"A Limo for a Lame-O" is a commentary delivered by Al Franken during Weekend Update on the May 10, 1980, episode of Saturday Night Live (SNL).
She oversaw a wholesale replacement of the cast and writing staff, and was fired before the end of the next season, called the worst in the show's history by author Brian Finamore.
But all the show's other repertory cast members remained, and midway through the season Harry Shearer was promoted from featured player status to replace them, although he soon alienated his colleagues with his attitude.
[4] Many of the show's writers, who had long been playing minor roles in sketches, including Al Franken and his longtime partner Tom Davis, were in turn named as featured players.
Increasing cocaine use, particularly the addictions of Garrett Morris and Laraine Newman, had exacerbated existing interpersonal friction, and stories of egotistical behavior by the stars began to reach the media.
Producer Lorne Michaels had felt it necessary to bring the staff up to Mohonk Mountain House in the Hudson Valley for a weekend retreat before the season, the first time that had been necessary, which the senior cast members declined to attend.
From the beginning of his tenure at NBC, Silverman had been convinced that a weekday variety show starring Gilda Radner, whom he saw as the next Lucille Ball, could be a hit.
Shows like The Tonight Show (itself embroiled in a contract dispute with host Johnny Carson at the same time) were mainstays of the schedule along with SNL, but the network had had very few of the prime time hits it hoped president Fred Silverman, known until then for his apparently unerring instinct in understanding what audiences would watch, would be able to deliver for them as he had for ABC and CBS earlier in the decade.
[6] NBC's weak ratings position was aggravated in early 1980 by its shaky finances—a loss of millions in broadcast fees when President Jimmy Carter decided to boycott that year's Summer Olympics in Moscow in order to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the preceding fall, and the failure of Supertrain in spring of 1979, the most expensive series in television history at that point, had pushed the network to the verge of bankruptcy.
When it returned he wanted to totally restructure it, probably with a new cast, and would have filled the role of executive producer, since he had signed a three-picture deal with Warner Brothers, leaving the duties he had handled for the previous five seasons to someone else, possibly Franken and Davis.
Irwin Moss, the network's vice president for business affairs, began by noting the $2.5 million NBC had paid, sight unseen, for the broadcast rights to Gilda Live, which had failed commercially and critically.
They finally left after Moss refused to commit to any more than six episodes of a possible prime time series; Brillstein and Michaels had wanted 17.
Silverman offered Michaels more money, primetime shows, anything he wanted, as long as he'd stay at least nominally involved with Saturday Night Live.
[8] Shortly before dress rehearsal on May 10 for the season's third-to-last show, hosted by Bob Newhart, Barbara Gallagher, NBC vice president for late-night and special programming, who had worked for Silverman at ABC as well, was perusing the scripts for that evening's show when she came across Franken's commentary for that night's Weekend Update, where he had increasingly been making appearances that season as the segment's "social sciences editor", riffing on the concept of the 1980s as the "Al Franken Decade" that he had introduced a few months earlier with the end of the 1970s "Me Decade".
In this evening's installment, Franken recounted how, earlier in the week, he had just come up with a great idea for the show while hailing a taxi outside Rockefeller Center when a fan interrupted him, and he forgot it.
After dress, where the commentary drew voluminous laughter from the audience, she went to Michaels, who agreed that it might have been too much (he had not thought it funny when Franken read it to him, but allowed it since it only took up two minutes of airtime).
"[1] Michaels assured Gallagher and Brandon Tartikoff, NBC vice president for comedy programming, who was also present, that Franken would nevertheless comply with her request and tone the commentary down.
Michaels believed that both Gallagher and Tartikoff were afraid to talk to Silverman, who as the pressures on him increased with NBC's failures had been screaming at his subordinates more and more frequently.
"[1] Instead of the meeting the two had originally planned, the event of Monday in Silverman's office was the arrival of approximately 5,000 letters and postcards in response to Franken's plea.
Franken further implored Silverman not to blame Lorne, who often allowed material on the show that he himself did not personally see the humor of in the name of creative freedom.
While host Buck Henry, doing that duty for what turned out to be the last time, emphatically denied (to loud applause) that the show was ending and even paraded a purported "new cast" (actually longtime backstage crewmembers) across the stage during his opening monologue, the end sent a different message, as the "On Air" sign outside the studio, the show's traditional final shot, flickered and then darkened.
Michaels had also left all the cast members a gift, a cigarette lighter shaped like the 30 Rock building where the show was produced, inscribed "Nice working with you/1975–1980".
So, during the meeting, it was suggested that longtime associate producer Jean Doumanian, a good friend of Gallagher's, be promoted to the top job.
She had ostensibly produced a primetime special with Bob and Ray, whose humor was especially adored by many of the SNL writers and performers, earlier that season.
After the meeting, Tartikoff called Allan Katz, a former Laugh-In writer who'd gone on to write and produce for several successful 1970s sitcoms, including M*A*S*H and Rhoda, to see if he was interested.
[11] Two weeks later, Michaels signed a one-year "holding agreement" with NBC, which served mainly to prevent him from going to work for another network so soon, while he started his own production company, Broadway Video.
"Everyone got a memo from Jean to clear out their offices by July," he claims, likening her to "the new broom" which, in a common media adage about management changes, "sweeps clean".
Joe Piscopo's characters drew genuine laughter from the audience, and over the course of the season Eddie Murphy, whom Doumanian had been persuaded to give a chance despite reservations about his youth, began to emerge as a star.
Doumanian was fired and replaced with Dick Ebersol, who was able to produce just one show before that year's writers' strike forced an early end to the TV season.
But Franken did not have a much better opinion of Ebersol, who had been in charge of late-night programming for NBC when SNL had been launched in 1975, and thus became "the first person to steal credit for the success of Saturday Night Live."