Word: show
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sketch during the Iran-contra affair, President Reagan (ah, that's Phil Hartman) puts on his familiar bumbling act in public, then turns into a whipcracking boss in private, directing every detail of the covert operation, down to computing interest on the money stored in Swiss bank accounts. The show's movie parodies have also had some shrewd twists: Carvey, for example, playing Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant in Rain Man -- who turns out to be giving gambling tips to Pete Rose...
...show, in short, is once again delivering laughs. So why, for a veteran fan, does the new Saturday Night Live still seem like a pale imitation of its old self? For one thing, the most popular bits -- Carvey's Church Lady, the body-building brothers Hans and Franz -- are the weakest parts of the show, crowd pleasers that depend on makeup gimmicks rather than nimble gags. Too many sketches are pat and obvious in ways that the old group wouldn't have tolerated (a team of ad executives, marooned on an island, worries more about meetings and market surveys than...
...those days, SNL writers would sometimes reject comic ideas with the put- down "That's Carol Burnett." It was their code language for material that was too broad, too mainstream. Saturday Night Live may not quite have become the Carol Burnett Show of the '80s, but complacency has crept in. Perhaps it was inevitable. TV anniversaries, after all, serve another important function. They remind us that shows grow...
...1890s until 1972, Atlantic City was ruled by a succession of political machines, and while nothing quite as feudal remains today, political leaders still seem to exhibit the high-handed habits of that era. Only eight years ago, the city commissioners passed a resolution ordering all municipal employees to show them "respect and obedience...
SATURDAY NIGHT WITH CONNIE CHUNG (CBS, Sept. 23, 10 p.m. EDT). CBS's long- struggling magazine show, West 57th, has re-emerged with a new name and a new star as host and chief correspondent. One added element certain to cause a stir: dramatized re-creations of news events...