|
 SCTV
IS ON THE AIR AND ON DVD. SEAN PLUMMER TRACES THE LEGACY OF MELONVILLE’S
FINEST TV NETWORK ON CONTEMPORARY COMEDY.
Dave Thomas thinks he knows why Second City Television
(SCTV) remains one of Canada’s best loved comedy shows twenty years
after its demise.
"Probably because it’s not on anymore!"
He may have a point. Too many Canadian sketch shows
wear out their welcome. (Think Wayne & Shuster and the Royal
Canadian Air Farce.) Not SCTV. For six seasons between 1976
and 1984, the TV version of the influential Second City improv theatre
used the boob tube itself to poke fun at the medium’s worst aspects,
from infomercials to variety shows, from restaurant critics to smarmy
talk show hosts. Audiences in Canada and America alike fell in love
with Melonville’s little network and its incompetent staff: owner
Guy Caballero, station manager Edith Prickley, news anchors Earl Camembert
and Floyd Robertson, and on-air personalities like Count Floyd, Dr.
Tongue, Johnny LaRue, and Bob and Doug MacKenzie.
Thomas, a head writer and cast member (most famously,
he was Doug to Rick Moranis’s Bob), is glad the show never got
the chance to suck. "I think it’s sort of like James Dean
crashing his car," he says. "There was all this potential
if only it’d stayed on."
It didn’t, but don’t cry. The Comedy Network
broadcasts reruns daily, and Shout! Factory, the retro pop culture company
responsible for the recent DVD release of cult TV show Freaks And
Geeks, is about to unleash a five-disc SCTV box set –
the first of several if Shout! COO Bob Emmer has his way. "I plan
to retire on this package," he says only half-jokingly.
If sales meet demand, Emmer can start the bidding
on his tropical island paradise. There are numerous SCTV shrines
online (Thomas has found at least a hundred websites dedicated to hosers
Bob and Doug alone), and the cast has been fielding inquiries from curious
fans for years.
"It’s been a long time in coming,"
agrees Joe Flaherty, a.k.a. Guy Caballero. "So many people have
asked me about that. ‘When are they going to come out with some
tapes of the show?’ And I always had to say ‘I don’t
know.’ [It] didn’t look like it was ever going to happen."
The problem was music rights. SCTV used hundreds
of little bits of music during its run, from three-second cues to full
songs, every one of which had to be cleared. That meant, says Emmer,
"a lot of legwork" (nine months’ worth) to find rights-holders
and pay publishers. (A few concessions had to be made but not many.)
"The music was integral to the storylines," Emmer says. "You
couldn’t go and replace the music because it would lose a lot.
They’re entwined with SCTV, it’s entwined in the skits."
Which is why SCTV: Network 90 - Volume 1 is
more expensive than the average DVD box set (suggested retail price
is $99.99). Emmer, who originated the SCTV project years ago
at his former place of employment, Rhino Video, thinks the fans will
understand. "No one’s trying to gouge anybody," he insists.
If nothing else, Shout! is justifying the extra cost.
Extras are extensive (see sidebar), and Flaherty and Thomas agree that
the nine shows compiled on Volume 1 – the troupe’s
first for NBC, the fourth season overall – are among their strongest.
Says Thomas: "Everybody had worked out their lumps in the oatmeal.
It was a good, well-oiled little machine at that point."
"We did peak in our NBC years as far as just
the writing went," Flaherty says. "But, on the other hand,
[in] the earlier shows, we were experimenting and just testing to see
what we could get away with. And even though the shows looked chintzy,
I thought they were funny."
They were. SCTV debuted on September 21, 1976,
on the Toronto-based Global network, and despite the bargain basement
production values, the strength of the writing was evident. Most of
the original cast – Flaherty, Thomas, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy,
Catherine O’Hara and John Candy – were graduates of either
the Toronto or Chicago Second Cities so their comedic sensibilities
were well-honed by the time they stepped in front of a camera. (Other
SC vets, including Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi,
would form the original cast of Saturday Night Live.)
"It’s the best training ground in the world
for this kind of work," says show producer Andrew Alexander of
The Second City. "There’s nothing better than working six
days a week, eight shows a week [for] two or three years. You just get
better."
Despite having American syndication, SCTV lasted
only two seasons with Global before budget considerations shut them
down. Alexander and his partners eventually found a new broadcast partner,
Edmonton’s ITV. The cast, which had spread out to do other things,
re-assembled in Alberta in ‘79 and started cranking out new shows.
