Second City Television - Significance

Significance

SCTV initially adapted its comedy from existing sketches and improvisation from the Second City stage show. However, especially after expanding to a ninety minute format, SCTV quickly pushed the envelope on television sketch comedy. While showing some influence from Monty Python's Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live, SCTV eschewed both the live television format and even filming before a live studio audience. This was mostly to save money, but it also allowed more attention and care to be taken in building a premise and supporting it.

Having a moderately low budget and limited resources, SCTV got a reputation for making the most out of what it had, reusing sets and particularly taking advantage of expert makeup and hairstyling. With the luxury of being able to take long periods of time in the makeup chair, elaborate characters could be built. Not being bound by expensive and elaborate prosthetics, cast members and makeup artists worked together to create their characters, referring to the process in interviews as "Improvisation in the chair."

To add to the feel of the show — that of a low-budget local television station that went national — the SCTV crew recruited their dance troupe from the writers on the show, led by costumer Juul Haalmeyer. The "Juul Haalmeyer Dancers" were spectacularly maladroit, parodying dance teams on variety shows through their sheer ineptness, and ultimately attracting a cult fandom of their own. (Juul Haalmeyer himself reports still being asked for autographs years later.)

The core premise of the show allowed for tremendous variety in presentation, but unlike Monty Python, which often would cut from one sketch to another without any resolution, the SCTV format required television style bridges. One technique they used was to build premises into "promos" for shows that would never run (such as "Melvin and Howards", a parody of the movie Melvin and Howard which featured Melvin Dummar, Howard Hughes, Howard Cosell, Curly Howard, and Senator Howard Baker on a road trip singing old tunes). Another was to take longer pieces that failed and cut them into promos or trailers. These short elements wound up being the equivalent of "blackout" pieces on the Second City stage. However, the internal logic of the series — that this actually was a television station producing low-budget programming — was never lost. SCTV's techniques helped inform and influence later shows, with clear influence on The State, the Upright Citizen's Brigade, and The Kids in the Hall.

Later shows built a tight theme, sometimes acting as a metaparody — such as the Emmy-winning "Moral Majority" episode where advertisers and special interest groups forced significant changes to SCTV's programming; "Zontar", a parody of the Larry Buchanan film Zontar, The Thing from Venus which featured an alien race seeking to kidnap SCTV's on-air talent for "a nine-show cycle plus three best-ofs" (which was the actual deal NBC worked out with SCTV that season); and an ambitious parody of The Godfather featuring an all-out network war over pay television between SCTV, CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS - the last featured mafia-style hits on the sets of The Today Show, Three's Company, and The NFL Today as well as an extended sequence with guest star John Marley as an off-beat Leonard Bernstein, spoofing his Godfather role of Hollywood mogul Jack Woltz.

In another such episode, a janitorial union went on strike, forcing the station to broadcast the network feed from CBC Television. Parodies of Canadian television ensued, such as Hinterland Who's Who, Front Page Challenge, and It's a Fact, as well as promos for Monday Night Curling, hosted by two orange-jacketed sportscasters who were both named Gord, and Magnum, P.E.I., with John Candy as a private detective chasing his quarry through the scenic potato patches of Prince Edward Island. Meanwhile, in behind-the-scenes labour negotiations, Eugene Levy's Sid Dithers played the union president, barely able to see over the conference table as he detailed the progress of the strike-talks ("Fifteen minutes for lunsch? Ye can't even blow on your shoop!")

While these shows continued to incorporate the broad range of television parodies the show was known for, they also had a strong narrative thread which set the show apart from other sketch comedy shows of the time.

The show would also have a huge influence on The Simpsons. In the DVD commentary for "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment" (in which Dave Thomas guest stars), everyone says how much they loved the show and how influential it was because "it was so funny". Matt Groening goes on to say that he was specifically inspired by the town of Melonville, its own little universe with many recurring characters, and that that was the type of universe he wanted for The Simpsons. Both Dave Thomas and Andrea Martin have guest starred on The Simpsons.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (another program that also enjoyed a "cult" following like that of SCTV) at times featured references to the show and its characters; for example, during the film Space Mutiny, a character with an outrageous hairdo is said to resemble Martin Short's Ed Grimley and prompted numerous impersonations of said character. In another example, near the end of the film Danger! Death Ray a character throws a watch out of a window, prompting Crow T. Robot to cry "SCTV is on the air!"

The entire troupe was given a star on Canada's Walk of Fame in 2002. John Candy, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Catherine O'Hara also have individual stars.