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Start Your Weekends With Fridays!
That was the ad line that promoted the first-ever episode of ABC’s live comedy series, Fridays, April 11, 1980. It’s fitting and ironic that the one and only thing that anyone remembers about this nearly-forgotten show, the first thing they say about it, even to this very day is the subject of its first “cold open”. A couple of young writers are sitting at a table, complaining that everybody’s comparing their new ABC show to NBC’s comedy sketch show, Saturday Night Live, and it seems so unfair. After all, Lorne Michaels was far from the first producer to put sketch comedy on the air mixed with rock performers. All of the unseen cast members on the other side of the table can be heard, agreeing about how unfair it is. Then the camera reverses angle, and we see that all of the Fridays comedians are dressed up in classic cliché SNL outfits: bees, coneheads, Blues Brothers, Roseanne Rosannadanna, Point and Counterpoint, Weekend Update.
Text scrolls up the screen: Lorne Michaels didn’t invent scrolling words on the screen to make an ironic point underlining or contradicting the spoken lines of the performers. Why isn’t anybody calling him an imitator? It was not only very funny, but nervy, a perfect start for a show whose young adult comedy genre requires at least the illusion of a little sassy bravery in the face of the powerful, and by 1980 that’s what SNL had become.
It was 41 years ago, hard to believe. On-screen, it sure doesn’t look it. Much of the young studio audience looked and dressed in ways that wouldn’t get a second glance today. They laughed at roughly the same sort of jokes that they’d be laughing at today: politicians are hypocritical vain bumpkins, copious references to pot, silly sexual double-entendres.
The rest of that first episode of Fridays varied in quality, of course. How could it not? A running gag about a talkative woman who shouts to you on an escalator wasn’t disturbing, but it wasn’t all that funny. Ditto a couple of seemingly abstract Samuel Beckett routines filtered through Monty Python. A stupid bar routine with two guys was terrible, but it must be said that very early SNL routines weren’t always in the groove either. Their own version of Weekend Update was, in truth, a version of a pre-SNL format probably first seen on US television in the American remake of That Was The Week That Was (1964-65). Melanie Chartoff was cool and authoritative as the news anchor.
This brings up similarities and differences between the casts. Some of the similarities merely have to do with workable, common comedy archetypes that have delivered the laughs since the days when the original Caesar occupied the original palace. Others are narrowly based on the personalities of the specific cast members, who’d spent years honing their acts in front of live audiences.
Fridays’ Larry David, a future multimillionaire, plays what amounts to The Jewish Guy every week, and Michael Richards plays The Tall Crazy Jewish Guy. They’d famously later work together in the Seinfeld era. They have no direct equivalent on SNL
But Fridays’ Maryedith Burrell is a pretty close equivalent of Gilda Radner, someone whose range extends from zany to childlike without being cloying. Not the same recipe, not exactly the same flavor, but many of the same ingredients.
Fridays’ Melanie Chartoff is similarly not exactly alike, but comparable in some ways, to SNL’s steely, confident Jane Curtin. Chartoff’s overall comedy persona is also similar to less well remembered SNL original cast member Laraine Newman, who tried with only sporadic success to find a role for herself as the semi-official Sexy Girl on the show but was never able to catch up to Curtin. Newman generally came across as a ditz or a hippie seductress. Curtin’s brand of sex appeal was more polished, mature and reserved. As one of the few cast members uninterested in nightlife, she became a good, chilly foil for the loutish behavior of the men. It’s a distinct comic role if you have the talent for it. Melanie Chartoff played it a little younger, the sardonic girl in the hot tub with a raised eyebrow and a knowing smirk.
One of the most striking cases of a difference between the casts of the two shows was Darrow Igus, Fridays’ The Black Guy, who correctly pointed out on camera that he’d already been given more of a chance than SNL had given Garrett Morris in five years. In fact, Darrow Igus had at least some of the daring and original flair of SNL’s next Black star, Eddie Murphy, who hadn’t been cast yet. For nearly a year, Igus had that particular comedy spotlight to himself, but it didn’t “take”, and he’s forgotten now.
