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‘Saturday Night Live’s’ formative five years

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Times Staff Writer

This fall “Saturday Night Live” turns 30 -- an age past which, the generation that created it liked to say, no one could be trusted. NBC marks the anniversary early, this Sunday, with “Live from New York: The First Five Years of Saturday Night Live,” a surprisingly affecting stumble down memory lane. A combination of talking heads, all now way past 30, clips and photos, it tells the story of the series’ conception, gestation and early life, from its debut in October 1975 -- just before producer Lorne Michaels’ 31st birthday -- to his departure, with most of the cast, in May 1980. (He would be back five years after that, and is still back.) Among other things, it’s an occasion to remember how good it could be and the range of moods in which it worked, from rage to tenderness -- surprisingly, what stands out most about the show in its early years, at least as shown here, is its sweetness. The Bees, the Nerds, the Wild and Crazy Guys, Gilda Radner’s brilliant “Judy Miller Show,” even John Belushi’s Samurai, all have that quality.

And it all seems funnier than it did, say, 10 years ago.

Thirty years is a long time, and especially long in the life of a television show -- only “The Tonight Show,” among entertainment programs, has outlasted “SNL.” Thirty years before “Saturday Night Live,” there was no television comedy, there being no television to speak of. When the first episode aired, TV comedy was defined almost entirely by three-camera sitcoms -- with Norman Lear and MTM still the power producers -- and a few straggling variety show of which only “The Carol Burnett Show” mattered much. Gabe Kaplan of “Welcome Back, Kotter” was the sitcomical face of stand-up; Robin Williams was still three years away from “Mork and Mindy.” David Letterman had just moved to L.A. and was selling jokes to Paul Lynde and Bob Hope; he wouldn’t make his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” until 1978. Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien (who wrote for “SNL” from 1987 to ‘91) were still in junior high school.

Like most revolutions, it looked to history for inspiration; it was a conscious revival of the days of Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” when TV was live and open to disaster. But where those earlier programs were broadcast live out of necessity -- predating, as they did, the use of videotape -- “SNL” was live by choice, just to make things exciting. It espoused a rock-concert aesthetic and created a similar kind of community. In a world before TiVo, when even VCRs were rare, the home audience also had to be there when it happened (notwithstanding West Coast tape delay). That it was an actual shared moment made you feel that the show belonged to you. And, unlike “The Tonight Show” or other late-night programs that taped in the afternoon, “SNL” was authentically after-hours. The cast went to work at 11:30 and got off at 1. After which the parties began.

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Of course, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was, in a way, the flowering of a line of countercultural comedy that went back into the ‘60s, to the Firesign Theater and the Credibility Gap (whose Harry Shearer would twice join “SNL”), and to the Harvard Lampoon, which became the National Lampoon, which spawned “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” whose contributors included Belushi, Radner, Chevy Chase and Bill Murray and which was overseen by Michael O’Donoghue, who would be “Saturday Night’s” first head writer. It had roots also in the Second City troupes of Chicago and Toronto, which provided most of the original cast and many members afterward, and from the beginning was aligned with a slightly older group of left-of-center actors and comedians including George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, Eric Idle -- producer Michaels first met Chase in line to see “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” -- and Richard Pryor, whose now-unlikely “word-association” routine with Chase is an escalating exchange of racial epithets, is in Sunday’s retrospective.

It was also, perhaps not coincidentally, a moment for New York. “SNL” premiered smack in the middle of the decade of “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver,” of “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan.” CBGB birthed punk rock in ‘75; Studio 54 opened two years later. Like much else the city produced, “Saturday Night Live” was glamorous because it operated, or seemed to operate, outside the bounds of polite society. And if “SNL” was not punk itself -- as demonstrated by Michaels’ banning Elvis Costello from the show for switching songs on the air -- it profited from the proximity and punk’s air of slash-and-burn renewal.

The celebrity that quickly accrued to the cast was a rock-star celebrity, certified by the Rolling Stone magazine covers, the drugs, the sex, the entourages and the similar work hours. Even the internecine squabbling was part of the rock paradigm -- the Who and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles didn’t always get along either. Of course, this all turned out badly in the end, especially for Belushi, who died of early fame in 1982. “The First Five Years” is somewhat selective as to the darker details of those times, but neither do those interviewed deny or recant their youthful incaution, which makes the program feel particularly grown-up for prime-time television.

Chase went Hollywood early in the second season; Dan Aykroyd and Belushi left after the fourth. This looked like success at the time, but Chase’s film oeuvre tops out with “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” and Belushi, whose early death confirmed in romantic minds suspicions of his genius, did not fare much better. However much you might love “Animal House,” his TV work remains his deepest. Of the early players, only Murray went on to do work that one might call “surprising in a good way,” while Aykroyd finally carved a mainstream career as a character actor in “good,” and sometimes actually good, movies, and Jane Curtin starred in a couple of hit sitcoms. But watching “The First Five Years,” it’s hard not to notice all the unfulfilled promise.

Can “Saturday Night Live” still be trusted, now that it’s (almost) over 30? “Trusted to do what?” is the question. NBC trusts in its continuing popularity; in January the network renewed Michaels’ contract until 2012, by which time this king of youth comedy will be approaching 70. Succeeding generations of “SNL” performers have found favor with succeeding generations of viewers. At the same time, with every passing year it is less likely it will show you something you haven’t seen before, if you are old enough to have seen things before. It has left the margins and become the mainstream, which is, after all, just the way things go. The most exciting time of any enterprise is when it’s new, when the page is blank and might contain anything at all.

But it was also the times. There was anger in the air then, and love, where now there is only irony.

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