Thanks to its Second City influence and Absurdly Short Production Time, Saturday Night Live is notorious for stuff going wrong in production all the time.
Not to be confused with instances of Hostility on the Set, which has its own page here.
- The fifth season (1979-80), the last to feature any of the original cast members as regulars, was very nearly the series' last ever.
- At the beginning of the fifth season, despite the departure of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, the show was still riding high, one of NBC's few successes at the time. However, all was not well with the cast and crew. Many were burned out from four very intense years and the fame they had accumulated in the process, secretly hoping this season would be the last, at least for a while. Lorne Michaels took the unusual step of scheduling a preseason retreat at Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York. Significantly, though, none of the major cast members or writers attended.
- With Aykroyd and Belushi gone, the show relied a great deal on Bill Murray to carry the load. This stressed him out a great deal, and he often used the role to do deals with Lorne ... he'd do, say, another Nick the Lounge Singer sketch if Lorne agreed to another sketch he wanted to do, or booked this band or that guest host. Despite this star power, Murray would often succumb to fits of temper, walking off the set during blocking sessions on Friday or even on Thursdays, saying he was quitting ... only to return in time for dress rehearsal on Saturday, and nailing his performance live.
- Murray took out his anger with Belushi and Aykroyd in a Weekend Update review of 1941 (1979) in December. Noting that Carrie Fisher and Christopher Lee, "two old friends of mine" who had previously appeared on the show, were in the cast, he excoriated them for doing the movie, wondered what they had been thinking and said they should have never left the show, to much knowing laughter from the audience. Instead of seeing their movie, he recommended audiences go see Meatballs, his successful debut from the previous summer, again.
- Murray wasn't the only one who missed Aykroyd and Belushi. During the infamous vomitorium sketch, considered the nadir of the show's first five seasons, Al Franken nearly missed his cue to come on as a bratty young boy because he was musing aloud offstage as to how this would have been a perfect part for John.
- At the beginning of the season, Murray was splitting his time between the show and making Where the Buffalo Roam. He had spent so much time hanging out with Hunter S. Thompson in prepration for the part that he had effectively become Thompson, down to wearing the same dark glasses constantly and using a cigarette holder. His fellow castmates and writers, some of whom also knew Thompson, said that while he might have been fun to hang out with and carouse, he was not someone you wanted to do a weekly sketch comedy show with. Fortunately Murray started toning it down after the movie wrapped, and abandoned it completely later on after the movie bombed.
- Harry Shearer had been added to the cast and writing staff as a replacement. He quickly clashed with Lorne and alienated the other writers over his vision for the show, which he felt, in the absence of two big stars, should focus more on the sort of ensemble-based humor that he did in his later movies and his second stint in the cast a few years later, rather than the kind of recurring-character, Catchphrase-based humor it had come to specialize in. While no one agreed with him exactly, the show's writers eventually did try to rise to the challenge and take more risks as a way of making up for the loss of Aykroyd and Belushi.note
- The heavy drug use that later claimed Belushi's life was also taking its toll on the cast and crew. Where they had during earlier seasons generally relaxed and developed their comedy surrounded by clouds of pot smoke, now to keep up with the pace they worked at they snorted line after line of coke during the day ... with the attendant effect on everyone's temper and ego. Garrett Morris was heavy into freebasing, sometimes going on paranoid rants during rehearsals and at one point convinced an invisible robot was controlling him, Laraine Newman developed an eating disorder and a heroin addiction and cooped herself up in her dressing room where she slept off her binges or played solitaire (to the extent that Gilda Radner got her a Christmas present of a deck of cards with Newman's face on them), emerging only for blocking, dress, and the show. Meanwhile, Radner's bulimia only got worse. By Christmas, almost everyone involved with the show was hoping this season would be the last.
