Live From New York, It's Season Two!
November 29, 2007

Even though Saturday Night Live has been written about on DVDialog only once before, it’s safe to assume that there will be an entry regarding each seasonal DVD release from the show.  It was just such a time-tripping

Like the first season, Season Two finds an eclectic mélange of guest hosts taking center stage after “Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night!” is declared. Among the 22 hosts are such cult performers as Broderick Crawford, Buck Henry, Karen Black, Ruth Gordon and Jodie Foster; SNL stalwarts Candice Bergen, Steve Martin and Paul Simon; and the off-beat likes of TV producer Norman Lear, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.

As for musical guests, the second season offered everyone from such musical luminaries as Frank Zappa, Chuck Berry, Santana and The Band to such bubble-gummers as Leo Sayer, Boz Scaggs and Kenny Vance to such odd choices as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a solo Brian Wilson, who’s off-key version of “Good Vibrations” while sitting at a piano atop a pile of sand is a truly bizarre and sad spectacle.  

But it’s the sketches and comedy that lead the way, and with the second season, the SNL ensemble of performers and writers really started to hit their stride. With Chevy Chase having given notice after the first season—he would pop up in only a handful of sketches and pre-recorded bits for the first half of Season Two—the spotlight turned to Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi, as well as a newcomer by the name of Bill Murray. Some of the show’s most popular recurring characters—The Coneheads and Murray’s cloying nightclub singer—were introduced that year, a winning Jane Curtain took over Weekend Update, and a number of sketches took to slamming Chevy Chase. The most memorable of these bashes occurred on a “Jeopardy 1999” sketch wherein one of the answers was, “This comedian’s career fizzled after he left NBC’s Saturday Night Live.” The punchline, of course, is that nobody can remember the guy’s name.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on November 29, 2007 | Comments (0)