![]() ![]() Despite Michaels uttering the dreaded “You’ll never work in this town again” threat to Wayans at the time, the producer invited back Wayans to perform a stand-up piece on the last episode of that season, a move Wayans credits to the “sick” side of Michaels who “loves the rebel.” This was also the episode where Michaels locked the cast, including the returning Wayans, in a burning room, so who knows? “I went berserk,” Michaels admits in the SNL oral history, Live From New York, with Wayans recalling being taken aback that the perennially cool and collected producer would launch into a red-faced, expletive-filled tirade as Michaels fired him on the spot. Monopoly as written, but he surprised everybody by busting out a stereotypically “gay” accent during the sketch, derailing it and drawing Michaels’ immediate ire. Technically, Wayans, then floundering and deeply frustrated as a seldom-featured featured player, said his lines as an unfunny cop busting Jon Lovitz’s Mr. Whitney Brown and Dennis Miller being brought back for the rebuilding year that was Season 12.ĭamon Wayans lit the fuse on his firing when he did the unthinkable, at least according to the rules of Lorne Michaels: He went off script. An onscreen legend asked “Who will survive? Who will perish?,” with only Lovitz, Nora Dunn, A. Having second thoughts, the producer rushed into the flames - but only to rescue lone season standout performer Jon Lovitz, leaving the rest frantically scrabbling at the walls. With his cast happily celebrating having made it through the season (and toasting to many more), Michaels was seen pouring gasoline around the door of their backstage dressing room. So Michaels, aping the cliffhanger disaster plots of many a floundering TV series, literally burned the studio down. ![]() Reclaiming the producer’s chair, Michaels stacked his initial cast with an eclectic group of performers who, while undeniably talented, never gelled, leaving Season 11 a critical and ratings shambles by the end. Lorne Michaels’ long-awaited return to Saturday Night Live did not go as planned. ![]() The Reaping: Chapter 2 (Robert Downey Jr., Joan Cusack, Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Terry Sweeney, Danitra Vance) As noted in Saturday Night, the only reason Season 6 performer Denny Dillon was temporarily spared was that Ebersol couldn’t afford to buy out as many contracts as he’d have liked. The book Saturday Night relates how Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, the only two cast members popular enough to feel secure, giggled their way through the parade of departing fired faces, the sourness of the dismal season’s implosion turning them, as Piscopo puts it, into a “couple of little bastards.” And while Charles Rocket’s recent f-bomb made his firing all but a certainty, Risley and Gottfried, who’d barely made an impression in their brief time on the show, found themselves victims of Ebersol’s desire to essentially start over again from scratch. In addition to firing most of the existing writers, Ebersol set out to remake the cast, calling both Ann Risley and Gilbert Gottfried into his office for the chop. Season 6 claimed several more victims on its way to television ignominy, with the newly installed producer Dick Ebersol immediately cleaning house once he took over from Jean Doumanian. The Reaping: Chapter 1 (Gilbert Gottfried, Ann Risley) While Rocket and Doumanian were doing the contrite rounds in various executive offices, NBC was already plotting their exit, with Dick Ebersol, who’d helped get SNL off the ground initially, tapped to finish out the season - without Charles Rocket. By the time Rocket uttered his expletive, Doumanian (and, indeed, SNL itself) was on shaky ground - Rocket was the last straw that brought down this iteration of the show. (Censor Bill Clotworthy had just that night given a pass to musical guest Prince, whose own “fuckin’” during his performance of “Partyup” was deemed unintelligible enough to ignore.) But this was the infamous Season 6, where newly hired producer Jean Doumanian vainly attempted to replicate the unparalleled success of Saturday Night Live’s first five seasons, resulting in an all-time TV train wreck that saw SNL’s once-mighty ratings and critical acclaim crash and burn. It was an accident - “I wish I knew who the fuck did it,” Rocket regrettably ad-libbed when asked by host Charlene Tilton about the episode’s running “Who shot Charles Rocket?” gag - and a performer in a more secure position might have weathered the ensuing NBC storm. 21, 1981, episode, Rocket, tasked with stretching for time, broke the ultimate network taboo by uttering the f-bomb. It was the “fuck” heard ‘round the world. ![]()
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