Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at SCTV, the sketch comedy show that flew under the radar while Saturday Night Live got all the attention.
This is a milestone year for Saturday Night Live, which is in the middle of its 50th season. The show has had some great seasons, some decent seasons, some mediocre ones and some outright bad ones. Some of our biggest comedy stars have come from SNL. To my mind, there have been better sketch shows over the last half century, including Mr. Show, Kids in the Hall, Chapelle's Show, I Think You Should Leave and Key & Peele. But my all-time favorite is SCTV.
Originally called Second City Television, the show got its start in 1976 as an offshoot of Toronto's Second City comedy troupe. The original cast included relatively unknown members of the Toronto stage show--John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy--plus Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara and Harold Ramis. Instead of being a random collection of sketches like most comedy shows, SCTV's ingenious premise was to follow the broadcast day of a fictional TV station.
The first two years, the show aired 30-minute episodes on Global, a Canadian network of stations. The cast did parodies of TV shows, commercials and public service announcements, and later added behind-the-scenes segments featuring various characters at the station (later to become a network), including owner Guy Caballero (Flaherty), newscasters Floyd Robertson (Flaherty) and Earl Camembert (Levy), beer-swilling brothers Bob and Doug McKenzie (Moranis and Thomas), station managers Moe Green and Edith Prickley (Ramis and Martin), washed-up singer Lola Heatherton (O'Hara) and obnoxious star Johnny LaRue (Candy).
For its second season in 1978-79, the show was syndicated and shown in various markets in Canada and the U.S. Ramis left partway through the season. The Toronto Global station where the show was filmed dropped SCTV because of its high production costs, so show producer Andrew Alexander signed a deal to have the show filmed in Edmonton. Candy and O'Hara dropped out at this point, replaced by Rick Moranis, Tony Rosato and Robin Duke. Moranis, who had previously been a radio DJ, was the first cast member who wasn't a Second City alum.
After canceling the Friday night music show The Midnight Special, NBC signed SCTV in 1981 as a 90-minute late night replacement. Called SCTV Network 90 (and later SCTV Network), the show aired at 12:30 a.m. Rosato and Duke left for Saturday Night Live, which was undergoing a revamp after Lorne Michaels left. Candy and O'Hara returned for the fourth season, and Martin Short joined the cast toward the end of the season; O'Hara, Thomas and Moranis all left near the end of the season. Several of the early 25 episodes included sketches from the previous seasons as the cast worked to produce new episodes.
SCTV had one more season on NBC, ending in 1983. For the fall of '83, NBC wanted to compete with MTV by airing Friday Night Videos in the 12:30 a.m. slot, so it offered SCTV the Sunday night slot opposite 60 Minutes; SCTV declined, especially considering they would have had to tone down for the family time slot. The show ended up moving to pay-cable channel Cinemax in 1984 (and a similar one called Superchannel in Canada) for one more season of 18 45-minute episodes. The cast for this season was Flaherty, Martin, Levy and Short, although Candy, O'Hara and Thomas all make guest appearances.
The SCTV cast all went on to prominent things. Candy became a beloved comic actor in movies until his death in 1994. Moranis and Thomas rode the popularity of the McKenzie brothers into a comedy album, movie (the funny Strange Brew) and an animated series; Moranis appeared in many big movies, including Ghostbusters, the Honey I Shrunk the Kids series, Spaceballs and Parenthood, before retiring from acting in the late '90s to raise his kids after his wife died. Flaherty played notable bit roles in Stripes and Happy Gilmore and starred in the great Freaks and Geeks series; he passed away last year. Ramis left the show and starred in Stripes and Ghostbusters before focusing on directing films like Groundhog Day; he died in 2014. Levy starred in many movies, including Splash, Christopher Guest's films like Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind, and the comedy series Schitt's Creek. O'Hara starred in big movies including the Home Alone movies, the Guest movies, and Beetlejuice, and also in Schitt's Creek. Short was a cast member on SNL in 1984-85 and then became a popular movie actor (The Three Amigos, Innerspace, the Parenthood movies) and has hosted SNL five times. Martin has been a busy actor for the last 40 years, appearing in many movies and TV shows, most recently in Evil.
SCTV excelled in world-building, creating an entire universe of lunatic and hilarious characters. I remember seeing some of the Global shows in the late '70s, but I really got into SCTV when the NBC seasons started. I was also watching SNL at the same time, but SCTV was so much better. There were DVD box sets released in the early 2000s, of which I have a few, but as of now, the show isn't streaming anywhere and that's a shame. There was an SCTV documentary and reunion that was directed by Martin Scorsese for Netflix pre-pandemic, but it's been shelved and there's no indication on whether it will be released. In the meantime, there are plenty of great clips from the show on YouTube and even full episodes from the early years. It's definitely worth your while to check 'em out.
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