Vintage Saturday Night Live Review: George Wendt and Francis Ford Coppola / Philip Glass (S11E13)

"I want you to react by laughing, but if you don't feel like laughing, I want you to go back and remember something from your childhood..."

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NOTE: Hey, everybody! I was planning on posting this on Christmas, but then I totally forgot about that like a complete idiot. But I'm posting it now, because while it's attached to my review coming out in a few days, it's such a substantive piece of writing that I'd like it to also exist on its own so that it can get more unique web traffic and serve as an independent writing sample.

(The full episode can be watched here.)

Desperate times call for desperate measures, but is that always a bad thing? Season 11 of Saturday Night Live, for the most part, would lead you to believe it, amidst the series of questionable decisions it's made up to this point... but sometimes, out of adversity, amazing things can happen. It's true that something as crazy as the George Wendt/Francis Ford Coppola episode could only happen in a season like Season 11, but it still feels so deeply improbable. With Lorne Michaels and SNL in general, any degree of self-analysis is a slippery slope that risks having its cake and eating it too, and there's a definite risk of this deeply meta night being a self-indulgent mess that pokes at the show's systemic problems without trying to rectify them—and perhaps it does, to some extent. But the audacity of this episode, and the willingness of the show to hold itself up to some healthy scrutiny, makes it a legendary success. This is perhaps the most unique evening of the show that you will ever see.

To summarize the gist briefly to any readers who aren't aware: the narrative of this episode begins with Lorne telling the cast that Francis Ford Coppola has been brought in as the episode's director per the bequest of the network, and he has been granted full creative control—and throughout the night, Coppola misunderstands, twists, deconstructs, and breaks the show's format for the sake of his own indulgent desire to win an Emmy and create true art. In a lot of ways it mirror's the show's only other effort to go as strongly meta: the legendary Charles Grodin episode from Season 3, which pretended that its host had missed all of the rehearsals for the live show and had no idea what his role as a host actually involved.  There's a lot of comedy to be mined out of an episode gone wrong, especially since SNL is a show that thrives on its liveness inherently, but for all of their similarities, the sheer scope and ambition of this episode helps differentiate it. Charles Grodin's episode is fantastic, and it still remains one of my favorites of all time, but part of its effortlessness is that it played out when SNL was at its prime, working with one of the best casts they've ever had, and that it has such an ingeniously simple throughline. Whereas that episode also featured several winners independent from the Grodin storyline, this episode's narrative is so complex and sprawling that it touches down on almost every corner of the night's material; if it failed, the whole night would fail, too.

It's amazing, then, that basically everything that has to do with the episode's concept works, even if a few more minor moments pad it out. (It's also impressive that very little goes wrong; the only gaffe is botching Francis' mic during his Update appearance, though I'm very used to Update being a disaster anyway.) There's a great cleverness in how almost every main sketch in this episode shuffles through a different permutation of the effects of Coppola's controlling, egotistical nature. Right from the start, the jazzy opening cast montage have been replaced by brooding opening credits—in order of appearance, neatly—scored to a dramatic Philip Glass arrangement, and the monologue sets the tone of the episode right away: after George Wendt delivers his first big joke, Coppola interrupts and attempts to get a better take out of him while cajoling the studio audience to reimagine hearing his joke for the first time. The sketches that follow, for the most part, don't slack on inventiveness either—there's a murder mystery sketch, for instance, where he takes over the camera blocking and subsequently botches every single reveal with incorrect cues that render it unintelligible, and a later Vietnam scene gets cut short by the revelation that the cast is being shot at and wounded with live ammunition for "realism" rather than blanks. At a certain point, you're excitedly waiting to see how a given sketch subverts your expectations, and every escalation is an utter delight.

