Saturday Night Live (season 6) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Responses to Doumanian's SNL were disappointed and disappointing. The Associated Press, mocking the Carters-in-the-Oval-Office sketch, wrote, "The new Saturday Night Live is essentially crude, sophomoric and most of all self-consciously 'cool.' It is occasionally funny... Under producer Jean Doumanian, Saturday Night Live will define 'risk-taking' as a little naughtier, perhaps a little raunchier; it won't wander too far off the beaten path... They're all clones. This is television. If they can be funny once in a while, that's all we can ask."

Hill and Weingrad summarized other reviews:

The Washington Star said the show "strained and groaned" while the humor was "almost completely lost, despite desperate attempts to ring it out of raunch." Newsday's Marvin Kitman, as expected, ravaged the show gleefully, calling it "offensive and raunchy," and worse, not funny. "This new edition is terrible," he wrote. "Call it 'Saturday Night Dead on Arrival'."

Tom Shales's review in The Washington Post was devastating.

Shales had always been Saturday Night's strongest and most prestigious booster, and thus his reaction to the new show was more important than most. The headline on his review read FROM YUK TO YECCCH. The first sentence was: "Vile from New York—It's Saturday Night." The show, Shales said, was a "snide and sordid embarrassment." It imitated the "ribaldry and willingness to prod sacred cows" of the Lorne Michaels years without having the least "compensating satirical edge." It was, he wrote, "just haplessly pointless tastelessness." Shales concluded that despite one or two imaginative moments from the show's filmmakers, "from the six new performers and 13 new writers hired for the show, viewers got virtually no good news." ... Jean made it clear that she thought the writing was primarily at fault. "It's just got to be funnier," she said. Then she put a tape of the show on her videocassette machine to begin a sketch-by-sketch critique. According to writer Billy Brown, as she did she said, "Watch this. And I hope you hate it, because you wrote it."