(A side note: do you remember who George Coe is? I didn’t. He was a first-year SNL cast member who didn’t seem to have a lot to do, so Michaels dropped him for year 2. Given the show’s later success, this makes him something of a Pete Best. It’s odd to think that Coe was in the same show, the same time, as Chevy Chase, who quit after year 1 but is still popularly identified with SNL nearly a half-century later.)
SNL has had very little serious competition for its time slot, so it’s easy to overlook a difficult couple of years when the show seemed to be on its way out. The producers of Fridays might have sensed that their moment was right. In the spring of 1980, when Fridays went on the air, it was widely rumored that Lorne Michaels wasn’t coming back in the fall, and the contracts of the original cast weren’t being renewed. Silently confirming the rumors, Michaels gave out engraved souvenirs to the cast and crew, little models of the RCA Building with the caption, “Saturday Night Live, 1975-1980”.
The very last shot of the very last show that year was a fade-out on an NBC studios sign, “On The Air”, switching off. It sure looked like the brand-new Fridays had the field to itself.
But it didn’t, at least not quite yet. NBC surprised Michaels, and much of the TV industry, by announcing that the show would have a 1980-’81 season and putting Jean Doumanian, the show’s associate producer, in charge. It was presented as a bold, gutsy move, choosing a woman to run Saturday Night Live. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was Doumanian’s suitability for what, under Michaels, had been built into the closest thing that network TV had to a personal dictatorship.
Show business job titles, famously, can sometimes be inflated and deceptive, a good subject for another Ricochet post. Associate producer, in her case, meant Jean Doumanian was in charge of external talent relations: making deals and taking care of the hosts and bands that Lorne decided on, making sure the contracts were signed, champagne was sent to their hotel rooms, and the limos brought the artists to the studio in time. This is an important job, but it’s not the creative director of the whole show, nowhere near it. She’d never been in charge of a writing staff and had little to do with the regular weekly cast. Above all, she lacked Michaels’ sense of taste, or even an intuitive ability to know what SNL could get away with.
The TV industry was baffled. What was NBC thinking? Who advised them? Feminism, even the tamer version of forty years ago, made it awkward to raise these widespread doubts in the press. When SNL premiered in September 1980, the rebooted, Lorne-less show was in trouble almost from day one, widely derided as “Vile From New York, it’s Saturday Night!” It staggered through terrible reviews and big ratings losses as compared to the golden years. The new cast got mixed reviews. Joe Piscopo appeared to be Jean Doumanian’s first star in the making, a mix of Belushi’s aggressiveness and Aykroyd’s talent for mimicry. The new anchor of Weekend Update was Charles Rocket, good-looking and nasty, reasonably well received at first as a sort of new, even more, conceited Chevy Chase. Rocket was also a Doumanian favorite. Eddie Murphy, of course, would have a meteoric career, but it would take months before he’d make a real impression.
SNL barely made it into the late winter, then NBC fired Doumanian and shut the showdown. After an interval, one new spring ’81 episode was produced to prematurely finish the season. Then it was off the air, awaiting another executive producer and another total rebuild, its second in a year.
At this point, could anyone blame the cast and crew of ABC’s Fridays for thinking they’d lucked out? The 1980-81 season was especially strong for them. Now they were getting top hosts and musical acts. Their November 1980 parody of the newly elected Reagan administration, The Ronny Horror Show, was a critical and ratings triumph.
Fridays looked forward to the 1981-82 season with confidence, even if SNL was dragging itself up off the canvas one more time. As ABC had reminded people from the beginning, the very titles of the two shows meant they weren’t directly competing with each other.
In the end, what killed Fridays was an unfortunate, probably inevitable collision with the network’s news division when Ted Koppel’s nightly bulletin about Iran, America Held Hostage, became such a hit that after the hostages were freed, the show was made a permanent part of late-night TV with a new title, Nightline. Koppel wasn’t willing to run his show at 12:30 on Friday nights, and neither was Fridays, feeling that Koppel had, after all, four other nights of the week. Major national advertisers for both shows weren’t interested in the 12:30-1:30 timeslot.
