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It's the end of an era, and in some ways, perhaps an ignoble one. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd have been replaced by Harry Shearer and a rotating cast of writers as the show's mission seemingly becomes to survive and be perceived as afloat. As with Season 4, we've also hit a point where SNL, for all of its counterculture synergy, is an institution, increasingly tasked with upholding its reputation rather than defining itself. Similarly, this season feels like the last ride for many of the greatest hosts of this era—Buck Henry, Eric Idle, Richard Benjamin—and the last chance for others to pal along with this specific cast—Steve Martin, Elliott Gould. With the exception of Bill Murray, and Harry Shearer, much of the cast would also exit the studio on the season finale, never to return save for nostalgic cameos in anniversary shows.
Nevertheless, how does Season 5 fare against that ticking clock? Here's what I thought!
For my reviews of the preceding season, Season 4, CLICK HERE!
10/13/79: Steve Martin / Blondie (S5 E01)
What better way is there to commence a season of probing uncertainty than with a host who can carry the show as it makes its way through the darkness? Indeed, while the Steve Martin premiere of Season 5 functions rather well, there's a sense that its success is strictly indebted to him being the nucleus holding everything together. It's less "Saturday Night Live" than "Steve Martin and Friends," and while I enjoyed it far more than I was anticipating, I have no greater assurances that we're headed in the direction of stability.
I don't think that it's a bad idea to slot someone like Steve into the premiere slot; he's able to keep things feeling brisk and energetic while the show experiments and works out the finer details of what its deal is. With that being said, its greatest issue is that it remains hard to see what this final season will really look like; if you gut Steve out of proceedings, we're left with a show that feels painfully hollow and unable to hold itself up. The miscellaneous male writers do a fair job of filling in slots throughout this episode, but barring Bill, there's a crucial lack of identity to the show that periodic, serviceable appearances from the likes of Tom Davis or Jim Downey just can't solve. The female cast remains the same as it always was, but we've been shorn of the cerebrality of an Aykroyd or the manic energy of a Belushi; as much as I enjoy Bill, too, one cast member can't carry an entire half of the show no matter how far their abilities exceed. (It's true that Garrett's also there, but the loss of Dan and John doesn't do him any favors with how much the show pigeonholes his utility. Perhaps this imbalance also serves to explain why all but three hosts this season are male.) This premiere explores the idea of integrating writers into proceedings more, but none of them pop so much as merely keeping the show moving, which gives me concerns about what the season will look like without such a dynamic host.
Fortunately, there's still a lot of enjoyment to be had here in spite of those troubling aspects. I'd actually argue that this is on the upper end of Steve's hosting gigs from the original era. For as fractured as the show feels and for as central as Steve is to it, there's a very fun, writerly feel to every piece, whether or not they fully get over. The first proper sketch of the season featuring Steve as a freelance Spanish teacher, for instance, isn't a huge laugh riot, but there's something charming about the endeavor all the same; revealing Steve's intentions of infiltrating random suburban houses to be fueled by a desire to use their showers rather than some darker ulterior motive keeps it charming and almost childlike, a perfect mold for the host at-hand. The Vandals sketch is a bit more quintessentially Steve, casting him as a Roman emperor reacting in outrage to juvenile acts of vandalism from, well, the Vandals; it's another silly concept that works as well as it needs to, thanks to Steve's performance and some sharp little details. (I loved the touch of Steve ordering a young Vandal and his parents killed immediately after telling the Vandal to listen to his parents.)
The best pieces of the night, though, were the Carole King sketch and the 10-to-1. The former is another piece carried in some large part by Steve (surprise!), but it manages to extend its punchline of a vitally-injured Steve screaming for help from Laraine's Carole King—playing "You've Got a Friend" in a delicious bit of dark irony—to fine effect. The latter, meanwhile, is one of those simple little pieces that manages to crawl perfectly into the back of your brain and never leave; if I don't see it as the classic that it allegedly is, Bill and Steve taking turns to ask each other what the hell that thing is they're looking at makes for a simple but effective little comedy routine to close out the night. It's also a fun reminder of the fact that almost every Bill character is secretly just Honker. (Just kidding, I love you ya little knucklehead, now get outta here!)
Obviously, again, this episode doesn't make for a strong proof of concept of how the rest of the season will unravel, and more than anything else, it's a reminder that Steve is a perfect, flexible host. That's all you need sometimes, though, and truly, for what kind of cynical, sad person is the sight of Steve Martin breaking out into a fit of truly silly dancing anything but a dose of pure happiness? It'll be troubling to see how the show progresses as the reins are passed off to hosts who can't anchor the show as confidently, but with SNL approaching dire straits, I'll relish every bit of fun I can get. (Penned 9/14/21)
GRADE: B+.
10/20/79: Eric Idle / Bob Dylan (S5 E02)
Despite the fact that I've walked away from Eric's past three hosting gigs with an overwhelming sense of happiness, I wasn't too thrilled by the prospects of his final hosting stint. For one thing, it's always bittersweet to know that this is the end of the road for his involvement with the show, but for another, the original era of SNL is well past its prime; perhaps most glaringly, Dan's departure means that there's not really another cast member who can tap into Eric's exact wavelength. It's hard to say what I was looking forward to, because while Eric can ensure that the show has at least some overall sense of quality, it feels more like he's offering a boost to an ailing program rather than both sides supporting each other... and indeed, there are some points in this episode where SNL fails to really support him.
Perhaps some of the strange vibes of the episode can also be attributed to the fact that, as the cold open and monologue alluded to, Eric had a fever so severe that Buck Henry was on standby in case he couldn't perform. Eric, a determined host as ever, gamely spins some fun out of it with his delightfully silly monologue, performing a series of physical impressions while strapped to a stretcher, but as his presence in the episode slowly diminishes overtime, the effects of that complication become all the more clear. Perhaps that's also why Harry Shearer makes his debut as a featured player here, nimbly filling in some blanks in the episode and even getting a chance to carry his own sketch. (It's not a very good one, but his manic delivery is on-point—I'm excited to see what he'll bring the rest of this season.)
As for the sketches themselves, it was a strange mix of good and bad, so viciously bipolar that it's hard for me to say which side ultimately wins out in the end. On the plus side, we get some very sharp, Python-esque bits, which is always a delightful perk of Eric's hosting. The shoe store sketch is perhaps one of the finest to come from one of his episodes, casting him as a shoe salesman who exists solely to show off and sell his beloved footwear one shoe at a time; it's a classic double act, with Bill perfectly cast as his flustered, aggravated customer, but it's all of the delightful bits of miscellany (a string of Spanish lasses kiss Bill every time he forwards the conversation, for instance) that make the piece work so wonderfully. "Prince Charles Tells You How to Pick Up Girls!" is far more simplistic, but it certainly strikes the funny bone to watch Bill, Garrett, and Tom Davis snag women with hyperspecific one-liners about boning on the Magna Carta and Irish terrorism.