The CBC picked up Canadian distribution, and NBC affiliates in the US
began playing it after SNL.
"It started getting a following," recalls
Flaherty. "People were saying, ‘Hey, this show’s funny.
This is a good show.’"
Perhaps surprisingly, SCTV’s origins in
the Great White North never became an issue for Americans. Its particular
brand of humour didn’t acknowledge borders, existing instead in
a twilight zone between the two countries, despite Melonville’s
acknowledged position in the "Tri-State area."
"We wanted to split the difference and have it
be sort of Canadian but maybe not Canadian, sort of American but not
really American," says Flaherty. "We were always putting Canadian
things into the show. I was always appalled at the lack of knowledge
of Canada Americans had."
Thomas is more direct about why the show lacked a
distinctly Canadian identity.
"Isn’t that the sales model for everything?
Since the argument when you try to sell a show in Canada is ‘well,
jeez, we only have 10% of the people so we’re only going to pay
10% of the budget’, you’re forced to look elsewhere for funding,
as we were with SCTV. We couldn’t get enough funding from
Global when we started, or CBC, so we had to have some kind of syndication
deal in the States. That meant we had to make it generic enough that
it would appeal to the States. I think you’re forced by your financial
model to make those kinds of concessions rather than it being issues
of nationalism."
That said, it’s ironic that SCTV’s
American break can be chalked up to two ultra-Canadian hosers, and,
going even further back, to the CBC itself. Because the US version of
SCTV had two more minutes of commercials than the domestic version,
the CBC insisted the troupe fill those extra two minutes with "distinctively
Canadian" content.
"We were kind of offended by that," says
Thomas, who points out that the show was already an almost entirely
Canuck production. "When Andrew Alexander brought the request in,
Rick and I said, ‘What do they want us to do? Put up a map of Canada
and sit in front of it wearing toques and parkas and drinking beer?’
And he said, ‘Yeah, sure, that would be fine.’"
Thus were born The MacKenzie Brothers. Their sometimes
surreal discussions about back bacon, hockey, and how to stuff mice
into stubbies to get free refills ignited a pop culture fire that would
burn on both sides of the border. The air was suddenly filled with the
sound of "coo-roo-coo-coo-coo-coo-coo-coo," and NBC head Brandon
Tartikoff agreed to pick up SCTV for its fourth season. Was Thomas
surprised by the sudden attention being paid to a couple of throwaway
characters?
"If I wasn’t surprised, if I was such a
genius that I could predict that kind of thing, I would have created
a lot more characters," he says. "Why people like one thing
and not another is the magical mystery of the movie and television business."
Thomas and Moranis’s sudden notoriety threatened
to overshadow the rest of the show and cast. "I think that jolted
people a bit at a time when nerves were pretty frayed anyway because
of the work schedule," says Alexander. "It was a very strong
sense of family, and then, all of a sudden, somebody else [is] getting
more of the exposure, and they felt that maybe this was going to upset
the family, which in some ways it did."
More upsetting, though, were the demands placed on
them by NBC. The fast-paced 30-minute CBC show turned into a 90-minute
NBC show. "It’s all that Brandon Tartikoff was offering,"
says Thomas. "It was ‘take 90 or take nothing.’"
There was also the unsettling perception among the
cast and crew that Tartikoff was using SCTV as a hedge against
the low-rated SNL’s potential cancellation. "I liked
Brandon a lot," Thomas prefaces before admitting that "he
was a network executive and could be really ruthless. Ultimately they
all used your show as a pawn on the network board. But he did give us
a shot."
Flaherty is more direct. "I think he was interested
in basically replacing that cast at the time on Saturday Night Live,
and he thought our cast would be perfect. So I think what he wanted
to do was eventually get us to go to New York and do the Saturday
Night Live show. I think that was the grand plan."
The reality of the task at hand soon became evident.
"Long-term it was probably too ambitious because it started burning
people out," Thomas says. "But I think that short term it
gave us a challenge and everyone rose to the occasion.
There was a lot of grumbling about the NBC deal. "‘Oh
God, we’re never going to be able to do it.’ Then, all of
a sudden, we were doing it, and it was a challenge. There were times
when we thought, ‘Well, you know what? We’re not going to
do it. We won’t be able to do it.’"
A bigger budget didn’t help. As a taped show
with no musical guests to kill air time (unlike SNL), SCTV
had to fill each show’s 48 minutes with actual material. That meant
lots of sketches and lots of sets which ate up cash. "The carpenters
walked off the show," Thomas recalls. "They couldn’t
keep up with the sets. ‘There’s so much sawdust back there,
we don’t have time to clean up. We’re done.’" So
Alexander gave Thomas a list of the show’s old sets. "So it
was hard enough to do comedy but then we had to do comedy for specific
sets that had already been built."