Much like NBC would bobble the ball 30 years later, trying to placate both Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, ABC tried to avoid losing anyone, finally shifting Fridays to primetime, a move that muzzled its humor, lost its audience, and essentially killed the show. By spring 1982 it was gone. It left behind 48 episodes, not bad for two years. In its day, it wasn’t a minor show, but a moderate hit.
A week ago, SNL parodied its own history with elements of The Shining, starring Maya Rudolph and featuring several other stars of her era: Kenan Thompson as Dick Halloran, the Scatman Crothers role; Rachel Dratch as the scary lady in the bathtub, Kristen Wiig in a cameo as the twin girls in the hallway, and Tina Fey, almost unrecognizable as a composite, nobody-in-particular character, a 70s writer of the show. The parody also has a Shining bar as well as a “blood elevator” shot, explained as all the red wine leftover from the show’s after-parties. There were some funny bits scattered throughout the ambitious but unfocused routine, whose point was, like the sinister Overlook Hotel in the film, once you’re a part of Saturday Night Live, you can’t escape; like it or not, you will be identified with it forever.
The ending caught the spirit of the film by tracking into a black and white photo, with that gramophone-toned “Midnight, the Stars and You” song that ends The Shining. Instead of Jack Nicholson, eternally at home in the Overlook in 1921, Maya Rudolph was now permanently photoshopped into Gilda Radner’s place in a picture of the original 1975 cast, a bunch of skeptical young anti-establishment hipsters who long ago were turned into saleable icons, trinkets in the gift shop of a pop culture mausoleum. It was witty, self-knowing, and a little sad.
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Fridays had King Crimson:
Thanks, noD. The show definitely had its moments.
I still remember the skit? when Andy Kaufmann acted like he was really high, and the rest of the cast finally lost it, with the show ending in chaos. When it happened it sure looked real. If it was performance art it fooled me.
Has anyone else besides me noticed Saturday and Sunday together are called the weekend, but in reality Sunday is the first day of the week? Maybe we should start saying, “Weekendbeginning” . . .
Fridays was doomed from the outset, I would think, because it didn’t sufficiently differentiate itself from SNL. But that didn’t make it inferior. I have never forgotten that show, and in particular some of Michael Richards’s characters made an indelible impression. When Fridays went under, I figured I’d never see him again, so when he surfaced later on Seinfeld I was pleased to see his success.
I remember the post-Lorne-Michaels SNL as well. I was watching the live broadcast the night Charles Rocket dropped an F-bomb; he must have thought he was being edgy, but it was a stupid thing to do in 1980.
Gary, surely you are associated with the entertainment industry in some way. What do you do?
Good memory, BXO. The F-bomb doesn’t fly on broadcast TV even today, 40 years later. The show was already in deep ratings trouble and this was the final straw for NBC (it was February 21, 1981). Doumanian claimed that this wasn’t the first time this had happened, and she was technically right; a routine in the 1979-’80 season featured Medieval characters repeating the word “flogging”, and one of them slipped up. But you couldn’t hear it clearly, and in fact most viewers didn’t even notice. Above all, the difference was, the earlier one was clearly an accident. Charles Rocket said it very deliberately, in full closeup. What did he think was going to happen?
I retired in 2017 after running the American Cinema Foundation for twenty years. Before that, I ran the Los Angeles film festival for about fifteen years, most of them with the American Film Institute.
Here’s The Ronny Horror Show:
Why am I posting this here, among fellow conservatives? Mainly, because it was funny and well done. Remember when the libs were actually funny? Besides, you know what they say about “He who has the last laugh”. They assumed that Reagan was a fluke, a doddering old man who was the puppet of his shadowy team of political hacks…sound familiar?
That was such an excellent show. Watching it for the frat house sofa, man.
The Numb Boys. My favorite skit… what a great show!
I remember “Fridays.” I liked it quite a bit. That first opening was hilarious. I was in college, though, and Friday and Saturday nights were taken up … um … studying. Yes, that’s it. Studying at the library.
Many (though not all) episodes are available for free online.
https://tubitv.com/series/140/the-best-of-fridays
From, oh, 1948 to 1975, Saturday night was mostly a sleepy backwater of network TV. ABC had Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert until 1981, but it didn’t pick up the ratings or critical attention of SNL. NBC had The Midnight Special, which ran on Friday nights but way later, after The Tonight Show finished. Local stations programmed the time with old movies.