Unfortunately, this is also an episode that falls apart almost entirely in its second half; the transvestite stripper sketch feels at a loss with its own weak conceit, "Heavy Sarcasm" was too formulaic, and "Ask Elvis" bordered somewhere between cerebral and fully pointless. Andy Kaufman makes a daring effort to save the episode by challenging the women of the audience to a wrestling match, but as fun as it is to watch him relish in the opportunity to become a villain and spar with the audience, this ultimately isn't an act that speaks to me as much within his oeuvre. The episode's Bob Dylan performances don't do much to sweeten the deal, either—I respect the artistry, but packing in three sleepy, folksy tunes doesn't do a comedy show any favors.
No matter which way you look at it, this is definitely the worst of Eric's four episodes, even if it's not all that bad. This is an episode that doesn't ultimately gel, and I'm no more assured that this season's gonna be getting anywhere. (Penned 9/15/21)
GRADE: B-.
11/03/79: Bill Russell / Chicago (S5 E03)
It's kind of surprising to me that there haven't been more athlete hosts in this original era considering how much of a periodic staple they would become. While it's true that none of their episodes have been particularly great (Fran Tarkenton's was okay at best, O. J.'s was actively quite miserable), they always present something of a fun obstacle for the show that ensures that SNL can't just go on like normal; it needs to accommodate for a host without acting or comedy experience, and it needs to make them look good. The end result tends to be either surprisingly great, or very unremarkable, but at least it makes for an exciting proposition. Bill Russell, however, was the latter.
To his credit, Bill seems to be having a pretty great time, even if his natural woodenness gets in the way. As he expresses in his monologue, SNL is a show that he greatly enjoys, and being able to participate in it is an opportunity that he does his best not to pass up, gamely participating in premises throughout that night which play as much to his abilities as they do to his weaknesses. The best piece of the night is also the most elaborate, "The Black Shadow," casting him as a role-reversed Black coach who needs to be looked after by the white high school basketball team that he coaches. Its premise is strong and it explores it nimbly, if without any tremendous surprises, and although Bill is a bit of a tough nut to crack in his performance, he's given such fun lines that it doesn't even matter. I especially loved his repeated questioning of "It's because I'm Black, isn't it?" every time someone calls out one of his personal flaws, including his own mother (played frustratingly, if also to surprisingly gifted effect, by Garrett).
Bill is at a bit more ease in the sports hotline sketch (opposite of Murray), if not only because he plays himself, though it's a far less remarkable piece; there's some fun to come out of the absurdity of describing esoteric sports as if they were as ubiquitous as basketball, but it's a bit too uninvolved to become anything greater. Unfortunately, though, Bill stumbles over the night's most theoretically-compelling offering, casting him and Garrett as the proprietors of a Barry White clothes store in the abandoned mall. It's sort of a bizarre expectation to me that Bill would be able to carry a more dramatic, slice-of-life piece, and unsurprisingly the sketch is never able to get over, but I can't help but feel even the idea was an ill-advised continuation of that sketch-verse in the first place.
The rest of the night alternates between good and bad, okay and fully unremarkable. The best of those, I'd argue, was the "Banshee" ad, for a speaker which blasts pre-installed, melodramatic crying at funerals you don't want to attend ("Your time is precious. His time is over."); we also get a passable enough Nick the Lounge Singer sketch, as they always tend to be, though this one (set at a military base in Greenland) lacked the fun wrinkles and characterizations that these sketches are really predicated upon. There's a sketch spoofing advice columns, and a sketch about Eleanor Roosevelt's suggestive lesbianism—both feature Jane sitting at a desk and playing with paper, and one of them is particularly dire. Everything else sort of recedes into the background, swallowed up by the ho-hum atmosphere. At least the host offered this one a bit of unique fun; without his wobbly but amicable presence, this episode almost feels like nothing at all. (Penned 9/15/21)
GRADE: C+.
11/10/79: Buck Henry / Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (S5 E04)
SNL paints Buck's record-breaking, ninth time hosting as a jokingly bleak occasion. Protestors line the entrances of 30 Rock in opposition, picketing and lynching a Buck effigy; during his monologue, Buck is flanked by security guards in riot gear as he casually deflects hecklers; and perhaps most amusingly, during the goodnights, the cast is so fed up with Buck and his maudlin speech that they chase him off-stage and beat him up. Is this prolonged narrative an excessively roundabout way to score another dig at Fred Silverman? Perhaps. But it speaks to the power of Buck, an unassuming, everyman host who relinquishes himself to SNL's whims, and while that so often results in episodes that disappoint me, his penultimate gig is a reminder of why I always find myself rooting for the guy.
Even if this episode was uneven, it was charmingly uneven; it felt like a conceptual wild west, and while that didn't always pay off, it teemed with a passion that the past year of the show has been sorely lacking in. It's an episode that really feels like a team effort, where everyone is pitching in something silly and different, and it makes for a delightful amalgamation of voices. Sure, that means we end up with a dry-ass lead-off sketch built strictly off of the visual of Laraine and Tom Davis having freaky frog throat prosthetics and literally nothing else, but that also means we get a morning talk show sketch led off by Garrett and (astonishingly) Yvette Hudson founded upon the premise of force-feeding rancid clams to an unsuspecting celebrity guest. The beauty is in the dichotomy.
This also happens to be an episode that deploys Buck at some of his finest, which is such a joy to see. For once, he escapes an SNL episode without being put at the mercy of the show's perversion! His best performance in my opinion is in the Nerds sketch, making a return appearance as Todd's dad. I was very skeptical of these sketches continuing past the last installment, but while this is a step down, it's as strong of a character piece as the Nerds sketches have become. Buck, with his beautifully weird laugh and ticks, makes for a fine addition to the pieces, and his fumbled attempts to ask out Mrs. Loepner are tons of fun in their own, thoughtfully character-driven way. The best piece of the night for me, though—that prototypically insane 10-to-1—let him cut beautifully loose as a man speeding down the street, screaming with his wife and daughter about his desperation to pee at home and slamming through everything in his path. I repeat: dichotomy!
It's sort of sad to know that, for as iffy as Buck's episodes can be, there's only one left to look forward to. No matter if SNL's impulses with him are good or bad on any given night, there's no denying that he's the quintessential host of these first five years, and this episode is a testament to that unheralded strength. (Penned 9/17/21)
GRADE: B+.
11/17/79: Bea Arthur / The Roches (S5 E05)
The prospects of Bea Arthur hosting SNL were as exciting as they proved to be quietly disappointing. She's a wickedly funny woman who could score a laugh from a glare, and her theatrical background ensures that she's more than capable of carrying out whatever the show could possibly ask of her with panache. It's a shame, then, that the show asks so little of her; rather than being able to command the stage, she's often relegated to straight roles, plugging effortlessly into the universe of the sketches she's offered, but also rather thanklessly. It's not a bad night, really, but it's one that can never really exit the cloud of disappointment that comes with such a squandered host.
