In honor of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th Anniversary, we will be going through its rich and varied history and breaking down its legendary run into easy to digest eras. Some eras might last for years, others only one season. But each era is one that either marked a change in the show, were driven by a remarkable personality of a star, or marked a special part of the history of the program. Today, we cover arguably the worst SNL season: the Jean Doumanian season.
Let’s be honest here: anyone who took over for Lorne Michaels and the original cast of Saturday Night Live would have has a rough time of it. You could have hired Norman Lear as a producer, Neil Simon as head writer and built the cast around Robin Williams and people would still find fault in it because it wasn’t Lorne, Gilda and Garrett.
But at least if NBC hired any of the people listed above, they’d be getting people who at least knew what they were doing.
Instead, they hired Jean Doumanian.
On paper, if you squinted really tightly, Doumanian might have seemed like a good choice. She was with the show for 4 1/2 years under Michaels. She also worked briefly on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell and was friends with Woody Allen. She appeared to be a safe choice to carry over Michaels’ legacy without any of the controversy the previous administration.
However, carrying over Michaels’ legacy was made hard due to the mass exodus of people who left when Lorne did. Whether it be out of loyalty to Lorne, a dislike of Doumanian, severe burnout or a combination of the above, all the cast and most of the writers left. Only Brian Doyle-Murray remained from the Lorne era. Doumanian had to start from scratch.
Doumanian, unlike Michaels, was not a writer. She was a talent coordinator. Even though she put herself in the role of script supervisor, she had no writing experience, or much experience running a show for that matter. Michaels was able to mold his writing staff to be the best that they could be. All Doumanian could do is write vague bon mots like “Make it Funnier” or “Should Be More Outrageous” on the tops of their scripts.
Then there was her casting, which Doumanian did through a nationwide search. I’m not saying that her casting was completely horrible. Then fact that Gilbert Gottfried, Charles Rocket, Denny Dillion, Matthew Laurence and Joe Piscopo went on to have a career after this debacle of a season proves that they had talent. But the people Doumanian passed on went on to far more fame- Jim Carrey, future Oscar-winner Mercedes Ruehl, Sandra Bernhard, Emmy-Winner John Goodman, Emmy-Winning screenwriter Larry Karaszewski and future Pee-Wee Herman Paul Reubens. Andy Kaufman offered to become a recurring guest and was declined. Harry Shearer offered to stay on so Doumanian could have a cast member that knew what they were doing. He says Doumanian told him she preferred a cast that didn’t know what they were doing.
And, no, I am not giving Doumanian credit with discovering Eddie Murphy. By all accounts, her arm had to be twisted by talent coordinator Neil Levy to even consider Murphy.
Doumanian was trying to ape Michaels in her casting. Michaels’ cast had left the impression with the public of being a group of rowdy young geniuses gathered from all over North America who came together to magically gel into a comedic force. But most of the original cast came from the world of improv. And whether it was Second City or the Groundlings, you were working from the teachings of improv legend Del Close, so they all spoke the same language, And many of the cast did work with each other before, with Second City or National Lampoon. In other words, the original cast had experience working with each other (or a similar style to each other) doing sketches in front of a live audiences. Doumanian’s crew of stand-up comedians didn’t. And it showed.
But some things that hurt the show were out of Doumanian’s control. NBC slashed the show’s budget from $1,000,000 an episode to just $350,000, according to Doumanian. And then there is the press.
The media certainly had a love/hate relationship with Michaels’ SNL. But they had their knifes out for Doumanian. Especially the New York Daily News. The paper did a hatchet job, fed by disgruntled employees, on Doumanian in their October 22, 1980, edition. The article, released the day before the new cast was originally presented to the public for the first time, not only revealed the cast but also presented a chaotic backstage environment and painted Doumanian as a domineering “Ayatollah Doumanian.” Tom Shales, who wrote a eulogy for the show four years prior, title his preview of the season premiere “It Could Be Saturday Night Dead”
The first episode of the season aired on November 15, 1980 (which was after election season, a debut Michaels wanted if he stuck around but was refused.) It was greeted by middling to poor reviews. Many critics called the show out for being cruder than the Michaels regime (and considering the last season of Michaels’ tenure had a sketch set in a vomitorium, that’s saying a lot) but some said it did show potential.
