky. Meaning, in 1953, nearly 72% of American households that owned a TV were tuned in to Lucy that night (the U.S. population at the time was around 160 million). To put that number into perspective: the M*A*S*H finale, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” is the highest rated non-Super Bowl program of all-time, with over 50 million viewers. But the percentage of households that watched the episode was "just" 60.2%. Even last year’s Super Bowl, the most watched in American history with [...]

There is a book I love and it is not clear to me what the name is, but I think it is just Saturday Night Live. If you’re looking for it, you should search for Saturday Night Live, Host: Francisco Franco or maybe Saturday Night Live Franco but not James Franco edited by Anne Beatts and John Head Avon Books 1977 it is green? In any case, you should look for it!

With the (great) oral history of SNL by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller and with all the early seasons available to stream on Netflix and Hulu, it is maybe a little easier now to see what [...]