I think that a large part of your opinion on this episode, then, is founded upon your opinion of its two largest pieces: "First He Cries" and "Backer's Audition." The former is another in Franken and Davis' string of inverted premise epics: what if, in light of a woman's masectomy, we focus less on her struggles in favor of the marginalized interests of a husband who has to cope with being married to "half a woman?" As with a lot of their work, there's a very cruel sense to the joke, which plays around with farcical misogyny as everyone from Gilda's family to her doctor (played expertly by Bea in her best role of the night) berate her for making Bill's plight all about herself, but it works for how much it hits you over the head with its stupidity, framing Bill's narcissistic stance on the issue as one deserving of an entire hero's journey. (We also get another delightfully goofy theme song from Bill to cap the sketch off, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite running gags with this season—this is certainly better work from Al than him aimlessly torturing live cockroaches on Update.) The "Backer's Audition" works less for me, though; while I was eventually able to come around on it more, it's dense, esoteric, and so unassumingly delivered that it's hard to make hay of everything it presents to you. I enjoyed a lot of the individual musical numbers—Bill sings emphatically about being a "burglar of love," and Garrett steals it with an insane song as Charles Manson about "Revolution 9"—but it was hard for me to equate the piece to the sum of its parts with how frequently it threatened to lose me in its headiness altogether.
Elsewhere, while I don't think the episode possessed any duds, a lot of sketches left me with something to be desired despite their promise. I really enjoyed the premise of Tom Davis' sketch, casting him as a boy whose refusal to go to school sends his father and all of American society into a downward spiral, but its execution felt too rushed and undetailed, zipping straight to its admittedly strong finish without tending to the sort of structure that would make it much more fulfilling. Similarly, I really liked everyone's performance in the Thanksgiving dinner sketch, with Bill, Jane, Laraine, and Paul Shaffer devolving into sophomoric antics at the kiddie table they've been sentenced to for the umpteenth year in a row, but I'd love to have seen where it would continue to go. (It's a very functional sketch, at least, and there's nothing wrong with leaving the audience wanting more.)
GRADE: B.
12/08/79: Howard Hesseman / Randy Newman (S5 E06)
Y'know, you can't knock Howard Hesseman for his energy. He's like everybody's favorite '70s dad, on top of being an ideal, charismatic-as-hell SNL host. Right from the monologue, he seems perfectly at ease navigating some fairly cumbersome writing and engaging in a lot of crowd work, even throwing in some fun ad-libs. That monologue serves as a sort of precedent for a lot of this episode's material: if there's nothing here that I'd single out as a particular highlight, Howard holds the rather inelegant sketches he's saddled with together like a pro. It makes you wish he got better things to do, admittedly, but there's worse a host can do than make their way through a testy episode with flying colors.
Howard's flexibility is his greatest attribute; although he doesn't get a ton of chances to really cut loose, he commits to everything while weaving perfectly into the ensemble. He reads as someone who has complete faith in the show and writing, and never oversteps that imaginary line. This serves him best in the "Stereo 105," featuring Harry as a radio DJ who spends basically the entire sketch zooming tactlessly along an ostensive radio interview with the WKRP star. It's long, and as with Harry's sketches, occasionally overwrought with lived-in but needlessly meticulous detail, but Howard is in fine form as his bewilderment mounts and crystallizes into anger, at one point choke-holding Harry just to get a few lines in. He also gets to have a nice burst of silliness at the very end of the night in the "Holiday Inn Horror" sketch; as fun as the premise is of Gilda tormenting two poor hotel guests with 6 AM room service is, it's Howard's turn as a maniacal front desk clerk that allows everything to snap perfectly in place.
The rest of the episode doesn't find a great use for his talents, but he keeps plugging along. "The Bel-Airabs" is a piece that was destined to age poorly, in between my lack of familiarity with The Beverly Hillbillies and the whole Arab routine (Gilda's character... fucking woof), but I guess it's functional within a vacuum if you close your eyes and pretend that a lot of the variables are different. I also struggled with the "old flame" sketch, which felt almost like some weird, farcical version of a slice-of-life sketch. It was peppered with just enough unsavory detail that it's hard to tell if its characters should be approached with empathy, or approached as caricatures. All of this also makes the sketch sound more novel than it actually is, though; it's not too exciting either way. Some other things, I wish I could appreciate more—the Celtic James Brown cold open and the pretape about Jane's first love Walter Cronkite at least feel somewhat inspired, but they're also as labored or aimless as almost everything else in the show.
Ultimately, while a rewatch granted me more enjoyment over the episode than I had before, all it really left me with was piqued curiosity for when Howard comes back to host in the Ebersol era. (Penned 9/21/21)
GRADE: C+.
12/15/79: Martin Sheen / David Bowie (S5 E07)
Sometimes, a radical musical guest can lend an episode more gravitas than any of the written material itself. Such is certainly the case for this Martin Sheen gig. Not to be unfair to the guy, by any means—he's about on-par with the hosts this season, not revelatory but workmanlike, and he gets to shine in some legitimately great material on some occasions—but this episode is all about David Bowie. He's the king of otherwordly cool, whether than entails him performing a number while incapacitated in a sarcophagus-esque suit or being flanked with robotic, television-mouthed poodles. (We even get a little marionette dick in there because, y'know, why not?) Bowie, with his three numbers, is a performer who outshines everyone else in his midst by the sheer power of his captivation. To let him be a musical guest in a season of SNL that's already struggling feels almost unfair to them.
But as for the show itself, as I said before, everyone's trying, and hey, sometimes the sketches are working. Two particularly exceptional pieces offer a momentary respite from the episode's bouts of monotony. The "Dark Shadows" sketch is perfect, casting Gilda as a little girl who is repeatedly the victim of more and more sinister intrustions, all of which are written off by her increasingly-beleaguered parents. It's the sort of slow-burning sketch that actually works with its slow pacing; rather than being as padded out as, say, this episode's never-ending Apocalypse Now sketch (funny to critique Coppola for letting money burn as if this SNL epic was worth the work itself), every beat adds delightfully to the tension and takes glee in pulling the rug out from under us with every successively more absurd turn. The final beat, with Gilda opening her closet door and discovering a grotesque, axe-wielding monstrosity with one of its eyes popped out of its socket elicits a beautiful roll of gasps and groans from the audience... and goddammit, I love to hear it. The murderer sketch is similarly thoughtful and deploys the sort of classic comic premise that you wish you were the one to come up with, casting Garrett and Martin as a crime duo who find themselves at the mercy of an increasing body count despite their best efforts to keep a low profile. It stumbles a bit at the end, but it's a great mix of darkness and silliness.
Everything else deserves little to no attention. An ad for "Martin Sheen" hair sheen, with Martin spitting directly onto Jane's hair, is slight but at least cute; the Robert Conrad sketch similarly gives Martin a chance to really pal around with the boys rather charmingly, even if the cache of the specific ad it's parodying is long expired. The less said about the interminable teacher's strike sketch or the transsexual cold open (on the Bowie show, guys?), the better. It's a bit of a difficult episode to compute, but the fact that it has some legitimately wonderful material, in tandem with its wonderful musical performances, ensures that there's at least something to keep you going. (Penned 11/29/21)
GRADE: B-.
12/22/79: Ted Knight / Desmond Child & Rouge (S5 E08)
Since last season's Elliott Gould episode, I feel like we've settled into more of a representative pattern of what SNL's Christmas episodes can be like: they're either spirited, all-hands-on-deck efforts filled with holiday cheer, or they're largely mediocre, getting a slight bump from the time of year that only occasionally off-centers a sense of punching in for one last time before the holiday break. Ted Knight's episode is a step above what we got last season, but it quietly makes itself at home in the pantheon of rather humdrum Christmas episodes. Some strong pieces towards the end give it value, but beyond the spectacle of Ted's beaming charisma, there's not too much joy being channeled here.
