A typical 1/2 hour television show is 22mins long (8mins of commercials), an hour show is about 44mins.
Saturday Night Live fills a 1 1/2 hour timeslot, so following the above formula would bring it to 66mins. The last 1/2 hour, though, has always, as long as I can remember watching, seemed over full of commercials.
Is this just my imagination? Is it just that come 12:30 I get tired and the unfunny last half hour of sketches seems entirely unfullfilling? Or does the last half hour, in fact, have less SNL and more commercials?
Letterman’s show (at least what we get on local TV) seems to run like clockwork although I never actually timed it. Opening monologue less than 5 minutes
Paul plays walking music while Dave goes to the desk
Dave tells who’s on that night
commercial break less than 5 minutes
several bits that range from odd to peculiar
another maybe-5-minute break
Top 10 list
first guest for maybe 5 minutes
another 5-minute commercial break
more of first guest (if first guest was anybody) or second guest for maybe 5 minutes
another 5-minute plus break
second guest unless first guest was Bill Clinton or Tom Brokaw
at least 10-minute break with a tiny interruption for some Alan Kalter nonsense (which is usually the funniest thing that night)
“musical” guest or an on-the-way-up comic
maybe another two minutes of commercials for the die-hards who like seeing the Worldwide Pants logo
followed by Dave waving and saying “good night.”
That last siege of commercials has broken me from waiting to see the musical guest.
My theory is that SNL operates similarly, but it’s been years since I watched SNL. It was that way when I was a regular viewer.
They do seem to take more time for commercials later in the show. [speculation] Maybe they don’t want to lose viewers early on, so they save the longer commercial breaks for later. Maybe they charge more for ad slots at the top of the show, and fewer advertisers can afford it. Or maybe by the last half hour the cast and crew are getting worn out and need longer breaks. [/speculation]
That’s the cliche, and it’s largely true, but not entirely. They tend to put the safer sketches, like those built around popular recurring characters, in the first half of the show. If they have some odd or throwaway bit that they’re not sure whether it will work or not, they’ll run it near the end. Often these aren’t worth watching, but occasionally there are some real gems.
There’s a great story Larry David told on Fresh Air about his stint at SNL as a writer, when one of the only, if not the only, sketch he wrote that got used going on in the last ten minutes of the show. The “ten to one” slot.
It’s worth going to the Fresh Air archives to hear.
I thought it was a trick question, too. I was going to reply in a manner similar to Bo, in that the last half hour usually seems unbearably longer than the 30 minutes it’s taking up. Sometimes even that loudmouth selling OXY CLEAN!!! BUY NOW AND WE’LL DOUBLE YOUR ORDER!!! is more entertaining than the last third of SNL. Cut the last half hour and move directly on to the SNL “Classis” episode that follows.
True, last night’s “classic” was pretty bad. I like seeing the old ones though, because it allows you to see how much things have changed. Last night’s episode wasn’t very good, but even the worst episodes from the beginning of SNL come across as edgier than the focus-grouped garbage that they’ve been trying to pass of lately.
Since the Rivers episode was before my time (born in '82), I don’t really know Joan Rivers other than being a parody of the plastic surgery culture in Hollywood, and screeching about fashion. Seeing her doing her schtick last night made me feel bad for her. She seemed to be doing a Rodney Dangerfield-esque bit about how she was so ugly. That kind of self-deprecation over a long period of time, and the amount of plastic surgery she’s had, just made me feel bad for her.
I forgot to mention about last night’s episode. The first skit with Buckwheat’s bodyguard went on forever and it really wasn’t that funny, but I still thought it was admirable. Now the SNL wouldn’t think of doing anything like that, since they have to be sure not to go more than X minutes before getting some ad revenue.
Commercial breaks typically get longer near the end of a program. Short ones at the beginning so you don’t change the channel and find something else, and longer ones once they figure you’re hooked.
It’s more noticible with Saturday Night Live because towards the end people tend to drift into a hypnogogic state, experiencing disorientation and a nauseous sense of time-distention.
[QUOTE=Dignan]
I forgot to mention about last night’s episode. The first skit with Buckwheat’s bodyguard went on forever and it really wasn’t that funny, but I still thought it was admirable. Now the SNL wouldn’t think of doing anything like that, since they have to be sure not to go more than X minutes before getting some ad revenue.[/QUOTE
That was the major problem with the early 80’s SNL. The sketches that sucked went on way too long. The 1981-82 season (the one after the last of the “classic” cast left) was especially plagued with this problem. It didn’t help that the cast sucked hard (Denny Dillon, Charles Rocket, etc).
I kind of surprised they would rerun an episode hosted by Joan Rivers from 1983. Lorne Michaels wasn’t producing SNL then and he supposedly doesn’t think too highly of the shows put out during that time. Also, Michaels has said publicly that he has always detested Joan Rivers (and has had her caricatured savagely several times on SNL). Given these factors, I would’ve guessed Michaels would’ve preferred that tapes of the episode be erased from existence rather than NBC re-air it as a “classic.”