- During the latter half of the season, Lorne became preoccupied with his contract renegotiations, despite being upset slightly with his manager for also representing one of the creators of ABC's competing Fridays, and at NBC for having forced Herb Schlosser, SNL's best friend in the executive ranks, out when Fred Silverman had taken over the previous year. He was hoping to be able to take at least a year off, along with others, with the possibility of doing some specials. NBC wanted the show to continue for a sixth season as it was not only doing poorly in the ratings, it had taken a huge financial hit when President Carter chose to boycott that summer's Olympics. If the show did go on, Michaels wanted the season to start only after that fall's election, as it had in 1976, and would commit to no more than six episodes (NBC in turn wanted at least 17). He was pushing them toward hiring either James Downey or Franken and Davis as producers as they were writers, and the show's producer had to be able to understand its writers. The network put the talks on the back burner as NBC was focusing on keeping Johnny Carson, who had publicly expressed his discontent with the current state of affairs, on board.
- After they succeeded at that, they turned to Lorne. All they seemed interested in doing was offering him more money, incensing Lorne and his manager, who had given NBC plenty of time to go over their much more specific demands. NBC was also upset that Radner nixed Silverman's idea for a Variety Show she would host, since she did not want to leave SNL and could not handle two shows at once.
- In May 1980 Lorne requested a meeting with Silverman. The network head put it off because he had stayed up all night the night before putting together the fall schedule for a presentation to the affiliates' board of governors, which did not go well for him. Lorne gave the network 24 hours to come up with a final offer. He was able to meet with Silverman briefly to start working things out, and they scheduled another meeting for the following week.
- But during the ensuing show that Saturday night, Franken rewrote his "A Limo for A Lame-O
" Update commentary into an even stronger "The Reason You Suck" Speech directed at Silverman after Barbara Gallagher, the NBC executive in charge of comedy and late-night programming, had asked him to tone it down, because Franken, unaware of the specifics of the situation, felt Silverman had deliberately blown Lorne off. After it aired, Silverman called the studio in a fury, looking for the other executives, and then canceled his meeting with Lorne, assuming he had let Franken deliver the speech on purpose as retaliation for the missed meeting. - Postcards requesting Franken be provided with limo service in response to his commentary flooded Silverman's office the next week. Silverman, who did not appreciate Belushi's take on him but tolerated it because of the comedian's talent, had no such ambivalence toward Franken, whose humor he had always considered somewhat mean. He refused to accept Franken's apology and has reportedly never forgiven him.
- That also ended Franken and Davis's chance of producing the show in Lorne's absence. That season's last episode, two weeks later, had some of the hallmarks of a Series Finale. While Buck Henry promised the show would go on in his opening monologue, he also introduced a purported "new cast"note and in the final shot of the end credits the "On Air" sign was shown flickering out. NBC had no intention of allowing that to happen, and continued to look for a new producer. Gallagher suggested her friend, the show's longtime associate producer Jean Doumanian, and after being offered the job on the provision she not disclose it if she accepted, she did so.
- When Lorne, who not only had been trying to recruit Doumanian to work for him but had warned the network that not only was she not a writer as he had suggested a replacement be, no one presently associated with the show's creative side would work for her if she was the producer,note found out a month later that not only had the network disregarded his advice but had provisionally hired Doumanian while still making a last-ditch effort to bring him back, he went ballistic, both at NBC and Doumanian, whom he has reportedly never spoken to since, much less forgiven.
- Thus started the show's sixth season (1980-81), widely remembered as SNL's first Audience-Alienating Era:
- The cast, all severely burnt out, left. Whether the writers did so as well or were fired depends on who tells the story. Some of them have said the word came down that Doumanian wanted them all out by the end of July, while she says that three writers who agreed to stay on under her changed their minds once Lorne found out she had been hired. In any event, the offices were stripped bare by August ... Joe Piscopo recalled that not even the pencils had been left behind.
- To be fair to the oft-maligned Doumanian, she thus had only ten weeks to put together a new writing staff and cast, a task which Lorne had almost a year to do before the show's first season. And she had to do this on a third of the budget the show's fifth season had, since not only was NBC pinching pennies, she had no established stars. Nonetheless, she managed to pass on up-and-coming talent like Jim Carrey and John Goodman, and only hired Eddie Murphy after others lobbied her hard for him.
- However, that's as far as fairness goes. The putative stars of her cast - Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried and Charles Rocket - acted like they had it made just by virtue of being on Saturday Night Live, and to others it showed. At the end of a meeting after the cast and writers had worked on material for several weeks, Doumanian asked if anyone had any comments or suggestions. Piscopo, dismayed by what he had seen so far, was about to suggest she fire everyone and start over, until Ann Risley spoke up that she didn't like having white wine in her dressing room and wanted a bottle of red instead. At that point he realized the problem went all the way to the top.
