How to Make a Good Sketch Show

After reading Howard Rosenberg’s review of “Saturday Night Special” (“So Far, Call It Anything but ‘Special,’ ” Calendar, April 15), I have to ask: Are we really surprised that the show was so terrible? This sentiment is not directed solely at Roseanne or her production but more upon the way these types of shows are developed.

Every season a studio or two puts the word out that they are developing a show along the lines of what “SCTV” or “Saturday Night Live” used to be. They send various and sundry casting directors and talent executives across the country to find various and sundry improvisational comedians, put them on videotape and send the tapes to the networks for approval.

What most of these studio development executives fail to recognize is that history is always a valuable asset (this can apply to many areas of television but I want to limit my comments). Every one of the sketch shows that have had any kind of successful run (“SCTV,” the original cast of “Saturday Night Live,” “Kids in the Hall”) have been developed with a group of actors or comedians who have had the opportunity of working together for an extended period of time prior to their appearance on television.

Even the so-called granddaddy of them all, “Your Show of Shows,” was created from a group of performers and writers who were interconnected through one particular writer-producer, Max Liebman, and their mutual experiences from vaudeville. Of course there is an alternative, creating a show with your family (“The Marx Brothers,” “In Living Color”).

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Television “sketch shows” by definition are probably the hardest productions to create and sustain. When a sitcom or an hour drama is developed and a pilot is produced (no easy task), the weekly writing staff has at least an apparent advantage of working off of a defined set of characters. This daunting task of writing quality episodes in a short period of time can only be that more challenging without the benefit of a defined “franchise.”

What most of the members of successful sketch shows had going for them was the experience of previously working together that allowed them to develop a certain communication and tone that had to give their writers (some of which were themselves) a great help during those long hours within the short week between shows. But instead, most of the studios search for those five or six separate individuals who will be thrown together for five or six days to create history--and fail.

Perhaps it is easy for me to say that television networks should be more patient and look for the next improvisational or comedic group that emerges before they throw together another bunch of actors in a room, but considering that the few successful sketch shows (ratings-wise and creative-wise) were created from such stock, I might actually be doing us all a big favor.