The worst season in ‘Saturday Night Live’ history, according to Tom Hanks: “You could easily say it should have been off the air”
Any TV series that runs for years, never mind half a century, is going to experience plenty of ups and downs, with Tom Hanks pinpointing one season of Saturday Night Live as the sketch show’s nadir.
In his defence, despite it sounding like behaviour unbecoming of Hollywood’s most wholesome A-lister, he’s hardly alone. It would be ridiculous to think that SNL would be able to maintain consistency over five decades, and it just so happened that its worst-ever run was when the actor made his hosting debut.
The two-time Academy Award winner has become a fixture of the late-night staple, fronting ten episodes between December 1985 and April 2020, as well as making almost a dozen cameo appearances. The first time he served as compere, he was still best known as the guy from Splash, five episodes into season 11.
Things hadn’t gotten off to the best start after the disastrous Madonna-fronted premiere, and it didn’t get much better. After a five-year sabbatical, creator Lorne Michaels returned as executive producer and showrunner, but opted to change his approach to sounding out new cast members.
Instead of taking the tried-and-trusted route of recruiting up-and-coming comedians from the stand-up and improvisational circuit, he went after semi-established names. That led to Robert Downey Jr, Anthony Michael Hall, Randy Quaid, and Joan Cusack being brought in, and none of them survived beyond the season finale.
They were all experienced performers on stage and/or screen, but when it came to live comedy, they were immediately exposed as being out of their depth. Most episodes were panned, the ratings continually trended downward, and things had gotten so bad that NBC president Brandon Tartikoff had planned to make the May 24th, 1986 episode its last, until he was convinced to give the show a stay of execution.
“It was a sort of cobbled-together cast. Lorne put it together in like six weeks,” Hanks recalled in Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “So it was definitely a sense that the whole staff was either finding their bearings for the first time, or trying to re-find their bearings after an extreme absence.”
Being the kind of person who won’t say a bad word about anything or anyone, Hanks did manage to put a semi-positive spin on SNL‘s worst-ever year. “But in some ways, it was one of those years that Saturday Night Live showed itself to be this enduring showbusiness tradition; this entity, this classic thing,” he explained.
“Because you could easily say it should have been off the air; that’s what everybody wanted it to be,” he added. “You know, Saturday Night Dead. How often did you read that by the time I was on the show for the first time?” The answer was plenty, with Michaels’ comeback getting off to a shambolic start and somehow conspiring to worsen from there. Season 11 has few defenders, and if Tom Hanks thinks it could, and maybe should, have been cancelled, that tells you how dire things were.