- Risley's request pointed to Lorne's concerns about Doumanian, her associate producer credit notwithstanding, not being a writer as having been on target. She had mainly been responsible for guest relations during the previous five seasons, and the care she devoted to their needs assured that no guest ever refused to return because they had been neglected in that department. But she was at sea with the writers. Many recall her notes primarily being limited to "make it funnier" or "It isn't hip enough" (and no, those aren't paraphrases, they are direct quotes); many writers seriously wondered if she was even reading what they sent her, based on the size of the pile on her desk. At one point she handed down a requirement that every sketch have three jokes per page. Unlike Lorne, she also decided to actively enforce NBC's policy forbidding drug use on company property, even posting signs to this effect, further alienating those who felt more comfortable writing after they had smoked a joint or two. Barry Blaustein recalls that he had barely settled into his desk on his first day when another writer came into his office with a petition demanding Doumanian be fired.
- The season got off to a bad start with criticsnote and didn't get better, as Rocket's Weekend Update appearances, despite his background doing that sort of spoof news, were often so devoid of laughs as to be painful, and sketches like the "Leather Weather" bit that made the previous season's vomitorium sketch look inspired in comparison. Doumanian insisted on booking Malcolm McDowell as host despite the network's concern that he was (at the time) too obscure for most of the audience.
- About two-thirds of the way through the season, the cast started to gel as Dillon, Rocket and Gottfried realized that comedy was something that, like the original cast, they had to work at no matter how talented they were. An episode hosted by Karen Black managed to be consistently funny. Murphy started to emerge.
- But then came the infamous show hosted by Dallas's Charlene Tilton, which had a Running Gag parodying the "Who Shot J.R." plotline of her show with brief intercuts in which every cast member supposedly had a reason to kill Rocket, and he was finally shot just before the last commercial break. With, unusually, a few minutes more left than expected, they gathered on stage and improvised before learning who had shot Rocket. Tilton asked a wheelchair-bound Rocket how he felt, and he answered, "I'd like to know who the fuck did it" ... on live air (this happening after another sketch in which Rocket dropped a similarly uncensored hard "R" nigger in a sketch about racists shooting minorities as sport, a word also not allowed on television at the time, especially in that context). note
- That sealed Doumanian's fate. Three weeks later, on what would be the last show she produced, Murray returned as the first member of the original cast to guest host. The show went well enough, but at the end, he apologized to all his former castmates, even Belushi and Aykroyd, for what he had just done. Afterwards, he refused to embrace all of the cast except Murphy, quite blatantly turning away from Rocket in the process.
- Dick Ebersol was hired to replace Doumanian; he fired all the cast except Piscopo and Murphy, and all the writers except Blaustein. After almost two months, he was able to produce one show, hosted by Chevy Chase. Its most notable moment was another Weekend Update commentary by Franken, in which he recounted the events of the past year and proposed another write-in campaign to NBC, this time telling them to "put this tired old format to sleep", until Chevy "reminded" him that he and Davis were due to host the show next week (actually, as they both knew, that was the end of the season as that year's writer's strike was imminent).
- Not long before the Season 47 episode hosted by Paul Rudd was due to go live, several cast membersnote and crew members tested positive for COVID-19, which threw things for a loop, with some cast members reportedly expressing concern over the outbreak. This resulted in no live audience, and Charli XCX, who was going to be the performer, was forced to opt out due to precautions. And since all of this happened hours before the episode was aired, the fate of the last episode of 2021 was uncertain, especially since Lorne was reportedly sick. Ultimately, Rudd's fifth hosting gig did air, but COVID concerns made it a Clip Show instead, featuring old Christmas sketches and a few pre-taped sketches that were made for the episode. Rudd was still inducted into the Five-Timers' Club, but it was pre-recorded. Only two current cast members as of this writing appeared on set — Kenan Thompson (presented Rudd's Five-Timers' robe and introduced a few sketches) and Michael Che (co-anchored Weekend Update, this time with Tina Fey filling in for Jost).
