I am – Hercules!!

Jason “My Name Is Earl” Lee and the Foo Fighters appear on a new “Saturday Night Live” tonight, but if you’re among those who remember liking the show better when the likes of Joe Piscopo and Dana Carvey – rather than Will Forte and Amy Poehler - dominated it, have we got the show for you.

NBC combats “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy” Sunday night with “Saturday Night Live in the ‘80s: Lost and Found,” a well-researched and interview-packed two-hour look at the post-Bill Murray era that gave us Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Chris Guest, Robert Downey Jr., Joan Cusack, John Lovitz, Phil Hartman and many another pop-culture icon.

The tale of the show’s fall and rise during that decade makes for fascinating storytelling, and it’s fun to see it illustrated with first-person accounts and well-chosen clips.

Featured in new interviews are former cast members Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthias, Denny Dillon, Tim Kazurinsky, Mary Gross, Robin Duke, Gary Kroeger, Jim Belushi, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Jon Lovitz, Victoria Jackson, Terry Sweeney, Nora Dunn, Kevin Nealon, Carvey and Piscopo (who has somehow grown to resemble Hello Deli proprietor Rupert Gee), frequent host Danny DeVito, writers Lorne Michaels, Al Franken, Tom Davis, A. Whitney Brown, Robert Smigel, Conan O’Brien, Don Novello, Andy Breckman, Bob Tischler, Margaret Oberman, Andrew Smith, David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein, manager Bernie Brillstein, producer Dick Ebersol, and talent coordinators Laurie Zaks and Neil Levy.

(Those NOT interviewed, sadly, include the late Charles Rocket, Eddie Murphy, Brian Doyle-Murray, Brad Hall, Rich Hall, Christopher Guest, Dennis Miller, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Jan Hooks, Randy Quaid, Tom Hanks, Ben Stiller and Larry David.)

SNL LOST

“Lost and Found” kicks off with creator Michaels’ decision to depart the hugely successful SNL after five years. In a hilarious 1981 “Weekend Update” clip, Franken deplores both NBC’s “horrendous” decision to replace Michaels with Jean Doumanian, the show’s non-writing talent-booker, and NBC’s subsequent decision to replace Doumanian with Dick Ebersol, a non-writing NBC exec. (Undisclosed in the doc is that writers Franken, Tom Davis and Jim Downey were Michael’s choices to succeed him as SNL showrunners.) “Okay, now, who do they pick to rectify the original error? Someone who knows what he’s doing? Someone like me, Al Franken? No, they picked Dick Ebersol. I know Dick and I can tell you that he doesn’t know dick. Okay, now the show’s going to be a little better. No English-speaking person could do a worse job than Jean.”

Ebersol, relates writer Andy Breckman later in the doc, “was the only guy in the business I ever heard turn to somebody else and say, ‘Was that funny? I just don’t know.’ He would just admit, ‘I don’t know.’”

We’re reminded of how avidly potential cast members clamored for a shot at the start-over SNL, which in its first five years had turned Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray into movie stars. Matthias reveals that one of her auditions lasted eight hours.

We’re reminded that Bill Murray returned to guest-host and appear in horrible sketches during the show’s first post-Michaels season. There’s a clip with him on a couch with Rocket, Risley, Piscopo and the others, talking with them about how much everybody hates the show since he left. “Yeah, I read that stuff,” laments Murray. ‘Saturday Night Live is Saturday Night Dead.’ My favorite, though, is ‘Vile From New York.’”

“Aristocrats” star Gottfried, who provides a lot of memorable commentary, remembers the loathing that greeted the post-Murray era: “It was like if, during the height of Beatlemania, you were going to remove the Beatles and have a whole new group of Beatles.”

Gottfried also laments his season’s poor craftsmanship. Doumanian, he says, “always stuck me as the type of woman who would watch a Marx Brothers movie and go, ‘Well, I like Margaret DuMont. But who are those weird gentlemen running around?’”

We’re reminded that the early Ebersol years, even though they brought back writers like Alan Zweibel and (briefly) Michael O’Donaghue, were plenty lame, with Kazurinsky ad-libbing alongside monkeys and Piscopo discovering endless excuses to drag out his Sinatra impersonation. (Piscopo’s Sinatra stylings appear particularly pathetic when compared to the much more pointed version Phil Hartman would offer on the show a few years down the line.)