"NBC, I think, was getting pissed," says
Flaherty of the troupe’s eventual decision to pad some of their
shows with older material previously unseen in the States. "That’s
something you just don’t do on television is say you don’t
have a show that week."
So the production hired more performers (including
Martin Short) and writers, although finding talent with "that SCTV
feel" was tough. "We didn’t want to just write sketches
to fill a show," says Flaherty. "We wouldn’t do that.
We wouldn’t just say ‘okay, well, we’ll use this sketch
even though we think it sucks.’"
Despite their best efforts and a devoted cult following,
SCTV lasted only two seasons on NBC. Everyone I speak to agrees
that the show’s biggest obstacle was its time slot: Friday nights
at 12:30 following Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.
"You can’t get a big audience then. No one
can," says Thomas, who points out that the American media, from
Life to Rolling Stone, was all over them. (The show also
earned 13 Emmy nominations during its run, winning two for best writing.)
"I think we got as much of the public as we could get behind the
show at that particular time of night."
Of the show’s demise at NBC, Alexander thinks
it was "kind of inevitable." The cast had been doing SCTV
for a long time prior to the NBC pick-up and on stage before that. "Everybody
knew by the time we’d finished NBC that, creatively, we were really
beginning to lose some steam."
Thomas was "burned out before I left the show.
I was done, baked." Don Novello, SNL’s Father Guido
Sarducci, took over as head writer. Thomas and Moranis left in ‘82,
milking the last of Bob & Doug mania with the movie Strange Brew
(1983). A take-off of Hamlet that co-starred Max Von Sydow, it
flopped. In 1984, a 45-minute SCTV was shown biweekly by Cinemax
in the States and Superchannel in Canada for one last season.
Twenty years later, the SCTV alumni continue
to work. Eugene Levy is most visible thanks to his role as Jim’s
dad in the American Pie films and supporting turns in hits like
last year’s Bringing Down The House. Andrea Martin appeared
alongside Levy in the recent Olsen twins movie New York Minute
and appeared as Aunt Voula in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Martin
Short continues to receive praise as corpulent talk show host Jiminy
Glick on Comedy Central’s hit show Primetime Glick. Catherine
O’Hara’s association with former SNL writer Christopher
Guest has resulted in three films, most recently last year’s A
Mighty Wind. Flaherty recently appeared on an episode of The Comedy
Network’s hit show Puppets Who Kill, and Rick Moranis does
a lot of voice work, including last year’s animated movie Brother
Bear alongside Thomas. The late John Candy became a genuine movie
star post-SCTV thanks to lead roles in hits like Planes, Trains &
Automobiles (1987) and Uncle Buck (1989) before suffering
a fatal heart attack in 1994.
SCTV, meanwhile, lives on in syndication and
should expand its fan base thanks to the forthcoming DVD box set. Shout!
Factory’s Emmer recently turned his 16- and 21-year-old sons into
fans. "So you’re getting a whole new generation exposed to
it," he says.
The show also continues to have friends in high places.
Late night talk show host and former Simpsons writer Conan O’Brien
is a vocal fan and contributes extensively to the DVD. After the show’s
demise, Flaherty was down in LA making the rounds when he got an unexpected
call from director Martin Scorsese. "It was there with Robert De
Niro, and Scorsese was talking about the show. ‘Maudlin’s
Eleven’, he really liked that."
Thomas recalls getting a complimentary call from Steven
Spielberg about his parody of the director. "Then he sent me a
two-page letter with a critique of my impersonation."
For his part, Thomas is proud of his work and marvels
at what they accomplished.
"I couldn’t do it today," he says flatly.
"I look at that workload, and we were literally working seven days
a week, fourteen, sixteen hours a day with no days off. You can’t
have kids, you can’t have a family. You can’t do that kind
of stuff unless you’re young and foolish."
"It was a terrific ensemble of performers,"
says Alexander, who continues to supervise all things Second City. "To
put a group of people together that just has such a diverse comedic
sensibility, and smart... That was just magic in itself."
|
.: ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
|
Number
of discs: 5
JOE
FLAHERTY 
DAVE
THOMAS 
ANDREA
MARTIN 
EUGENE
LEVY 
CATHERINE
O’HARA 
MARTIN
SHORT 
JOHN
CANDY 
RICK
MORANIS 
