“It was extremely challenging”: the ‘Saturday Night Live’ star who called the show a “living hell”
Not everyone is cut out for Saturday Night Live, but the downside is that nobody is in a position to figure that out until they start appearing on the show, by which point it’s too late to do anything.
The best they can hope for is that their contract won’t be renewed, or they could always quit or even put themselves in a position to be fired. Not everyone gets to be Kenan Thompson, who’s been absorbed into the furniture over the last two decades, and for many, SNL has been a long, hard slog.
Or, in some cases, a short, hard slog, with several Studio 8H alumni cutting their ties with the weekly sketch series as quickly as possible. Laurie Metcalf wasn’t one of them, but she still set a record by becoming the show’s shortest-tenured full-time performer after appearing in a solitary episode.
Harry Shearer must have been a glutton for punishment, though, because he signed up twice. The actor, comedian, writer, producer, musician, and Simpsons veteran originally joined SNL in the summer of 1979, and he hated the experience so much that he was gone by the end of his first season.
“It was just not a real pleasant place to work,” he ruminated. When asked to elaborate on what made it that way, he could only rustle up two words, albeit two words that said everything they needed to: “Living hell.” Shearer cited the organisation, the treatment of the cast, and the material as his main bugbears, which is just about everything involved in making Saturday Night Live a success.
“It was smarter and subtler and meaner than the way they treat cattle,” he elaborated. “I’ve talked about it way too much in public anyway. I’m trying to be discreet about it at this point, but it was about as far from pleasant as you can possibly get. It was extremely challenging.”
Still, after jumping ship with Lorne Michaels and everyone else after the fifth season, Shearer was somehow convinced to return under Dick Ebersol’s stewardship. What made it stranger was that he was hotter than ever off the back of Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap, but he was still convinced to make a comeback, bringing co-star Christopher Guest with him, who didn’t like it, either.
Were things better the second time around? In a word, no. “I was there for a year, left, and came back five years later when I thought things had changed,” Shearer sighed. “And found to my dismay they hadn’t.” By January 1985, he was gone for good, and this time, there was no chance he’d ever be coming back.
Clearly, he hadn’t learned his lesson from his first go-around, and it’s enough to make you wonder why someone who hated their first year on Saturday Night Live would even contemplate doing it again. Call it karma if you want, but nobody should have been surprised that history repeated itself.