Kazurinsky describes Eddie Murphy as a “mensch” and “team player” who, as the show’s star, fought to give more screen-time to his castmates. Kazurinsky also relates that “Dr. Strangelove” screenwriter Terry Southern, who briefly joined the SNL writing staff, had a terrific wet bar in his office, and fabulous cocaine, and kept pitching very odd sketch ideas. Julia Louis-Dreyfus remembers she was still a college junior when she was plucked from Chicago’s Practical Theatre to join the SNL cast. Andy Breckman relates that “Seinfeld” creator Larry David only got on sketch on the air the whole year he wrote for SNL.

“Some people resent that I wasn’t as good as John,” notes Jim Belushi, who followed his movie-star brother onto the show during the Ebersol era. “And my answer to that is, ‘Who was?’”

SNL FOUND

We are reminded that Ebersol’s hiring of more established (and expensive) cast members like Billy Crystal and Martin Short was precipitated by Murphy’s departure. Louis-Dreyfus and Belushi remember being reduced to “second-stringers” with the arrival of Short, Crystal and Christopher Guest. (We learn that Crystal and Guest went to college together.) Crystal reveals he very much wanted to do a second season but “nobody else wanted to come back.” Laurie Zaks, an SNL talent coordinator at the time, said she thought that with the departure of Short, Guest and Crystal, the show really was at an end.

Learn that when auditions were being held for Michaels’ first year back, Nora Dunn was working as a waitress in a restaurant right below the audition hall. (Another fact politely left out of the documentary is that Michaels and Dunn became bedmates around the time she joined the SNL cast.) Franken does a hilarious impression of fellow writer George Meyer melting down backstage.

Michaels’ first season back ended with a sketch about the everyone in the cast getting trapped in a fire, and Michaels choosing to rescue only breakout star Lovitz. “Some fo the cast members were kind of mad about that sketch,” remembers writer Smigel. “The ones who weren’t Jon Lovitz.”

Learn that Michaels’ manager, of all people, had to talk Brandon Tartikoff out of cancelling the show following the troubled Anthony Michael Hall-Terry Sweeney season. Learn that SNL was the first writing job for stand-up comic A. Whitney Brown, apparently one of the few writers on the show who didn’t attend Harvard. Learn that Victoria Jackson does a serviceable Lorne Michaels impression! Learn what Don Novello sounds like when he’s not doing Father Guido Sarducci!

Dana Carvey reveals that the Harvard grads would laugh at him when he mispronounced what they’d written for him. Harvard grad Conan 0’Brien reveals that he and fellow writers Smigel and Bob “Mr. Show” Odenkirk were collectively referred to as “the nerds.”

The doc also does a great job of reminding one how funny Jon Lovitz and Phil Hartman could be, alone or together. Laugh at Lovitz’ scientist trying to explain physics to Hartman’s Peter Graves. Laugh at Lovitz, as Satan, protesting nerdily as he’s about to get tossed out of “The People’s Court.” Laugh again as Lovitz and Tom Hanks man a street corner, utterly incapable of engaging passing young women in conversation. Laugh yet again as Lovitz, as Tonto, debates the merits of fire with Nealon’s Tarzan and Hartman’s Frankenstein.

Missing entirely is any mention of Ben Stiller (who appeared in about a dozen 1989 installments) or Mike Myers (who also joined the cast in ’89). (Curiously, a “Wayne’s World” logo appears behind the interviewees in the final segment, so perhaps it was decided in the editing suite that Myers’ earliest SNL material would be saved for the inevitable third documentary.)

If “Lost and Found” has a weak link (a “Garrett Morris,” if you will), it’s its many intrusive 15- to 35-second clips featuring the show’s many musical guests. The tunes are spliced in to comment on the show’s ever-changing fortunes, but actually feel like padding and slow the doc’s narrative flow. Even so, these not-altogether-unpleasant interludes are a small price to pay for such an otherwise well-constructed document.

9 p.m. Sunday. NBC.

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