Then came the second episode.
The second episode of Doumanian’ season is widely considered the worst episode of Saturday Night Live ever. Judging by what could be seen on Peacock, I think they might be right. Not all sketches are included for streaming (which make me wonder how bad the ones the cut out had to be), but all the “classics” are there: “Leather Weather Report,” “Jack the Stripper,” and “Commie Hunting Season.”
About that last one. That sketch provides my favorite moment of the episode. And I mean “favorite” in the most sarcastic and schadenfreude-laden way possible. The sketch came five days after six KKK Members and Nazis were acquitted for killing five Communist Workers Party members in North Carolina. The sketch was a ham-fisted attempt at political commentary. As the title indicates, the sketch posits that killing communists was now legal in North Carolina, A young man (Joe Piscopo) asks his uncle (Charles Rocket) how he could tell if a person is a communist or not. The uncle says this:
“Alls yous got to do is shoot you a Jew or a N-Word. Chances are better than even that you’ll be shooting a commie, anyhoo.”
Only they didn’t say “N-Word.” They said the real word, with the hard R at the end.
That line isn’t my favorite moment. It’s a repugnant line in a bad sketch. No, my favorite moment is what came after the line was said, as Piscopo and Rocket held for an uncomfortable four seconds for laughs that never came. There wasn’t even nervous laughter. Just an awkward silence. It was beautiful. The fact that they expected laughter. The look on Piscopo’s and Rocket’s faces. The tension you could feel in the studio. Everything about that moment was amazing.
The episode did not go over well with critics, but two critics’ opinion in particular proved deadly to Doumanian’s run as producer– NBC executives Brandon Tartikoff and Fred Silverman. Both were appalled by the episode. All of a sudden, the one NBC show that wasn’t a problem became one of biggest issue in a sea of turmoil. Jean Doumanian’s leash got incredibly shorter. Silverman wanted to fire her then and there. Tartikoff was willing to give her the chance to get better. She never did.
February 21, 1981. The show had descended to chaos behind the scenes by this time. NBC Executives were micromanaging Doumanian and the show. Creative meetings almost broke out in fist fights, The host for the night was Charlene Tilton, cast member of the very successful Dallas TV show. The show decided to parody the “Who Shot J.R.?” storyline that helped Dallas captivate the nation the year before.
Charles Rocket was cast in the J.R. role, and he was supposedly shot in the last sketch of the night. He came out during goodnight wearing bandages and in a wheelchair. When Tilton asked him about getting shot, Rocket said something that sealed Doumanian’s (and his) fate:
“I’d like to know who the fuck did it”
Rocket wouldn’t be the first person to say “Fuck” on SNL, and he wouldn’t be the last. But the fact that it appeared that he said it deliberately was the final straw that fast tracked Doumanian’s firing. She would work on only one more show, one hosted by Bill Murray, then she would be fired. Her replacement was Dick Ebersol.
Ebersol took the show off the air for several weeks, returning with a retooled version in April. Gone were cast members Gilbert Gottfried, Yvonne Hudson, Matthew Laurance, Ann Risley, and Charles Rocket, replaced by Second City Alums Robin Duke, Tim Kazurinsky and Tony Rosato. Only one episode was aired with the combo cast before a writer’s strike caused the show to go on a forced hiatus. The strike gave Ebersol the chance to revamp the show even further.
When the show came back on the air for its seventh season, the only members of Doumanian’s cast that remained were Joe Piscopo and a young comedian that Doumanian didn’t utilize until it was too late. A comedian that would save Saturday Night Live before becoming one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood history. That comedian is, if you haven’t guessed, Eddie Murphy. We’ll be talking about his impact on the show in our next installment.
