Saturday Night Live season 6

• 1. Introduction

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  Saturday Night Live's sixth season began on the 15th of November 1980 with a cast no one had ever seen before. Lorne Michaels was gone. The writers were gone. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players were gone. In their place stood six newcomers, one of whom introduced himself on camera as a cross between Chevy Chase and Bill Murray. The season that followed would become one of the most documented disasters in American television history. How did a show that had defined late-night comedy for five years collapse so completely in one season? What happened inside the control room, the writers' room, and the 17th floor of Rockefeller Center when everything that had made SNL special was stripped away at once?

• 2. Jean Doumanian Takes Charge

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  Jean Doumanian had spent five years as an associate producer on SNL before Lorne Michaels left and she was handed the executive producer role. Michaels had expected the show to go on hiatus during his absence; NBC executives had led him to believe as much. Instead, the network moved forward without him. Doumanian faced the task of building a cast entirely from scratch.

  The audition process for an African-American male cast member to fill Garrett Morris's previous role became one of the season's most consequential stories. Over two days in mid-September, roughly thirty Black actors and comedians came through the writers' wing on the 17th floor of Rockefeller Center. Doumanian was leaning toward stand-up comedian Charlie Barnett. Talent coordinator Neil Levy had someone else in mind: a 19-year-old from Roosevelt, Long Island, named Eddie Murphy.

  Murphy had called Levy himself, begging for a shot. He was initially turned down because, as the story went, the Black cast member had already been chosen. Some accounts say Doumanian preferred Robert Townsend for the role. Eventually, after considerable pressure from colleagues and staff, Murphy was added as a featured player beginning with the fourth episode. Doumanian also passed on Jim Carrey, Mercedes Ruehl, Sandra Bernhard, John Goodman, and Paul Reubens. Andy Kaufman offered a weekly segment and was turned down.

  The repertory players Doumanian did hire were Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthius, Joe Piscopo, Ann Risley, and Charles Rocket. Yvonne Hudson, Matthew Laurance, and Patrick Weathers joined as featured players. Hudson had appeared in 14 episodes of SNL from 1978 to 1980 as an uncredited actress. Her recognition as SNL's first Black female cast member came when she was credited as a featured player in 1980.

• 3. A Season Under Siege

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  The reviews arrived quickly and they were brutal. The Associated Press called the new SNL "essentially crude, sophomoric and most of all self-consciously cool." The New York Times wrote that the season "looked almost exactly as it did in previous years, but actually only the shell remained," and called it "nothing so much as an unfunny parody of its predecessor."

  Newsday's Marvin Kitman called the show "offensive and raunchy" and, worse, not funny. "This new edition is terrible," he wrote. "Call it 'Saturday Night Dead on Arrival'." The Washington Star said the humor was "almost completely lost, despite desperate attempts to wring it out of raunch."

  Tom Shales led his review with the headline "FROM YUK TO YECCCH." His opening sentence read: "Vile from New York - It's Saturday Night." He called the show a "snide and sordid embarrassment" that imitated the ribaldry of the Michaels years without "the least compensating satirical edge," concluding it was "just haplessly pointless tastelessness."

  Doumanian herself turned the blame toward the writing. According to writer Billy Brown, she would sit down with a tape of the show and begin a sketch-by-sketch critique, telling the assembled writers: "Watch this. And I hope you hate it, because you wrote it." Behind the scenes, the head writer situation was unstable. Mason Williams, a musician and veteran of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, was first hired as head writer but left after clashing with Doumanian. Jeremy Stevens and Tom Moore took over for the remaining Doumanian episodes. Author David Hofstede later included this season in his book What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History as one of 25 runners-up.

• 4. The Charles Rocket Incident

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  On the 21st of February 1981, the episode built a running sketch around the "Who Shot J.R.?" craze from the soap opera Dallas. The parody was titled "Who Shot C.R.?" In the final sketch, cast member Charles Rocket was shot. Dallas star Charlene Tilton was hosting that week. During the goodnights, with Rocket seated in a wheelchair still in character, Tilton asked him his thoughts on being shot. His reply was unscripted. "Oh man, it's the first time I've been shot in my life. I'd like to know who the fuck did it."

