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To thank for all this, we have the seven benign loonies of the real SCTV: John Can dy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara and Dave Thomas, who also write and stage most of the material they perform. NBC, an outfit that sometimes looks like a Caballero/Prickley collaboration played straight, has kept SCTV on late weekend nights almost as a poor relation of the net work's much vaunted Saturday Night Live. In fact, some SNL originals (Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner) came from Canada's Second City troupe, which nurtured SCTV.
The new SNL, extensively overhauled and buffed to a fine gloss, has registered some gains from the disasters of last season. Up against its pale predecessor, the new SNL looks pretty good. But then so would Richard Simmons' exercise show. The writers of SNL still work too hard at being Big City hip. On SCTV, they act as though they never heard of hip and could care less.
That may be one advantage of doing a show in Canada. The SCTV troupe writes and rehearses in Toronto, shoots in Edmonton, and launches the results to the world outside in the same reckless way they are alleged to have sent up the SCTV satellite, which looks suspiciously like a hotdog rotisserie.
On SCTV the performers mesh closely, in part because many of them have been together for six years and also because they seem more interested in laughs than personalities. This is not a group of co medians; this is an ensemble of fine comic actors.
Not since the high old days of the Ernie Kovacs Show has anyone used the tricks and techniques of television to make such comic cap ital; such consistently capital comedy and such deadeye, fall-down-laughing satire has not been seen since Monty Python, and maybe even Your Show of Shows.
Last summer NBC ordered up nine new 90-min. segments. These have included a ruthless parody of a feminist musical revue, staged at a dinner theater, called I'm Takin ' My Own Head, Screwin' It On Right, and No Guy 's Gonna Tell Me That It Ain 't, and an SCTV movie of the week, starring Bobby Bittman as Julius Caesar, who is assassinated because Rome cannot stand his one-liners. Promised in the near fu ture is The Battle of the PBS Network Stars, featuring Economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman in a spirited bicycle race.
The SCTV troupe frets about keeping the quality consistently high under pro duction demands from the network. Even though they have shown no signs of flag ging, they know and worry about the possibility of network pressures eventually di luting the show. "It's important for our group to have control," says Rick Moranis who once brought off a pluperfect rendering of Woody Allen acting Robert De Niro's mirror soliloquy in Taxi Driver. "I SCTV becomes a Carol Burnett show for kids, we'll quit." Talk is cheap, though They all know Guy Caballero would never accept their resignations.