SNL seems at least generally aware of the energy that Ted can bring to the show; he's game as you could be, as evidenced by his monologue where he goes full-on Steve Martin and confesses that he's the comedy star's estranged father. But we also spend too much of the episode channeling that energy into pieces like the night's oblong sexual harassment sketch, whose greatest offense of all is the complete lack of perspective in spite of such an extensive runtime. (Can you guess what the big joke at the end of this '70s sketch on sexual harassment in the workplace is??) He's similar pushed into a dull, straight role in the Nerds nativity sketch, a piece which is infinitely more interesting for its unqualified controversy than its content itself. Nerds sketches are best when they continue to expand upon their universe, but this piece is merely an exercise in that classic SNL trope of stuffing characters into a new context and watching them derail it while Ted responds in powerless outrage. Basically, it's a Nerds sketch that, by design, has nowhere to really go.
Fortunately, the night does pack a few punches towards its back-half, however long it takes the episode to warm up. (For Christ's sake, the running order of the episode, barring its very short segments, is almost directly from worst to best.) Tom Schiller came in packing heat with his "Java Junkie" pretape, a rather unheralded piece starring Peter Aykroyd, a performer so underrated by the show that he hasn't even gotten a cast credit yet. It's not overly funny beyond its premise, with Peter becoming an addict for a hot cup of joe after life offers him the raw end of the stick, but it's anchored by dizzying cinematography and Peter's ace performance; as with Schiller's best work, its strength is in evoking a mood and a genre with equal parts goofiness and affection. Ted's abilities, meanwhile, are used best in the episode's final sketch (and the final sketch of the decade!), casting him as a visiting grandfather who cares excessively and detrimentally about Christmas, to the chagrin of his extended family. It's got some fun cynicism to it, but it balances those tones perfectly with Ted's blithe, dopey unawareness of everyone's dissatisfaction.
This episode also features the climactic wrestling match between Andy Kaufman and the female contest winner who was selected to take him on. These pieces remain strange, and perhaps difficult to assess; as much as I love Andy relishing in his antagonistic, misogynistic persona (he denies his opponent an extra minute at the very end, garnering the most aggressive crowd response I have ever heard on SNL), these are more fascinating than funny. It's an exercise in riling the crowd up and playing with their emotions, and while Andy whips them into a frenzy, he's gotten the same response in more delightful ways.
All in all, this isn't quite a middling effort, but it's one that fills me with some apprehension for what the rest of the season will look like. "I'll take what I can get" is quickly becoming my mantra, and as we near the point of no return for S5's reported mediocrity, all I can do is hope for those diamonds in the rough. (Penned 9/25/21)
GRADE: B-.
1/26/80: Teri Garr / The B-52s (S5 E09)
Even if my praise of the first half of S5 wasn't perhaps the most lavish, I'll admit that I found it to be far more enjoyable than I was anticipating. If it hasn't been inspiring me to get deeper into my watch-through, I've walked away from almost every episode with respect for at least some of the material. (Comparatively, the first half of last season left me with a dire lack of season highlights.) I shudder at what lay ahead, though; this Teri Garr episode is considered to be the dramatic turning point for the season, and while I don't think this one reached any crushing lows, it didn't do much to give me hope. Ironically enough, Teri is better served in her cameo last episode's "Java Junkie" than she is here; she's a game presence that the show is so hung up on figuring out how to use that her monologue is literally 30 seconds long.
I could easily generalize the failures of this episode, as none of the sketches fully work and many overstay their welcome, but I feel like there's actually quite a bit of merit here. The greater misfortune is that, despite being rich in workable concepts, nothing in this episode takes off as much as it could, and sometimes it doesn't take off at all. There's something to the idea of a gang of presidential hopefuls carrying out household chores for a housewife hoping to swing a vote for the Iowa Caucus, for instance, but it never finds a fun or particularly incisive angle. Instead, it seemingly exists to remind us of how fundamentally weak the male cast of the show is right now, a theme that would be reiterated as the episode continues. (Jim Downey and Brian-Doyle Murray are many things, but they're certainly not magnetic when they're given this much to do.) The idea of "Debs Behind Bars" feels similarly ripe, perhaps getting to twist some delightfully scathing jabs at films in its genre like the great "Married in a Minute!" sketch from Mary Kay Place's S3 episode, but it ends up being similarly lethargic—it's rather telling that the best moment is a blooper where Laraine-as-Gloria Vanderbilt's earring falls off and thuds on the ground.
I don't want to talk about most of this episode's other patches of mediocrity too intensely; we get the unwarranted return of those "Bad X" sketches, and Laraine does good work as a child movie producer in a less-than-good piece. The "Anchovy Council of America" sketch is the most successful sketch here; it could've afforded some more polishing, but I found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable exercise in deadpan absurdity, and mercifully less racial stereotyping than its premise (a council for anchovies trying to target Black consumers) would suggest. If this is another Harry Shearer sketch, I'd say it's also found some of the best use of his tendencies as a writer and performer. If not, uh... sorry man, still not the biggest fan of your brand right now.
You know what's super awesome, though? The B-52's bopping around like a bunch of kitschy weirdos, shout-singing about lobsters, marine life, and different dance moves to the overwhelming delight of the entire studio audience. One wishes SNL had less general reservation about bringing new wave artists onto the show; it's the perfect fit for SNL's brand of counterculture, though it's perhaps unsurprising that as this era becomes more jaded, it's also become more willing to call on the likes of Randy Newman, James Taylor, and Bob Dylan in his Christian phase to lull me to sleep. At least we can get some stuff as delightful as this, sometimes; if SNL can't provide enough joyful silliness for an evening like this, I'm more than happy for a group like the B-52's to step up to bat and inject some into my veins. (Penned 9/26/21)
GRADE: C.
2/09/80: Chevy Chase / Marianne Faithfull, Tom Scott (S5 E10)
I love a good trainwreck episode, at least in theory, and it's sort of dumb that I do. How often do I actually enjoy those? How often do I derive true entertainment from SNL veering hard off the rails or being engulfed by drama? It's true that these sort of legendary episodes offer something unique—they've lived on in infamy, for better or worse, more than your average, ho-hum outing—but it's rare that such uniqueness is a source of guilty joy so much as anger or tedium. This Chevy Chase episode doesn't end up on the right side, and it's all the more dreary because of it.
I mean lo and behold: Chevy is a fucking disaster. His forehead glistens through the entire night with flop sweat, and whatever surefire chops he deployed through his tenure that made him such a star have been replaced with nervous laughter and hesitation. Tragically, too, much of the show is built around the necessity that he'll be in tip-top shape, even if much of its material is the sort of thing that even Chevy in his prime couldn't save; it basically asked for the audience's goodwill in a performer submitting, up to this point, the worst performance of his entire life. The centerpiece sketch, most famously, is the never-ending "You Can't Win" piece, casting Chevy as the host of a game show where, by design, none of its contestants can win. There's an okay premise in that, though the writing betrays it and fails to recognize that us knowing how the show will keep screwing contestants over leaves the no room for surprise. But Chevy, blasting through his lines with a sort of ambiguous cocaine anxiety, comes across less like he's saying his lines—the meat and potatoes of this sketch—so much as having a stroke with occasional hints of coherency. He does the impossible: he kills an episode that's already dead. (Also, as a reminder: this is the same guy who got banned from hosting SNL for smacking Cheri when she flubbed a line.)