A problem for both Fridays and SNL; the shows were expensive.
Fun read! I hadn’t even heard of Fridays.
I vaguely remember “Fridays”, so I guess it wasn’t that memorable – but SNL is an American icon of sorts. It’s launched numerous comedy careers, musical performances were always good, and they always tried to push the comedic envelope – in the political and social, and entertainment sphere.
I think the best era included Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, and Phil Hartman. The show has had its ups and downs, but has always been a sort of stand up café in your living room. God bless all the comedians! I hope and pray those with the talent bring their humor back – our country is in desperate need of it – and political correctness be damned! Remember when politics could actually be funny??
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/george-h-w-bush-supports-dana-carvey-cold-open/2872690
Really? I thought the whole point of SNL was that it was cheap.
I would have guessed the same. Is it the cost of hosts and musical acts? Because I would have thought they would want to be there for the cool factor.
It was only cheap in comparison to prime time. Before SNL came along, NBC in New York used to run The Saturday Night Film Festival in that timeslot. That was their generic title for foreign films, mostly of the yowza type: Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin, or the gorgeous Daliah Lavi in Station Six Sahara, Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Film rentals, especially of foreign films, were cheap. The use of Studio 8H was expensive, and having a full production and writing staff, not to mention a cast, was also costly.
Nothing, and No One, will ever duplicate Saturday Night Live. It was perfect for its time period, and will never be surpassed. I was flabbergasted to find exactly what I was looking for.
This is code for “ran hookers and blow in Central America for twenty years”.
C’mon, Gary. Embellish. Make it rad.
Thanks for the throwback on this one. I had completely forgotten about Michael Richards being on this show. And it reminded me of being a kid (born in 67) where I was just starting to watch those things that were kinda hip and edgy, like SNL was, right at the semi-perfect age of 12-14.
And the kool kids were watching SNL. Like a sheep, trundling forward, oblivious to its massacre, I followed them, and watched the show.
That’s one hell of a production for a weekly show. It has the added benefit of being both funny and entertaining at the same time.
Really interesting to hear what they’re saying about politics, too – that’s what was in the culture, at the time. It’s almost the same language we hear today.
The only bit I remember is Michael Richards, wearing a plastic helmet, blowing up green Army men on a sand table.
All right, all right, I confess. I ran stolen Czarist gold and Orthodox icons for twenty years.
You’ll be 54 this year, and I just turned 69. Funny thing is, to someone in their twenties or early thirties today, the difference between being born in 1952 or 1967 is flattened out: “These guys are so old, they probably did their homework on steam engines”.
By and large, they did a good job over the years. Just last week, they had a fake game show about Black people giving excuses why they won’t get vaccinated, and it was nervy–you don’t expect a liberal show to be so honest.
It’s amazing how much deja vu is going on here. The Seventies were Woke War One. Look at the those guys with long hair and beards, and the women in slacks (or jeans), peasant blouses and flat shoes; they don’t look Eighties or Nineties, but they would fit right in today. The end of the Reagan skit is prophetic, but in a screwed up way: the Black militant who the jokesters said would be the result of Reagan’s election finally showed up, all right, but 30 years later than they hoped.
Give the Fridays writers credit for this: when this sketch aired, Jimmy Carter was still president. Reagan wasn’t even inaugurated yet. Many of the cliche jokes about him weren’t coined yet, but here they are, ahead of their time.
“My ‘faithful’ Vice President. Don’t think I forgot for one moment that he wants to be the White House resident”. I don’t know how many younger people would even know that George H.W. Bush ran against Reagan in 1980.
Just as with Mad Magazine, or in fact SNL, it really helps to make a parody look as much as possible as the original. They really matched up visuals with the actual Rocky Horror Picture Show, this at a time when you couldn’t (quite yet) just pop a VHS of the movie into the VCR in the writers’ room.
I was born at the beginning of the Seventies and don’t remember the cultural battles. A few years ago I was playing with one of the online dictionary sites’ first use feature and this definition of woke was first used in 1972. It’s current popularity seems to be traced to an author five or ten years ago but evidently wasn’t new.