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Then, out of the ashes, a renaissance of sorts. For the 1986-87 season, Michaels pieced together a cast that finally took hold and is now starting its fourth season together. Only one of them -- the silky, moonfaced Jon Lovitz, creator of the pathological-liar character -- seems to capture the old spirit: like Belushi or Aykroyd or Radner, he gets laughs by simply showing up onstage. Still, there's plenty of talent on hand: Dana Carvey, a pixieish comic with devilish impressions of George Bush and Jimmy Stewart; Victoria Jackson, a ditsily appealing blond; and the sparkling, versatile Jan Hooks. If none seem destined for stardom, they have at least been together long enough to get comfortable.
The writers are more comfortable with them too. Carvey's Bush impersonation galvanized the troupe into some sharp political satire on the '88 campaign. In one inspired sketch during the Iran-contra affair, President Reagan (ah, that's Phil Hartman) puts on his familiar bumbling act in public, then turns into a whipcracking boss in private, directing every detail of the covert operation, down to computing interest on the money stored in Swiss bank accounts. The show's movie parodies have also had some shrewd twists: Carvey, for example, playing Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant in Rain Man -- who turns out to be giving gambling tips to Pete Rose.
The show, in short, is once again delivering laughs. So why, for a veteran fan, does the new Saturday Night Live still seem like a pale imitation of its old self? For one thing, the most popular bits -- Carvey's Church Lady, the body-building brothers Hans and Franz -- are the weakest parts of the show, crowd pleasers that depend on makeup gimmicks rather than nimble gags. Too many sketches are pat and obvious in ways that the old group wouldn't have tolerated (a team of ad executives, marooned on an island, worries more about meetings and market surveys than about building a raft to escape). The live production, meanwhile, is more polished but lacks the old gleam. The actors now get extensively made up for their impressions (Chevy used to do Gerald Ford without even changing his voice). Yet the skits seem more ragged and underrehearsed than they were during the seat-of-the-pants '70s.
In those days, SNL writers would sometimes reject comic ideas with the put- down "That's Carol Burnett." It was their code language for material that was too broad, too mainstream. Saturday Night Live may not quite have become the Carol Burnett Show of the '80s, but complacency has crept in. Perhaps it was inevitable. TV anniversaries, after all, serve another important function. They remind us that shows grow old.