I suppose not all the blame can be cast on Chevy even if so much of it should be; the show certainly gives him nothing good to work with either way. For fuck's sake, we get another grueling "Bel-Airabs" sketch where the joke remains, "What if we did The Beverly Hillbillies but it was racist?", which to its credit is the most Franken & Davis sketch premise ever. (It even has the foresight to have Don Novello's character point out the racist depictions of Arabs in media because, y'know, that totally takes the edge off!) Every other sketch is, at best, vaguely palatable, but fraught with Chevy's ineptitude. By the time the show lands on a truly interesting and experimental piece—the poison darts sketch at the very end—my patience has been tested too many times for me to even give it a chance.
Oh yeah, and we also get a musical performance from Chevy, performing an awful cover of "16 Tons" to close out the night! Whether or not this is better than Marianne Faithfull's two performances—she was dragged off a toilet, where she was discovered high on dental anesthetics with a bottle of brandy between her knees, just hours before—is debatable. God, this one sucks. (Penned 11/30/21)
GRADE: D.
2/16/80: Elliott Gould / Gary Numan (S5 E11)
It's a shame that Elliott Gould, in all of his effortlessly cool charms, can't seem to inspire the show anymore. Perhaps it's no coincidence that his hosting gigs all seem emblematic of the seasons he resides over: he keeps his Season 1 gigs stable and inspired, elevates a joyful Season 2 gig, and slogs through a dull Season 4 gig. He's less likely to raise the show so much as play gamely to its then-current attributes, so perhaps it's no surprise that his final hosting stint within the original era feels quintessentially burned out, packed with some intriguing enough concepts but a failure to capitalize on its ambitions.
To the show's credit, Elliott gets to cut loose this episode more than most of his other episodes, but not to particularly strong effect. The subway genie sketch grants him perhaps the most meaty character work the show's ever offered him as he waxes poetic on he majesty of the MTA and tosses limitless subway tokens and transfer coupons about, but the piece itself is symptomatic of the season in general: a unique concept and set design saddled by a lack of conciseness. "The Incredible Man" sketch is as long, and perhaps twice as muddy; there's certainly something to the idea of a crude, Canadian knock-off of The Wizard of Oz, but it's never clear what it's actually trying to do, and moreover, how to make comedic targets out of whatever its goal is. More than anything else, it misinterprets extravagance and commitment—look at that set! the costumes! the songs!—for inherent humor. (We also get to see Garrett dressed up as a monkey, which is so disgustingly demeaning that he'd end up having a breakdown about the casting at the next week's table read. Wanna take a guess who wrote that one?)
Fortunately, some things worked at least a bit better here than in other episodes this season, even if some of the more grueling pieces inch out their goodwill. The prison recruitment sketch, with Elliott making an appeal to a serial murderer about a basketball scholarship, makes for a sturdy exercise in comic heightening with the fun of bringing more and more strange figures into his holding cell to sell him on the concept. (It's not trying to be much, but it succeeds in being adequate and landing as intended!) Moreover, Harry Shearer scores an unequivocal win here, playing a radio DJ whose exclusive goal is telling callers the time; it's something of a masterclass on the power of repetition, and the added wrinkle of his clock breaking part-way through the sketch, draining him of his already contrived sense of purpose, is fantastic. Lastly, Gilda contributes a delightfully silly fake ad, using her Rhonda Weiss character to advertise "Jewess Jeans." It's simple but effective pastiche, and another case study for Gilda's ability to sell a concept by the virtues of her charms alone.
GRADE: C+.
2/23/80: Kirk Douglas / Sam & Dave (S5 E12)
Another day, another Season 5 episode whose quality falls unceremoniously in the middle. It's hard to come up with some new thesis statement every single episode when the show seems committed to take its most promising assets and generally squander them. As with Elliott the preceding week, Kirk Douglas is a naturally magnetic and game host, and his stint is littered with promising and at times audacious ideas... and yet, by the end, all I can really do is shrug at the ways the show channeled those positive qualities.
The rest of the night is generally less successful, despite that same spirit. "What If," unsurprisingly, is back to being a truly baffling recurring segment. I get the joke, I swear, and I think there is something funny to the idea of taking a mind-numbingly dumb question from a little kid and granting it a painfully-earnest dramatization, but these sketches almost never live up to their promise in spite of their commitment. Kirk, continuing his trend of being a fun host, is a lot of fun as a very childish Spartacus dropping his shoes out of an aircraft window, but the joke feels so slight and drawn-out that even the audience is unsure how to respond to any of it. We also get another installment of Nick the Lounge Singer, but a strange one that doesn't work for me fully; it takes a strangely long time to reveal itself to be a Nick sketch, and that time spent world-building almost feels like a detriment for these sorts of sketches where the world is built organically in Nick's interactions with his audience. (He doesn't get a particularly fun crowd here, either.) Things end, at least, with a rather solid sketch, casting Gilda as a gruff bathroom attendant who grapples onto Kirk when he accidentally walks into the women's washroom. The premise of a celebrity playing themselves in an incongruous situation is pretty chockablock for SNL, but this one works in how character-driven it is, with Gilda's strong performance giving it slice-of-life vibes. It's a nice and silly palette-cleanser to end the night on.
As always, though: some good, some bad, mostly things in between. (We also get some badass Sam & Dave performances thrown into the mix, helping to exorcise the ghosts of the Blues Brothers from the studio with a bold reclamation of their song "Soul Man." Hell yeah, baby.) To Season 5's credit, it hasn't truly bottomed out, but it's never lived up to what it has the capacity to be, either. (Penned 10/03/21)
GRADE: C+.
3/08/80: Rodney Dangerfield / The J. Geils Band (S5 E13)
You want to look forward to Rodney Dangerfield hosting so badly that you almost forget to heed to the warning signs. I'll keep beleaguering the point: this season has not been great. It's settled into such a frustrating patch that even the prospect of a host who I would otherwise be really eager to see carry out the show fills me more with apprehension than excitement. It becomes a manner of guessing not if an episode will be good or bad, but in what ways a host will be wronged. Fortunately, those low expectations allowed me to get some nice surprises out of this one, but the lowlights make it characteristically difficult to assess.
First of all: Rodney Dangerfield! I haven't had too much exposure to him throughout my life, but he's one of those comedians of yesteryear that manages to stay one step ahead of the potential hackiness of his act by the virtue of his charms and talent, hammering in his self-owns with a near-surgical precision. He's not the sort of person that can really put on other comic personas throughout the night, but he doesn't have to—we're here for Rodney, and the show is privy to throwing him some fun one-liners to forge the night's identity firmly around him. Sketches like the sperm store sketch serve him well in that regard, constructing an absurd scenario (Dangerfield sperm is in high demand) that he can sink some of his trademark barbs into ("I’m at the age now, when I squeeze into a parking space, I’m sexually satisfied!").
