
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 27, 1995                   TAG: 9508280118
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                 LENGTH: Medium

`SNL'S' LORNE MICHAELS IS ON THE HOT SEAT

For Lorne Michaels to look any more relaxed, he would have to be levitating above his desk in the lotus position. You'd hardly know from sitting and chatting with him that the creator and producer of ``Saturday Night Live'' has just come through his most turbulent and lacerating season ever.

He is now at work trying to fix ``Saturday Night Live'' so that network executives don't cancel it or fire him. ``Can I be fired? Of course I can be fired,'' Michaels says casually. ``Yes, I am mortal.'' He's also debonair and nonchalant and just about the suavest producer around. But he'd also better be one of the smartest or his goose is cooked.

An absolute tsunami of criticism engulfed ``Saturday Night Live'' last season; it was trashed in the press, knocked even by Simpson Trial judge Lance Ito (in response to a sketch that was done about him on the show), and pilloried publicly by such former cast members as Adam Sandler and Phil Hartman. Sandler was reported to have said the writing ``su---.''

``Adam claims not to have said it,'' says Michaels magnanimously. ``I don't think it was his style to say it. I've never been hit as hard as we were last season and a lot of it was personal so you go, `Oh, I see. I'm no longer a sympathetic figure.' That was the big piece of information that came to me because I have difficulty seeing myself differently than I have ever seen myself.''

Ratings were down 10 percent. NBC executives let it loudly be known that they were not pleased with the show. A smirky-smarmy comic on Comedy Central took a jab at the program; Michaels says the comic auditioned to be ``Weekend Update'' anchor last year and was angry about not getting the job. On MTV, which keeps trying to do rival sketch comedy shows of its own, snarling Kurt Loder referred to the show as a ``sinking ship.''

That ``Saturday Night Live'' had become ``Saturday Night Lousy'' turned overnight into a Media Truth. The wolf pack gathered, growled and grew.

``I'd say this was the most savage criticism ever, yeah,'' says Michaels with no apparent savagery of his own. He concedes the season was no triumph. ``This was the first season in which no new characters emerged, I think, in the history of the show,'' he says. What happened? ``The cast was too large. And I think we were probably slow to make changes that people felt were overdue.''

Most of last season's cast have left the show. Norm MacDonald will be back as the ``Weekend Update'' anchor. David Spade will return and have his own segment of the show at the 12:30 point; all Michaels will say about it is that it will be ``entertainment-based.'' Mark McKinney, a featured player last season and an alumnus of Michaels' cable comedy show ``The Kids in the Hall,'' will also be part of the new cast. Four new young cast members have been announced: Cheri Oteri, Will Farrell, David Koechner and Nancy Walls, all from regional comedy and improvisation groups. More will be announced soon.

David Schwimmer, the funniest fellow on NBC's hit ``Friends,'' will guest-host the first show of the new season Sept. 30. Other hoped-for hosts during the season include Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey and Sharon Stone.

Michaels has seen ``Saturday Night Live'' through other dark periods. The show didn't really take off with the public, he says, until its third season. Even in its happiest heydays, from 1975 through 1979, Michaels says it was repeatedly called ``uneven.''

On the best of shows, there were always a few weak sketches. And on the worst of shows, there were always a few great moments.

Michaels quit in 1980 to pursue other projects. For the next five years, the show flirted with disaster, even though Eddie Murphy, probably the biggest star ever to emerge from the cast, brightened it up. In 1985, Michaels returned, and his first season back was not pretty. Michaels himself calls it ``disastrous.''

``In '85 and '86, the let-it-die stuff was at its loudest,'' Michaels recalls. Brandon Tartikoff, legendary NBC programmer, went so far as to pull the plug. ``He did cancel it, and I had to go back and plead for it,'' Michaels says. Tartikoff relented and the show returned.

Tartikoff, now president of New World Television, says from his home in New Orleans: ``Lorne has his work cut out for him. I just hope they let him do what he does best and I hope he applies himself. He's got a lot of challenges ahead.''

MONDAY: Lorne Michaels vs. the NBC brass.

by CNB