Live from New York: The First 5 Years of Saturday Night Live (2005 TV Special) User Reviews

Live from New York, it's Saturday Night...

[2faraway · 8/10 · 8 January 2006]

Ahhh... Saturday Night Live. This is a pretty good documentary about the heyday of SNL (the first five years 1975-1980) that was originally made for broadcast by NBC.

It includes many great interviews with the cast and writers (including Chevy Chase, Dan Akroyd, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris and others), mixed with lots of quick flashes of classic sketches and musical guests. The interviews are fairly candid and I learned a few things about the cast that I didn't know.

Watching this special made me yearn for the days when SNL was edgy and funny. Viewing the show now most of the time is a chore. Do yourself a favor and pick up this DVD. It's money well spent for fans of classic Saturday Night Live.

Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!

[jimwhittaker02 · 10/10 · 15 January 2006]

The first five years of Saturday Night Live set the tone, and the bar, for the cultural institution that followed. In 1975, no outlet existed on television for the comic sensibilities of the counterculture. Baby boomers were being given a watered-down taste of the times with the Carol Burnett Show, Sonny and Cher and the Bob Hope specials. When Johnny Carson announced that he would prefer not to have Tonight Show reruns shown on the weekend, NBC President Herbert Schlosser proposed starting a late-night variety show that would appeal to young people. Although network research suggested that the show's intended audience would never stay home on Saturday night, the project was approved, and late-night programming head Dick Ebersol contacted a young Canadian producer and Monty Python enthusiast named Lorne Michaels.

Writers were hired and cast members auditioned, including some of the best talent from National Lampoon and Second City and Groundlings improv groups. With sketches that touched on edgy topics of sexuality and drugs and rock groups as the musical guests (then shunned by the Tonight Show), NBC's Saturday Night quickly became television's only mirror for its young, intelligent audience. Chevy Chase quickly skyrocketed to fame, and the other cast members soon followed, with John Belushi parlaying his gonzo persona into success with Animal House and a number one album with the Blues Brothers. With its reputation for both quirky repeated characters (the Coneheads, the Czech Brothers) and a willingness to present the unexpected (Andy Kaufman, Michael O'Donoghue's Mr. Mike), Saturday Night Live became a creative force as important as Your Show of Shows and Monty Python's Flying Circus.

This documentary is an oral history of the show's groundbreaking beginnings, told by the cast members, crew, producers and executives that made it happen. Anecdotes are illustrated with many clips from early sketches and musical acts and photos from the time. The cast members are discussed in individual segments, interspersed with a run-down of each of the first five years, including favorite moments, battles with the censors, and even original audition clips. The DVD makes a wonderful companion piece to the unrelated SNL interview book "Live From New York" by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, and is well worth watching by anyone who watched the show during its formative years or wonders how it all began.