Unfortunately, this is also an episode that tries its hand at some edgier fare, perhaps indebted to Rodney being in the house, and my god does it bring the episode to a screeching halt. Harry Shearer's gratuitously ill-conceited fake ad up top for a coin with a very racist name that allows him to keep saying the n-word feels like a little teaser for the episode's big stinker: "Manhasset," a Woody Allen parody casting Rodney as a man (himself?) who's in love with an adolescent. It takes a skilled writer to craft a parody that works without directly knowing what it's based off of; it takes Franken and Davis to decide it's comedy gold to bump down the age of a character from 17 to 10. There's nothing to this one, unless specificity for specificity's sake can substitute for humor. In the ickiness of it all, it's just too hard to locate laughs despite the show being way too confident that it's a riot.
The best sketch of the night wasn't edgy, nor was it centered too hard on anything crude: the "substitute judge" sketch is just perfect silliness. As soon as the joke locks in that Brian-Doyle Murray's substitute judge is like the courtroom's substitute teacher, it becomes an exercise in goofy fun and clever observations. If that Thanksgiving kid's table sketch from Bea Arthur was a proof of concept, this sketch is a masterclass on juvenility. That's the sort of energy this episode really deserved all the way through, and it's the sort of energy that Rodney was able to feed into best, however scarcely this episode allowed him to. He just don't get no respect. (Penned 10/04/21)
GRADE: C+.
3/08/80: 100th Episode (no host) / Paul Simon & James Taylor, David Sanborn (S5 E14)
It's nice that, in this wildly unenticing season, the 100th episode feels like a proper celebration. The house is packed with cameos from faces old and new; greatest hits are being broken out left and right; and James Taylor and Paul Simon, two of the SNL's favorite folksy fellas, are in the building to perform a nice little medley. Despite all of this ringers, this isn't the most bombastic episode ever, but it's one that does the best it can at bringing some excitement into an era that's past its prime, hoping that some dazzling surprise guest stars and crowd-pleasers can bring a buzz back to the room. It sort of does, and it sort of doesn't, but there's always a nice air of specialness.
Other cameos work a bit less well, even if there's never anything too offensive. Ralph Nader holds down a correspondent spot on Weekend Update to do his dorky dad economist things, and while he maintains the likability that made his Season 2 hosting gig such a surprise, the material itself is nothing worth writing home about. (There is something poignant about seeing Ralph sitting alongside Bill, though, as the host of his very first episode in the cast.) Patrick Moynihan also pops up twice as himself, never to strong effect; "The Biggest Leprechaun" is peak aimlessness for SNL, stumbling upon a funny visual (tall Peter Aykroyd as a leprechaun) but leaning on that visual as its sole crutch, and he later walks on to an admittedly-silly sketch featuring Peter, Bill, and Garett as wine connoisseur bums to advertise the wines of New York.
Everything else in the episode sort of fills in the gaps, but it maintains the amicable mood. We get another Nerds sketch, and while the show has written itself into a corner where it's unsure of how to expand their narrative further, it's fun enough to see them and delve into a bit of ensemble work. The medieval band sketch is similarly silly, if modest in ambition; it's really just a chance for everyone to do silly British accents and say "flogging" a lot. The novelty of Paul Shaffer accidentally letting out an f-bomb triumphs over any of the written material, but it's always fun to be reminded of the live, accident-prone nature of the show. My favorite piece of the night was the monologue, where at the expense of a host, Bill Murray comes out, fully unbridled, to perform a wild serenade to the hustle and bustle of New York City while dancing, flipping, and slamming into the floor.
As my write-up can attest to, there's not any big wins, but there's something to be said of the fun, celebratory vibes of this show. It may ultimately end up being just another Season 5 episode, but it charms instead of frustrates. The show feels so fatigued by this point that I'll happily take in those good vibes. (Penned 10/06/21)
GRADE: B-.
3/08/80: Richard Benjamin & Paula Prentiss / The Grateful Dead (S5 E15)
While I still have absolutely no idea what Richard Benjamin's deal is, within only two hosting stints he's proven himself to be one of my favorite hosts of this original era. For some reason, he just seems to unlock the best out of SNL; his first episode was packed with stunning ambition and experimentation, while this second (and sadly final) one, with his wife Paula Prentiss in tow, is all about nuanced character pieces, tinged with slice-of-life aspects and clever conceits. In a season that's felt largely tapped-out, it's miraculous that, yet again, Richard's allowed SNL to really capture lightning in the bottle.
I phrase all of this as if the episode isn't hosted, in equal if not greater part, by Richard's wife, Paula Prentiss, though I think that also lends more credence to how much Richard vibes with the show; as he says in the monologue, he enjoyed hosting last season so much that he had to bring her along for another round. The dual hosting nature of the show is rarely a huge factor in the material, but the fact that both Richard and Paula can tap into a more low-key well of energy ensured that things always struck a very nice tone. Paula, for her part, opens up room for the show to do more female-oriented sketches, which feels refreshing in a season sorely lacking in female hosts. She's put to her best use in the "assertiveness training" sketch, an ensemble piece giving Gilda, Jane, and Laraine a shot at great, lived-in character work with a decidedly feminist slant, taking turns talking about the means in which they've succeeded and (largely) failed to dismantle the misogyny in their lives. Although she plays a far smaller role in the Jesus crush sketch, casting Gilda and Laraine as young girls fantasizing about their competing crushes on Jesus Christ, I also find it hard to believe it would get on the show if not for her presence guiding the show away from the typical, male-driven avenues.
Richard is surprisingly a smidge less involved in the show, but he shines in the two sketches he's provided in that idiosyncratic, nerdy, Richard Benjamin sort of way. He submits some of the finest work he's ever submitted to SNL in his "post-coital torture" sketch as a married man in the deepest throes of paranoia in the wake of a one-night stand with another woman, his strained attempts at politeness outweighed by a sinking feeling that he's really done it this time. It's the way that Richard really lingers onto every stilted, nervous word that sells the sketch ("You were fine. You were just fine. You were terrific as always. Thank you, again. You're a very nice person."), though Laraine submits equally-great work as the woman he slept with who takes delight in toying with his nerves. The night's best piece, though, finds both Richard and Paula joining forces as fans of Joey Bishop who, when discovering their neighbors (Bill and Gilda) share the same affection, explode into a frenzy over their shared fandom. Not only is it a sublimely-acted piece that taps into every corner of its performers' range, but it feels shockingly prescient of fan discourse within pop culture. It captures that joy one feels in realizing that a complete stranger shares in their devotion... but in the same stroke, it captures how slight variations in perspective can cause them to drive each other up a goddamn wall. (As an SNL fan, I know those streets far too well.)
All of that good does well to help overlook some of the more tedious parts of the episode, which is fair enough. It's miraculous as is for a Season 5 episode to be pumped this full of goodness that I'm willing to ignore the exhausting, convoluted, and potentially-racist Franken & Davis sketch and another Mr. Bill segment. It's nice to know that, as this era dies down, we at least got one more episode worth bragging about. (Penned 10/07/21)
4/12/80: Burt Reynolds / Anne Murray (S5 E16)
Burt Reynolds, by all accounts, didn't have the most amicable time his week at SNL; despite inviting the writers to make fun of him, he walked out of readthroughs in a complete hissy-fit that necessitated the written material be gutted and re-worked to his vain specifications. It's all the more impressive, then, that this episode comes across as a scathing indictment of his machismo, granting him the opportunity to wear bigotry and misogyny on his sleeve with a discomforting sense that those predispositions are not only okay, but a part of why we're supposed to find Burt cool. Unfortunately, as time has marched onwards and progressed us to a better place, it's hard to look back upon the show starting off with a cold open where Burt says the n-word and then violently beats Gilda against a locker as remotely charming. It's certainly not.
