Saturday Night Live (season 10)
Saturday Night Live aired its tenth season during the 1984-1985 television season on NBC. The season contained 17 episodes and was cut short due to a writer's strike and budget constraints.
During the previous season Eddie Murphy left the show mid season. Because of Murphy's departure Joe Piscopo also left the show because he did not want to do it without Murphy. Dick Ebersol then fired Robin Duke, Brad Hall and Tim Kazurinsky.
Ebersol then wanted to blow up the show by adding seasoned comedians instead of newcomers. He hired Billy Crystal (who hosted twice in season nine and was originally set to appear in SNL's first episode), Harry Shearer (who was a castmember on SNL in its fifth season), New Zealander Pamela Stephenson (from "Not The Nine O'Clock News"), Rich Hall (best known for his work on Not Necessarily the News and Fridays), Martin Short (from SCTV), and Christopher Guest (a frequent contributor to The National Lampoon Radio Hour in the early 1970s). Guest would become the anchor of Saturday Night News.
In the middle of the season, Harry Shearer left the show, due to "creative differences" (which Shearer describes as "I was creative; they were different"). Despite his departure, his image is still shown in the opening credits (spray-painting an elevated train as it goes down the track).
This season also featured a bizarre opening sequence, depicting the SNL cast as giants in New York City with flying hot dogs and cockroaches.
At the end of the season, Ebersol requested to completely revamp the show to include mostly prerecorded segments. Short, Guest, and Hall had tired of the show's demanding production schedule and showed little interest in returning for another season, leaving Crystal the only "A-cast" member available for Season 11. Like Lorne Michaels at the end of Season 5, Ebersol made taking the show off the air for several months to re-cast and rebuild a condition of his return. Another idea was to institute a permanent rotation of hosts (Billy Crystal, David Letterman and Joe Piscopo) for "a hip The Ed Sullivan Show".
After briefly canceling the show, NBC decided to continue production only if they could get Michaels to produce again. Ebersol along with his writing staff and most of the cast, left the show after this season (those who wished to stay, such as Crystal, were eventually not re-hired for 1985), which closed the book on an inconsistent, yet memorable, era in SNL history.
Read more about Saturday Night Live (season 10): Cast, Writers, Episodes, Specials
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