“I think … it would go something … like this …”
I am – Hercules!!
True story. “Saturday Night Live” was actually called “NBC’s Saturday Night” during its first season because ABC and Howard Cosell had a live primetime variety show that year (starring Cosell and Bill Murray, among others) titled “Saturday Night Live.”
“NBC’s Saturday Night” was the brainchild of 30-year-old writer-producer Lorne Michaels, a Canadian television comedian and “Monty Python” devotee who wrote on (but apparently hated) “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” during the early 1970s. But “Saturday Night” was also a direct descendant of Chicago’s Second City and the brilliant National Lampoon Radio Hour, which featured such core future “SNL” writer-performers as John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Michael O’Donoghue, Gilda Radner, Anne Beatts, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and George Coe.
One can't underestimate the importance, especially, of O'Donoghue to the lasting impact of SNL's initial seasons. Chase and Belushi brought raw charisma, but O'Donoghue shouldered the gravitas and his troubled sensibilities made certain the shows remained memorable and distinctive three decades later.
O’Donoghue, Belushi and Chase starred in the show’s very first sketch, a funny and Pythonish O’Donoghue-authored piece about a vaguely sinister language instructor and his guileless immigrant student.
SNL had many fathers. Go to IMDb and discover that “Saturday Night’s” original working title was “The Albert Brooks Show.” The 28-year-old Brooks, already contemplating the application of his genius to a feature career, declined Michaels’ invitation to serve as the show’s permanent host, but did agree to make the six short films that season, hilarious efforts that ultimately launched the big-screen career that spawned “Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” “Lost in America” and “Defending Your Life.”
“Saturday Night,” when it arrived, looked like little else on American television. It wasn’t as political as “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” or “All in the Family,” but its sensibility was far darker and about a thousand times hipper – the first great TV show for and by the baby-boomers. (Remember that in 1975 good sketch comedy was considered Cher bitching about her mothers-in-law in a launderette, or Mr. Tudball chasing Mrs. Wiggins around the desk on “The Carol Burnett Show.”)
Saturday Night Live: The Complete First Season was the only full season starring Chase, and Chase was, somehow, truly funny in those days. Dan Aykroyd too. And Belushi and O’Donoghue, of course, were never anything less than comedy gods.
Because the 90-minute SNL was always most often syndicated in an hourlong format, much of the material on this set hasn’t been seen in years. Note that the first VHS recorder didn’t hit the market until September 1976, long after SNL’s first season had concluded. Another factor was “Saturday Night” originally alternated in its timeslot with a late-night newsmagazine titled “Weekend,” so it was rarely repeated that first year.
Other anomalies: With 24 episodes, the show’s first season was its longest. It even featured two live first-season episodes broadcast in July, the only new summer episodes in the show’s 31-year history.
Aside from the Brooks shorts, standout components that first year included sequels to “Jaws,” “The Exorcist” and “Citizen Kane,” a composing Beethoven, Belushi’s Samurai (introduced not with Buck Henry but with Richard Pryor!), the famous Chase-Pryor word-association test, Gerald Ford, Joe Cocker, Tom Snyder, Vito Corleone in therapy, the very first “Mr. Bill” short, the Franken & Davis “Pong” sketches, “Show Us Your Guns,” the Killer Bees, the Lifer Follies, Dueling Brandos, The Untouchables, the Norman Bates School of Motel Management, the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76, The Claudine Longet Ski Invitational, Lorne’s check payable to The Beatles, Woodword and Bernstein’s “The Final Days,” and the cancellation of “Star Trek.”
One extra on the set is the “Tomorrow Show” segment that introduced Michaels and his young cast to an unsuspecting America. A 90-minute “Tomorrow” special, which mostly focused on Tom Snyder’s interview with Jerry Lewis, ran in what we now know as SNL timeslot the week before “Saturday Night” premiered. (Prior to SNL, NBC used that slot for 90-minute “Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” repeats.)
Another keen extra is a reel of the original cast’s auditions.
24: The Complete Fifth Season was the first season of “24” to garner the best-drama Emmy.
It would be hard for any show to top the highs of “24’s” first season, but that season hit a sizeable lull in its latter half. The fifth season, by contrast, was the series’ most consistently artful and suspenseful to date, and built beautifully on the four seasons that preceded it. It is my favorite of the five.
One of the plottiest on the tube, this series is particularly susceptible to spoilers, so I’ll only say that the season is packed solid with twists, surprises and shockers.
The season was also almost overloaded with great characters: familiar ones like Jack, Palmer, Logan, Chloe, Edgar, Aaron, Tony, Michelle, Bill, Audrey, Kim (yep, Kim came back!), Mike, Curtis, Wayne, Logan, Ryan and Heller; and great new ones like Lynn McGill (Sean Astin), Barry Landes (C. Thomas Howell), Christopher Henderson (Peter Weller) and Martha Logan (Jean Smart).
Extras include four featurettes, 23 extended or deleted scenes, a 100th episode reel, and commentaries on 12 episodes by the likes of Kiefer Sutherland, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jean Smart, Greg Itzin, Julian Sands and Jude Ciccollela.
Before it became Paramount’s biggest movie franchise, Mission: Impossible was a highly addictive Cold War adventure hourlong about a supersecret squad of black ops agents who foil with elaborate ruses high-level mobsters and Iron Curtain communists. The series, which ran from 1966 to 1973, exists in one of those “Brazil” universes; the Impossible Missions Force hadn’t quite figured out microcassette recorders and VCRs, but employed technology that still doesn’t exist in 2006 (like tiny telescopes that can enhance the resolution of videotape images - and those famous pull-off masks that can make anyone look exactly like anyone else).
Just don’t be expecting “Good morning, Mr. Phelps” on any of those self-destructing audio tapes. Jim Phelps didn’t arrive to lead the IMF until season two; it was Daniel Briggs (“Law & Order” mainstay Steven Hill) who led the fight against the syndicate that first season.
It’s eerily appropriate that J.J. Abrams wound up directing the third “Impossible” movie, since no other series more resembles “Alias.”
If you’ve never heard of Happy Tree Friends, you are not alone. The series, apparently about cute cartoon woodland creatures subjected to horrifying deaths, has aired in the middle of the night on a newish cable/satellite channel called G4. It has been compared to “The Simpsons’” Itchy and Scratchy.
If you want to roll the dice, the single disc selling for $14.99 runs just 2.5 hours and contains commentary, storyboards and a behind-the-scenes featurette.
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