Maybe it's best to just run down the night's string of grave follies before moving into anything else (if there's anything else to move into). The baffling post-monologue sketch sets the tone: Burt plays himself, taking a limo to the front door of a suburban house in hopes of ensnaring some prepubescent fans for grooming. All of this plays out to their parent's excitement, failing to perceive the massive foul of the scenario, but the scene never makes a point out of Burt being a pedophilic sex demon either. Does that mean the joke is supposed to be everyone's naive giddiness towards Burt's leering, sexual interest in the underaged daughters? There are some fun performances to the piece if you strip it of its nauseating context, at least, and that seems to suggest that everyone is aware of some deep intentionality, but whatever that intent may be is lost completely in translation. The "Deliverance II" sketch at least wears a sense of hacky homophobia strongly enough on its sleeve that it can be easily understood as exhaustingly low-concept, but that doesn't make the premise of everyone putting on their best lisps to play gay campers passable. There's no perspective to it, which as a flagrant Franken/Davis piece shouldn't come as a surprise.
Everything else for Burt is secondary in dreadfulness, perhaps bearing a bit more merit but ultimately still feeding into the gross, sleazefest vibes. I sort of like the hyperspecificity of a sketch being set in an ancient Roman vomitorium, but as much as I found some enjoyment in the extraneous detail, it never finds a greater hook than Burt hitting on random women as they puke their brains out. There's also a slice-of-life-ish sketch in the back-half that finds Burt getting into a fight with Gilda over not introducing her to some of his friends at a party, though naturally, the concept of escalation with this week's host is to strangle her until she cries, and then ask her to have sex with him. Was America really this broken that this episode could successfully reinforce Burt's image as a macho sex icon?
There is one good sketch in tonight's mix, and it's the only live piece not to feature Burt in it: the "Peppers" sketch, with Laraine and a ragtag gang of cool, self-professed Dr. Pepper fans working to win the understanding and eventual allyship of her parents in devoting their lives to the soda brand. Everything else is just varying degrees of misery. (Penned 10/08/21)
GRADE: D.
4/19/80: Strother Martin / The Specials (S5 E17)
Character actors always make for the most underrated of SNL hosts. They're not here to act flashy or hog the limelight; they much prefer being team players, which unsurprisingly tends to enable SNL to be its absolute best. Less than catering to the whims of a specific host or having to hide them in the background, a character actor host just wants to indoctrinate themselves into the show, as much of a part of it as the rest of the cast while exercising the immaculate range and commitment that comes with their craft. Strother Martin embodies some of the best of what hosts of his breed can pull off, and he's all the more charming for it.
Elsewhere, he slips perfectly into more supporting roles, all teeming with as much life as his main ones. The conductor club sketch borders on thin, however well-observed, but it's the sight of Strother waving his baton around so manically that it accidentally flies out of his hand that makes things all worth it. He's similarly great in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," though admittedly the strength of that sketch rests less on his characterization so much as the brilliance of its satirical concept. SNL's made its feelings about Reagan known pretty loudly across the last two seasons, but there's no piece as ambitious or scathing as this one, revealing his campaign strategies to be the deployment of body-snatching alien eggs that force their new meat puppets to lifelessly recite conservative rhetoric. Under any circumstance, Strother makes the most of his screen time, big or small.
Round out the night with some wildly fun ska performances from The Specials (fuck me, I can dig ska) and a cool film by Edie Baskin and you've got one of the finest evenings of this season. You could argue it's not too great of an accomplishment against the iffy quality of S5, but if anything, that makes the success of an episode that much more rewarding. (Penned 10/12/21)
GRADE: A-.
5/10/80: Bob Newhart / The Amazing Rhythm Aces, Bruce Cockburn (S5 E18)
When there's a name like Bob Newhart hosting the show and he does just alright, it's impossible not to wish that the night was better. Perhaps that's an unfair argument to levy—have I not seen how rough this season tends to be, and shouldn't I just be grateful that this one is functional and at times good? All of that's totally fair, but SNL tends to be a victim of the bar that its host sets. If this sort of episode fell upon a host like Bill Russell, and he carried himself through it like a pro, it'd be a revelation... but this is Bob Newhart, someone who can carry the show in his sleep. One would hope for a bit more than an episode that functions dutifully but never surprises.
So what worked better? Well, I quite enjoyed "Dave's Variety Store," casting Bob and Gilda as a husband-wife pairing who fulfill the absurdist requests of their customers in between low-key chit-chat; the combination of absolute deadpan and the never-ending onslaught of increasingly bizarre prop comedy (a white chocolate crossbow, square basketballs, a frozen turtle in an ice block) that just works, with every character interaction offering needed variance against the repetition that the conceit threatens to bear. I also feel like, as much as I prefer to ignore him, it's worth mentioning Franken's infamous "Limo for a Lame-o" Update commentary, most certainly the most cutting piece he's ever contributed to the show. I'd be remiss not to mention another uncalled-for dunk on poor Garrett, but it's a historically fascinating moment in the show's history that feels as gleefully dirty then as it does now; the boldness of SNL to do a piece so nasty that it literally torpedoes itself as a consequence has got to be one of the most quintessentially anarchic things that this era of the show has ever done.
Outside of that stuff, though, it's a shame that Bob couldn't host SNL during the prime of its early years. Here's hoping he can be better served when he comes back in the dreaded Season 20. (Penned 10/13/21)
GRADE: B.
5/17/80: Steve Martin / 3-D, Paul and Linda McCartney (S5 E19)
It's disappointing, but perhaps a bit emblematic of his stints during the original era of the show, that Steve's final hosting stint with this cast is a bit of a dud. It's not really anybody's fault: Steve, as always, exerts his zany energy to will material into watchability when it threatens to be even too silly for his standards, and the writers try to flank him with ideas that cater to his specific brand of comic observation and irreverence. Everything just feels... labored by this point. Both the show and Steve know what they can do for each other, and they don't take this final go as a challenge to top itself so much as a chance to coast through a penultimate week of reliability. But why try, I suppose, if this show is more Paul McCartney's than Steve's?
Yes, after five grueling seasons of viciously trying to court a Beatles reunion, Lorne was able to get the next best thing: Paul, live by satellite from London, debuting a music video for his funky new single, "Coming Up." Did the show give him anything better to do than come out of his house with Linda after several meandering, fake-out segments from Father Guido Sarducci? No. But I suppose it's more about the destination than the journey sometimes, and Don Novello tries his best with the nondescript material he's given, throwing rocks at Paul's window and shouting a medley of Beatles songs at his bedroom with a bullhorn. Quaint stuff.
