The SNL nightmare thread inspired this…
Yeah, it wasn’t a great season. How could it be when they’re following the SNL Originals? BUT it wasn’t a total loss! It introduced Piscopo, Murphy & Kazarinsky!
And there was one skit I still remember- an Appalachian inbred family (with a daughter fixated on her imaginary babies crying) which is chosen to be part of a regional theatre, in which the audience just sets up chairs & watches them be themselves.
Now which season had the skit with “Amiable Dunce/Shrewd International Manipulator Reagan”?
Hate to nitpick here but Tim Kazarinsky wasn’t part of the infamous 1980-81 SNL cast and Murphy was initially just a featured player (I don’t think he was even in the disasterous season premiere in November 1980). SNL, after meeting with unanimously hostile reviews and free-falling ratings, was taken off the schedule after only 13 weeks for extensive repairs (i.e., firing the in-over-her-head producer Jean Doumanian and everyone in the cast except for Murphy and Piscopo). When it returned nearly two months later, SNL had a new producer (Dick Ebersole) and an almost-new cast (of which Kazarinsky was a member). However, they only did–at most–one or two more episodes that season. (I’m not 100% sure about that last fact since, by that time, I had stopped watching the show.)
That was about six years later during the time of Iran-Contra. As mentioned previously, Phil Hartman played the secretly astute Reagan.