Not long after Sunday’s celebration of 50 years of Saturday Night Live, people began celebrating 50 years of complaining about Saturday Night Live.
There was obviously much to critique about SNL50, from the unusual sketch lineup, to the tribute to the late Sinead O’Connor, who the show totally threw under the bus back in the ‘90s. Then there was the glut of dispiriting commercials, which revived a number of beloved SNL characters purely in the name of corporate synergy.
But one of the biggest complaints about SNL50 involved its length. The show clocked in at three hours and fifteen minutes, including commercials. That’s longer than The Godfather. Plus there was an hour-long red carpet event before the actual special began, ensuring that viewers would need to be crowbarred off of their sofas by the end of the night.
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Which begs the question: Could any part of the show have been trimmed? Well, on the most recent Fly on the Wall podcast, David Spade made a belated suggestion for what could have been cut out of the broadcast.
While his co-host Dana Carvey wasn’t able to attend due to illness, Spade was present for SNL50, and even appeared in John Mulaney’s prolonged musical time-travel sketch. Underscoring just how bloated the show was getting, Spade hilariously tapped out of the sketch before it was over, telling Mulaney and Pete Davidson from his seat: “I got a feel for it.”
After mentioning the special’s excessive running time, Spade shared his choice for the one segment that could have been “edited out.” He also suggested that it’s such a “ballsy take” that it would no doubt generate “headlines.” Well, he was right, I guess.
“I would have lifted the Belushi (short film) at the end,” Spade revealed, referring to Tom Schiller’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” which aired toward the end of the show, introduced by original cast member Garrett Morris. The 1978 not-so-digital short found an aged John Belushi visiting the graves of his SNL co-stars, including Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner. Adding an extra layer of melancholy to the already bleak film is the fact that Belushi himself would die only four years later. And Radner passed away just a little over a decade after it was shot.
Spade’s complaint wasn’t with the quality of the film, just with the fact that it was a huge bummer. “It made me sad. And Paul McCartney had to follow it,” Spade pointed out.
“Tom Schiller was a great little filmmaker. He did some cool stuff. But in that moment, yeah, I felt a little sad,” Carvey concurred.
“If we were there and we (saw) people that we were super-tight with, and they’re all passed away — it’s heavy for me and I didn’t know ‘em all,” Spade argued. “And then it just makes the whole place go, ‘Holy shit.’”
Had Lorne Michaels taken this advice and cut the film, the special would have been a breezy three hours and ten minutes.