Word: primes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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John Belushi and Gilda Radner are no longer around. The other Not Ready for Prime Time originals have phased into either obscurity or fat-cat Hollywood stardom. The baby boomers who discovered the show in the mid-'70s are now watching alongside their kids and struggling to keep up with the cast changes (which one is Phil Hartman?). Still, an anniversary for Saturday Night Live -- which will mark the start of its 15th season with a prime-time special next Sunday -- is more than just a routine occasion for TV nostalgia. The pressing question: Is Saturday Night still alive...
...rebuild from scratch. In the next few seasons -- the Dark Ages -- the show managed to unearth one superstar (Eddie Murphy) but a lot of also-rans (Charles Rocket, Mary Gross). One year it brought in seasoned ringers like Billy Crystal and Martin Short (no fair -- they were ready for prime time); then Michaels returned with an all new cast that ranged from teen flashes-in-the-pan like Anthony Michael Hall to Hollywood veteran Randy Quaid. But the ensemble - feeling had disappeared, and the writing had grown desperate and juvenile: in one witless sketch, Bobby and Jack Kennedy plot...
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: 15TH ANNIVERSARY (NBC, Sept. 24, 9 p.m. EDT). Still crazy -- or at least trying to be -- after all these years, the once groundbreaking comedy show waxes nostalgic in a prime-time special...
...peers, cannot entirely abandon this Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds heritage. Normally I only share these slightly outre sentiments with close friends. But such views have become a public issue with drug czar William Bennett's attacks on my generation's self-indulgence, coupled with George Bush's prime-time address to the nation on drugs. For in identifying those responsible for the cocaine crisis, the President pointedly included "everyone who looks the other way." Am I really a fellow traveler in this epidemic of addiction? Do my affectionate, albeit distant, ties to 1960s-style permissiveness render...
...list, alas, is long. Begin with public officials who have exploited the issue for 20 years, advocating phony feel-good nostrums like the current fad for drug testing in the workplace, as if mid-level bureaucrats were society's prime offenders. Joining the politicians in the dock are those antidrug crusaders who have either squandered credibility with exaggerated scare talk or strained credulity with prissy pronouncements. The media are culpable as well, for sensationalized coverage that has often served to glamourize the menace they are decrying. Then there are the social-policy conservatives who purport to see no connection between...