It's also nice how balanced this episode feels with its cast; it would be a shame if anyone got snubbed from such a crazy episode, but more than just giving them all things to do, everyone manages to have a real spotlight moment. Terry Sweeney, amusingly, forgoes participating in sketches in favor of following Francis around, kissing up to him and betraying his fellow castmates; Randy Quaid rattles off a dramatic speech about Francis' lack of humanity that momentarily causes Francis to walk out in shame at the episode's climax. Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr. pull their weight tonight, too, with the former having an explosive outburst over being shot in the leg and the latter contributing one of his most memorable bits of insanity, a confrontational monologue while zipped up in a suitcase. (It's a polarizing bit, but I can't not love lines like "I know why whales beach themselves... SPIDERMAN TOLD ME!") Best of all, the perpetually-underused Danitra Vance walks away with the best sketch of the entire episode, and one of the most fascinating pieces of self-examination that SNL's ever done, with this week's iteration of "That Black Girl" getting cut off by Francis for its perceived inauthenticity. At one level, it's amusing for Francis to fully miss the sketch's satirical underpinnings, and there's a good laugh from him calling upon the piece's writers and discovering them to be... the most Aryan trio of people you will ever see. But having Francis bluntly call out the show's lack of black women writers—none of which it's had up to this point, and which it will continue not to have for a long while—is bracing, and Francis telling Danitra, to her face, "I don't believe that you're a real black women," is a legitimately harrowing moment. Drained of her concept because it doesn't speak to how Francis perceives "the black experience," she's forced to transform her sketch into a provocative piece of drama with a long monologue about the woes of her existence. Danitra's performed several trunk pieces from her stage show across this season (there's a significant one coming next week), but this is definitely the closest she's gotten to creating new, personal content for SNL, and she does so by brilliantly interrogating how much the show really values—or perhaps tokenizes—her talents.

There are only a handful of people who don't feel as amazingly-served by the episode, but they're at least decently prominent. Nora Dunn slaves away at supporting/character roles throughout the night, though she does get a fun team-up with Robert as a pair of pretentious actors dissecting Francis' career, while Jon Lovitz reprises both Tommy Flanagan and Master Thespian to mixed effect, clearly out of fear that the audience would vie for some degree of familiarity in the midst of the madness. It's also disappointing that George Wendt, as the night's co-host of sorts, isn't really given much; despite being deeply-embedded in the narrative, he's mostly relegated to straight roles that don't let him key into his full comic potential. The best shots he gets are in the episode's two disconnected, fail-safe sketches that don't tie into the underlying theme, and while one is typical Franken/Davis nonsense (a Honeymooners riff, except Ralph finally hits Alice—abuse is funny!), the whale sketch is a delight, casting him as a fishmonger trying to desperately to sell a whale that he was erroneously shipped. It's a perfect blend of writers Andy Breckman and Jim Downey's writing talents, with moments of deadpan and quiet sophistication nestled into the absurd conceit, and George does a perfect job of selling his desperate pleas to customers to buy his product: "What the kids don't eat, you can melt down for candles!" It's a strange starting place for someone who would go onto become a recurring presence in the next era of the show, but George contributes good work when he's afforded the chance; I just wish he got more to do.

But ultimately, it's hard to begrudge the episode's select shortcomings by the time we get to the grand finale, Coppola's grand tribute to live television. Jon as Master Thespian rhapsodizes about the history of 8H before commencing a phenomenal tracking shot through the entire studio while the band plays a fanfare, with every cast member scattered across the sets giving a bow, and it's a legitimately awe-inspiring moment; for however much this episode keeps its tongue firmly in-cheek, the ending truly feels like a love letter to the studio, so extravagant that it might as well be the last episode of the show ever. But then, we cut to a bar that George has escaped to after quitting the episode, and while he watches the grand finale on a small television screen, all he can mutter is, "The horror... the horror..." It's barely a funny capper—though Franken scores a laugh by smugly deadpanning, "How do you think we feel? We're the producers"—but there's such a captivating, poignant nature to it. As the credits roll, the cast celebrates with Francis while George tries to hail a cab; in the meta-narrative of the episode, SNL has triumphed, but at what cost?

In a sense, that question stands. What does this episode mean for the rest of this season? In a weird way... it could mean nothing. And that's not a strike against it, though it's an interesting sort of observation. SNL is hurting, it risks cancellation more than ever before, and even Lorne's presence can't right the ship—so why not let a week spiral out so gloriously? (Even the choice of musical guest was deeply inspired; Philip Glass and his orchestra delivered some truly mind-meltingly gorgeous avant-garde performances, the likes of which we will never see on the show again.) If the Wendt/Coppola doesn't speak to anything in the long-term, though, perhaps it's best considered as a reminder that SNL is still a magical show even at its worst, that it can pull the most magnificent surprise out of nowhere, and that it shouldn't ever be discounted no matter how dire things feel. Part of the bittersweet beauty of this episode is that something like this will never happen again, and that it could've only happened with this deep of a fracture in SNL's identity, but that makes it all the more outstanding that it even exists.

GRADE: A+.

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