  In the studio, the audience and some cast members laughed and applauded. Inside the control room, the reaction was the opposite. Director Dave Wilson, believing the show was finished, threw his script papers in the air and said "Well, that's the end of live television" before walking out of the room.

  NBC president of entertainment Brandon Tartikoff moved quickly. He fired Doumanian and hired Dick Ebersol, the original developer of SNL, to take over. On the 10th of March 1981, Doumanian told Variety that she was "stepping aside" in hopes "the network will be successful in realizing the full potential of the show."

• 5. Bill Murray Walks In

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  Bill Murray hosted the episode on the 7th of March 1981, just two weeks after the Rocket incident. The invitation came through a personal friendship with Doumanian, and Murray agreed to host as a favor. The situation inside the writers' room had deteriorated so badly that some writers asked Murray's brother, writer Brian Doyle-Murray, to keep Bill away. They did not want the ratings to improve and extend the season.

  Murray's cold open addressed the crisis directly. He told the cast that in spite of everything, "it just doesn't matter" - a line drawn from his 1979 film Meatballs. He also told Rocket, on camera, to watch his mouth and clean it up. Writer Pamela Norris described the arrival as transformative: "It was like The Truth Teller had arrived."

  By the end of the episode, Murray had named his former cast members one by one and apologized to them for appearing on the show. When Rocket attempted to hug him during the goodnights, Murray rebuffed him. Years later, interviewed for the book Live from New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, Murray said he believed Doumanian had not been given a fair shot, and that the cast was unprepared for the demands of the show, the sudden attention, and the task of replacing the original cast.

  Murray's episode also had an unintended consequence. It convinced Tartikoff to keep the show running for one more week, a decision that set the stage for Ebersol's takeover and the restructuring that followed.

• 6. Ebersol Rebuilds

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  Dick Ebersol's first two weeks in charge produced immediate personnel changes. He fired Gottfried, Risley, and Rocket, replacing them with Robin Duke, Tim Kazurinsky, and Tony Rosato. By the end of the season, he would remove the rest of the 1980 cast except for Murphy and Piscopo. Ebersol had originally hoped to bring in John Candy and Catherine O'Hara from the sketch comedy series SCTV. Candy turned down the offer. O'Hara accepted, then quit almost immediately after a production meeting in which original SNL writer Michael O'Donoghue berated the cast and writers over the show's failures.

  Tartikoff had invited Ebersol to observe from the control booth in secret before the transition was made official. The cast and writers had no idea he was there. Ebersol's first produced episode aired on the 11th of April 1981, featuring Chevy Chase on Weekend Update and Al Franken asking viewers to "put SNL to sleep." Ebersol allowed Franken's tongue-in-cheek routine on air as a deliberate gesture toward the original cast.

  Franken and Tom Davis had been promised they could host the following week. With a writers' strike looming, they wrote material and mailed it to themselves so their postmark could prove they had not violated the strike. Ebersol ultimately cancelled the remaining episodes and promised the duo they could host the season premiere that fall. As summer ended, Ebersol decided he no longer needed a link to the original cast. Franken says Ebersol never returned his calls. Franken would not return to SNL until four years later, as a featured cast member.

• 7. Episodes That Never Aired

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  The 1981 Writers Guild of America strike ended the season at episode 13, cancelling four scheduled episodes. The episode set for the 25th of April 1981 would have been hosted by Dan Aykroyd, a former cast member. Aykroyd would not actually host SNL until the 28th season finale in 2003. The episode planned for the 9th of May 1981 would have brought back Steve Martin, who did not return to host until 1986.

  Brooke Shields was scheduled to host on the 16th of May 1981 and has yet to host the show at all. The final cancelled episode, set for the 23rd of May 1981, would have featured Buck Henry, a frequent SNL host who never hosted again after the strike prevented his appearance. The episode scheduled for the 14th of March 1981, between Murray's episode and the season break, would have been hosted by Robert Guillaume with musical guest Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Subsequent reruns of surrounding episodes partially edit out the announcement of that planned episode during the goodnights segment.