The prospects of Paul are at least more exciting than what the episode is generally able to pull together for Steve, no matter how enthusiastic it tries to be. "Real Incredible People" is a cute exercise in hyperbole, with a group of excitable panelists teetering with joy over increasingly mundane and undeserving subjects, but there isn't a great amount of meat on the bone and it veers itself into unnecessary directions. (Garrett is trotted out on stage on account of having "very dark brown skin.") Better was the sketch featuring Bill and Steve as two hooligans who break into houses not to steal anything, but to make a general mess (which then has to be tended to by their equally gun-toting mothers), though it won't make the history books, either. The rest of the night summated to Steve being used as a Steve is used, whether that means playing an intellectual caveman or a deer struggling to cross the road; the best of those scraps, an advert helmed by Gilda for an aging songstress' bitter, middle-aged songs, doesn't feature Steve at all.
GRADE: C+.
5/24/80: Buck Henry / Andrew Gold, Andrae Crouch & the Voices of Unity (S5 E20)
And so we reach the end of our first leg with Buck Henry's tenth and final hosting gig. Even if this final episode of the original era isn't firing off on all cylinders, it's an undoubtedly bittersweet occasion. Before I even get into the fact that this is our last big hurrah for this cast, most of whom will never return to the studio again, I wanna talk about Buck one last time: this being his final episode is almost as sad as it being this cast's. For as iffy as his episodes could get, he was the definitive host of this era to me, more so than the heralded Steve Martin; he played ball to all of the show's whims, no matter what it necessitated that he did, and he never threatened to overshadow the cast so much as reinforce their excellence.
Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that so much of this episode is made up of ensemble pieces, casting him in roles of every degree of significance. In sketches like one final outing for Nick the Lounge Singer, or "Week in Review," he merely sits back and lets the funny happen around him, whereas in a sketch like the series-closing "Mommy Beer," he's just one of the lads, lip-syncing along to a silly, fictitious beer jingle with the rest of the male cast. Buck shines the brightest, though, in this episode's legendary "Lord and Lady Douchebag" sketch, a full-cast piece sprawling with silly, pun-laden details that all part way as soon as he walks in with Gilda and enables a delightful series of earnestly-delivered crudities. That's some prime Buck right there. Not to be outdone, Buck also gets one final Uncle Roy sketch to properly anchor all on his own, and while I'd like to pretend these don't work for me... they always do, somehow. (That last exchange between Buck and Jane about how "there's more [Uncle Roys] than you might expect" is a nice, biting capper to the trilogy.)
The night is otherwise peppered with "one last ride" vibes, and whereas I'm perhaps not clamoring for just one more round from Chico Escuela or Roseanne Rosannadanna, they add to a nice sense of finality. (It's certainly easier to appreciate than this episode's massive clunker, "The Cow Minder's Daughter," which seemingly just exists to do some brownface and ethnic caricatures one last time.) None of these bits are remarkable, but there's enough goodwill with the occasion that they feel special. After all, what better way to conclude an era than to dig back into what made it so beloved at the time?
Perhaps the most unique artifact of this episode is its monologue, with Buck trotting out "the next season's cast," played by an assortment of writers, extras, and Don Pardo; it's not particularly funny, perhaps due to how jokingly earnest it plays out, it definitely hits in a very strange, quietly sad way to know just how much the cast turnover only a few months away would rock SNL off of its axis for the next several, Lorne-less seasons. I could see it being another bit of classic SNL navel-gazing, but against the uncertainty of the show's future—Lorne knew by this point that the reins wouldn't be passed off to those he was hoping it would—there's a troubling bit of insincerity, like it's trying to tell viewers that everything will be alright even when the show's not convinced of that itself. I can forgive that of the show, though, and that dark cloud is but a small, if poignant, part of the night. And if nothing else, it's another reminder that, for all the ups and downs of the past five seasons of SNL, I'll miss it. Onwards, into this scary next chapter! (Penned 11/03/21)
GRADE: B.
Cumulative Season Rankings:
2. Strother Martin / The Specials (A-)
3. Buck Henry / Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (B+)
4. Steve Martin / Blondie (B+)
5. Bea Arthur / The Roches (B)
6. Buck Henry / Andrew Gold, Andrae Crouch and the Voices of Unity (B)
7. Bob Newhart / The Amazing Rhythm Aces, Bruce Cockburn (B)
8. Martin Sheen / David Bowie (B-)
9. Ted Knight / Desmond Child & Rouge (B-)
10. Eric Idle / Bob Dylan (B-)
11. 100th episode (no host) / Paul Simon & James Taylor, David Sanborn (B-)
12. Rodney Dangerfield / The J Geils Band (C+)
13. Howard Hesseman / Randy Newman (C+)
14. Steve Martin / Paul and Linda McCartney, 3-D (C+)
15. Kirk Douglas / Sam & Dave (C+)
16. Elliott Gould / Gary Numan (C+)
17. Bill Russell / Chicago (C+)
18. Teri Garr / The B-52s (C)
19. Chevy Chase / Marianne Faithfull (D)
20. Burt Reynolds / Anne Murray (D)
FAVORITE SKETCHES:
10. "All Time Radio" (S5E11 / Elliott
Gould)
9. "Video Will" (S5E17 / Strother Martin)
8. "Driving" (S5E04 / Buck Henry)
7. "Lord and Lady
Douchebag" (S5E20 / Buck Henry #2)
6. "Jesus Crush" (S5E15
/ Richard Benjamin & Paula Prentiss)
5. "Java Junkie"
(S5E08 / Ted Knight)
4. "Dark Shadows" (S5E07 / Martin
Sheen)
3. "Post-Coital Torture" (S5E15 / Richard Benjamin
& Paula Prentiss)
2. "Substitute Judge" (S5E13 /
Rodney Dangerfield)
1. "Joey Bishop Fans" (S5E15 / Richard
Benjamin & Paula Prentiss)
Other great sketches: "Great Moments in Rock History" and "What the Hell is That?" (S5E01 / Steve Martin); "Shoe Store" (S5E02 / Eric Idle); "The Black Shadow" (S5E03 / Bill Russell); "Matchmaker Nerd" (S5E04 / Buck Henry); "Murder" (S5E07 / Martin Sheen); "Christmas Decorations" (S5E08 / Ted Knight); "Assertiveness Training" (S5E15 / Richard Benjamin & Paula Prentiss); "Peppers" (S5E16 / Burt Reynolds); "Invasion of the Brain Snatchers" (S5E17 / Strother Martin).
FAVORITE MUSICAL PERFORMANCES:
10. Andrew Gold (S5E20 /
Buck Henry #2)
9. The J. Geils Band (S5E13 / Rodney
Dangerfield)
8. Andrae Crouch & The Voices of Unity
(S5E20 / Buck Henry #2)
7. The Amazing Rhythm Aces (S5E18 /
Bob Newhart)
6. Gary Numan (S5E11 / Elliott Gould)
5. Sam & Dave (S5E12 / Kirk Douglas)
4. The Roches (S5E05
/ Bea Arthur)
3. The B-52s (S5E09 / Teri Garr)
2. The Specials (S5E17 / Strother Martin)
1. David
Bowie (S5E07 / Martin Sheen)
SEASON GRADE AVERAGE: C+.
Follow me on Twitter @Matt_a_la_mode!
Good to find someone else who realizes that "The Incredible Man" is a weird, targetless sketch. Most reviews call it a hit-and-miss sendup of The Wizard of Oz, and can't zero in on the core problem of "What is happening and why?"
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