Flakiest Night of the Week

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SN owes a debt to Laugh-In and to Monty Python, last year's hit on PBS, for its free-associating mixture of inanity and insult. It owes another one, too: without Python's national success, it is doubtful whether Herb Schlosser, president of NBC, would have offered Dick Ebersol such a free hand when he told him last year to come up with a live show from Manhattan. Ebersol turned to Lorne Michaels, 31, a Canadian who was a writer and co-producer for Comedienne Lily Tomlin's award-winning specials. Michaels recalls: "I wanted a show to and for and by the TV generation. Thirty-year-olds are left out of television. Our reference points, our humor, reflect a life-style never aired on TV. Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda are the most up-to-date shows on the air now, but they are liberated '50s."

In addition to Chase, Michaels recruited a core of writers including his own wife Rosie, 29, who had also worked for Tomlin; Michael O'Donoghue, 36, and Anne Beatts, 28, both formerly of the National Lampoon; and Herb Sargent, fiftyish, whose credits include That Was the Week That Was. Their styles are diverse. Their humor is not. Says O'Donoghue: "At some point in your life, you decide to either grow up or look like grownups. We've chosen the latter." Some critics think the show is sophomoric. Replies O'Donoghue: "Sophomoric is just the liberal word for funny."

God Can't Be Perfect. Sometimes SN is awful. Comedian Albert Brooks' taped films were at first a regular feature, but offered only ten minutes of boredom. The Muppets are cloying grotesques. The funniest jokes are the simplest: a land shark who gobbles up apartment dwellers; a parody of Catherine Deneuve's Chanel No. 5 ad which ended with a perfume bottle stuck to Guest Host Candice Bergen's head. A lot depends on the guest hosts who change each week and around whom an entire show is written. Among the first tapped by Michaels were Comedian George Carlin and Actor Rob Reiner. Says Reiner: "I didn't care if the show fell flat on its ass. TV needed it." He adds: "It's like an express train that no one can stop. You just have to hop aboard and hope it won't crash."

SN's most endearing and human quality is its unevenness. Guest hosts participate in the sketches themselves and some write their own jokes too. Carlin set the pace on his, the first show, with a line that would make prime-time programmers blanch: "God can't be perfect; everything he makes dies." By the time Lily Tomlin came on to host the fifth show, SN had a cult following. She made it a smash, her double-edged style and swift undercuts setting off SN's frenzied variety. Suddenly, everyone wanted to act as host: Richard Pryor, Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the British satirists, and this week Dick Cavett. The writers, of course, want someone a little different: King Olav of Norway, Patty Hearst ("but we don't want to blow her defense"), Ernest and Julio Gallo with Cesar Chavez as their guest.

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