Scot Bertram

Lorne Returns, Builds an Entirely New Cast, Then Burns it All Down

The eleventh season of Saturday Night Live started entirely from scratch, save the return of the show’s original creator, Lorne Michaels. With producer Dick Ebersol and big-name cast members like Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest out the door, Michaels brought in a number of Hollywood stars with almost no sketch comedy experience. And their presence was met with a torrent of negative media criticism.

Anthony Michael Hall, Randy Quaid, Joan Cusack, and Robert Downey, Jr. (what ever happened to that guy?) stepped on to SNL from movie screens. Jon Lovitz came to the cast from the Groundlings in Los Angeles. Terry Sweeney was a veteran of New York City drag shows. And Danitra Vance was a cashier at Bloomingdale’s in New York when she found out she got the job.

But perhaps most impactful was the addition of Pittsburgh-area stand-up comic Dennis Miller to the Weekend Update desk. Miller immediately transformed the moribund news break into a lively, entertaining stand-up bit that would serve as the blueprint for generations of news-comedy television shows.

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