Mining Familiar Territory

THE NEW SHOW, NBC, Fridays, 10p.m. E.S.T.

It was the party. Date: every week. Time: 11:30 p.m. E.S.T. Place: your living room or mine. During the mid-1970s, Saturday night meant one thing only for glassy-eyed millions of the TV generation: Saturday Night Live. In each installment, a guest host and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray et al.) teetered on the cutting edge of comedy chaos. The humor was topical, hip, manic, risky, urban and wildly uneven. It was guerrilla television and it radicalized American comedy.

By 1980 the party was over. One by one, members of the repertory company had defected to the movies, and the man behind the madness, Producer Lome Michaels, concluded that the show had dwindled into an institution. Michaels took a three-year hiatus from the pressures of weekly television, which had been his passion ever since he moved south from Canada to hatch gags for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

Last week, amid great expectations, Michaels returned. Not to the low-key late-night schedule, but to the hour of reckoning: prime time. And not for a loose-limbed 90 minutes but for a stricter 60. The question that hovered over the whole endeavor: What could he do for an encore without cannibalizing his own success?

Well, he could cannibalize someone else’s. The vehicle of his return is coyly called The New Show, but the theme song of the inaugural hour could have been Everything

Old Is New Again. The inspiration seemed to be less the anarchism of SNL than the more domesticated spirit of the comedy-variety shows of the 1950s, like Your Show of Shows and The Colgate Comedy Hour. The New Show courted chuckles of recognition rather than nervous titters or ribald guffaws. Even the graphics danced with domestic emblems of the ’50s like toasters and kidney-shaped swimming pools.

The show’s opening lineup featured three regulars: the deadpan, usually deadeye Buck Henry, the chameleon-like Dave Thomas, late of SCTV. and Valri Bromfield, a Canadian comedian whom Michaels originally wanted for SNL. There was a handful of mostly traditional sketches, long on premise and short on development. Guest Star Steve Martin (who can be funny just standing still) opened the show with some mincing mimickry of Michael Jackson’s distinctive footwork. In one skit Jeff Goldblum (The Big Chill) played an earnest, geeky math teacher who yearned to belt out Tom Lehrer-like songs for the faculty talent show.

Another routine used the overused device of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a theme that has already become a parody of itself. It did have its clever moments, though: in this brave new world, Studio 54 became the Ministry of Fun and a stentorian disc jockey commanded the dancers, “Fellow citizens, do the Pony!”

The most effective routine also mined familiar territory: television. Henry and Thomas played cheery, gee-whiz hosts of an “infotainment” show infatuated with swirling graphics and inane charts.

Doubtless it is unfair to judge The New Show on the basis of a single hour.

As Michaels notes, SNL required several weeks of on-air fumbling before it crystallized. The new series also will need time to find its way, and it cannot go too far wrong with the writing and performing talent it already has. Comedy, Steve Martin once said, is not pretty. The New Show needs to muss itself up a bit. If it does, then there is reason to hope that in the weeks ahead it will become The New and Improved Show. — By Richard Stengel