Fridays, the TV Show (1980-’82)

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.

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, 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 like, 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 night life, 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 sidenote: 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 show down. 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 left over 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 in to 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.