Can you believe that Saturday Night Live was almost canceled in the 1980s? The docu-series SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night devoted an entire episode to SNL‘s 1985-1986 Season 11, which was at the same time groundbreaking and disastrous. However, SNL as a franchise might have needed to come so close to death for executive producer Lorne Michaels tofigure out how the show did and did not work.
It’s an infamous season of the long-running series, though not necessarily because it was the worst. See for yourself. Highlights from the season are available to watch on Peacock. The sketches are not all terrible. But Season 11, as Beyond Saturday Night aptly puts it, is weird–and not always in a good way.
‘Saturday Night Live’ Season 11 Was a Pivotal Year
Michaels, who left his brainchild after the first five seasons, had returned to his former role as executive producer with a new cast that felt doomed from the start. The ensemble combined comedians with movie stars like Randy Quaid, Robert Downey Jr., and Anthony Michael Hall. It featured the show’s first openly gay cast member, Terry Sweeney, the first Black woman main cast member, Danitra Vance, and the then-unknown Joan Cusack. However, the first few episodes did not introduce America to the cast very well. They weren’t gelling as an ensemble. One soon-to-be famous cast member, Damon Wayans, deliberately got himself fired mid-season. (Thank goodness he did: the Wayans family went on to create In Living Color four years later.) At the end of the season, all but four members of the Season 11 cast were fired as well. Only Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn from the main cast, A. Whitney Brown from the featured cast, and Weekend Update anchor Dennis Miller survived to Season 12.
Because of Michael’s return, critics came to the Season 11 premiere with fresh and hungry eyes. Saturday Night Live was already on the chopping block. He was expected to save the show, but headlines reading “Saturday Night Dead” soon started cropping up. (As Sweeney told a journalist named Suzanne Stevens of Tribune Media at the time, Michaels brushed that off and told the cast he’d heard that punny insult for 10 years. “It isn’t something new,” Sweeney said.)
However, early negative reviews about an all-new cast became another hurdle that the show had to overcome. They tried getting ahead of the criticism by joking about how bad it was. That didn’t work. In one stand-out episode, auteur Francis Ford Coppola appeared as himself for the entire episode and directed the show, with minimalist composer Philip Glass as the musical guest, to give it a more prestigious edge. The audience wasn’t there while the episode was good, according to the documentary.
The final sketch of the season showed the entire cast, as themselves, getting burned alive by Michaels himself–except Lovitz, who, of course, was saved in real life as well. When the show returned the next year, Madonna read a “statement” from NBC claiming that Season 11 had been a “horrible, horrible dream” that was over now. Woof! The poor cast did not deserve that brutal treatment. But as a lesson of what not to do, Season 11 was effective for the show’s eventual return to success and longevity.
Season 11 Showed How Not To Cast ‘Saturday Night Live’
“Now I had something to prove again,” Michaels says in Beyond Saturday Night. “We started to get people in again whose one focus was to be funny.” The “all-star strategy”, which had worked for the Lorne-less seasons executive produced by Dick Ebersol with Christopher Guest, Martin Short, and Billy Crystal, failed Michaels. From then on, he sought experienced but unknown talent. Comedy nerds might recognize new SNL hires from the stand-up and improv scene, or online videos. (Some notable exceptions over the years include more established comedians Janeane Garofalo, Michael McKean, and Kenan Thompson.) But for most of the people tuning in at 11:30 ET, this is their first time seeing these comedians. This was Michaels’ instinct when creating the first ever SNL ensemble, after all.
In July 1986, ahead of Season 12, Michaels assured critics at a press conference of this strategy change/return to form. “I think they will definitely be seasoned performers,” he said, according to the L.A. Times wire. “I think it was a mistake having too many new faces and too many people who have never worked together before, and also too many people.”
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Season 11 Proved the ‘SNL’ Writers & Cast Have to Gel
The documentary admits that the writers did not know how to write for the Season 11 cast, especially the younger members. Michael Hall was still a teenager! There’s a lovely meta moment in the Coppola episode where the director criticizes the show for not having black women writers who can write for Vance. Wayans’ frustration with his sketches getting cut in favor of other writers who cast him in supporting and/or stereotypical racist roles led to him acting out and deliberately getting himself fired.
Sure, the environment at Saturday Night Live can be cut-throat, but the writers have to actually want to write for the performers and create characters with them. Collaboration, representing the cast in the writer’s room, and avoiding generation gaps are key. Season 11 made that clear for the show going forward. When the show returned, the writers and cast immediately started working on recurring characters. Successfully, too. According to People, Michaels’ then ex-wife and OG SNL writer Rosie Shuster worked with Dana Carvey that season to create the iconic Church Lady.
The next year, once Season 12 was rolling, Michaels told the AP News that the show had figured out how to be edgy and politically relevant again like they were in the 70s. “Last year, it was like dissent was rudeness,” Michaels said. “It was just bad form. And people would say it was a little aberrant window of opportunity, as it were, that Saturday Night came out right after Watergate.” As the AP writer Kathryn Baker noted in that piece, the early 80s seasons with Dick Ebersol at the helm instead of Michaels were notably tame when it came to satire and politics. (The recent film Saturday Night has a fascinating take on the Michaels and Ebersol relationship.) Season 11 brought that back in small bites, and it’s kind of a miracle that the season’s failure didn’t scare Michaels and the producers from pushing that envelope in the future.
And the show continues to take creative risks as well. We saw that in the 1990s with the Saturday TV Funhouse animated segments and in the 2000s with The Lonely Island‘s Digital Shorts. Timothee Chalamet singing obscure Bob Dylan songs as the host and musical guest in 2025 is a great example, too. The “weird season” is behind us, but Saturday Night Live lives and, thankfully, they can still get weird.
SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is available to stream on Peacock in the U.S.
SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night
- Release Date
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January 16, 2025
