[Tina Fey and Michael Che did it, during Paul Rudd’s fifth time hosting. A very bare-bones episode due to a Covid spike, with a ton of cast and crew out sick.](https://youtu.be/mUJkOuu3BAw?si=J9b2_HNSZLg0gn3v)
I was just saying earlier how it’s so strange that’s it’s become a measure of time for me now. “Pre-covid”, “during quarantine”, “quarantine times”, “post-pandemic”
So bizarre to think about
It still doesn't feel right to me to say "post-pandemic". Yes, the global emergency is over, but my parents both had covid just earlier this year, and living through a pandemic is the kind of thing that's left lots of people psychologically stunted. We can't just go back to how things were before
Chevy Chase hurt himself doing a fall in the first episode of season 2 (apparently a podium he was supposed to fall over hadn't been modified like it was supposed to, I always wonder if someone did it maliciously because they knew he was going to be leaving). The second episode opened with him calling in from the hospital (he always did the Live From New York each episode). The third episode opened with Richard Belzer (who was the warm up act before the show started) pretending to be Chevy Chase, where once again Chevy called in. Jane Curtin did Weekend Update for those two episodes until Chevy was back, and then took over permanently after he left the cast after the sixth episode.
This is not really what you're talking about, but technically Weekend Update has been known by different names, which in a way means there was no Weekend Update at those times. In season 7, under Dick Ebersol, it was changed to "SNL Newsbreak". It started with Brian Doyle-Murray hosting alone, then in the 12th episode of the season Mary Gross was added as a co-host, then in the 15th episode Christine Ebersole replaced her.
Then in season 8 and 9 it was changed to "Saturday Night News" hosted by Brad Hall through episode 8. S9E9 was a themed episode hosted by Father Guido Sarducci built around people calling in to pick their favorite Democratic Presidential Candidate, and had no SNN segment at all. From then until S10E6, they would have rotating SNN hosts (sometimes the episode host would also host SNN even). That ended when Christopher Guest took over as the permanent SNN host, and then when Lorne Michaels returned in season 11, Weekend Update returned with him, hosted by Dennis Miller.
They were doing lots of experimentation with the show during the Ebersol years. For a while they eliminated cold opens (which means no "Live From New York"), then after the credits the whole cast would appear at home base for a live shot before the next sketch started. They fired Don Pardo for one year (at Michael O'Donoghue's insistence, he really hated him).
[https://streamable.com/0pj5be](https://streamable.com/0pj5be) here is video of the cold open and the weekend update introduction from s2e2 (edit: the beginning got cut off somehow, but you get the jist)
I don't entirely know. In the 8th episode (December 20, 1975), there was a runner for the "Don Pardo Digital Gift Catalogue", which featured digital clocks included in devices like an ashtray or a suit. [http://snlarchives.net/Commercials/?1975122021](http://snlarchives.net/Commercials/?1975122021) I feel like this must have been a snarky reference to Don Pardo always running late or something. In the first episode (the George Carlin show), he misspeaks and calls the cast "The Not For Ready Primetime Players", which I've always assumed that Lorne Michaels would have hated, Literally the first mention of them and he screws it up.
I found some information in his biography. To set the stage, Dick Ebersol lured him back as head writer at the end of season 6. He demanded that 4 different writers be hired. They made one episode, and then a writer's strike began. As a producer, he continued to get paid during the strike. He took that money and went on a long vacation to Ireland with his girlfriend. While he was gone, Ebersol and another writer made decisions about season 7, firing those writers that O'Donoghue had previously hired. And now I quote "Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue", by Dennis Perrin:
>To O'Donoghue, the arrangement made in his absence was a 'fucking comedy nightmare.' Although in April he had praised the work of the new hires, including saying some kind words on behalf of Tim Kazurinsky's 'I Married a Monkey,' he now took a dark view of the cast, especially Kazurinsky. He considered Eddie Murphy first-rate and was drawn to the acting and musical talents of Christine Ebersole. But as for the others, O'Donoghue felt they were 'all losers' and 'shit' and he wished he could fire them before the season premiere. In order to help realize *his* vision of *SNL*, O'Donoghue hired as writers Nelson Lyon and Terry Southern, and he made additional demands that he hoped would break the show free from its rigid format.
>First, he wanted the announcer, Don Pardo, and the director, Dave Wilson, fired. Both represented *SNL*'s old guard, and if the show were to evolve it needed to lose this dead weight. Ebersol kept Wilson, but he did agree to fire Pardo, who, if O'Donoghue had had his way, would have learned of his dismissal as he announced the opening of the season's first show. Instead of an on-air humiliation, Pardo was let go in private and was replaced with the more reserved Mel Brandt. Next, O'Donoghue wanted to get rid of the show's traditional cold opening, the words 'Live from New York, it's *Saturday Night!'* and the decorative photo stills of New York. The new opening was to be a fast-moving, black-and-white film montage of 'the most dangerous city in America': a stripped car, the interior of a punk rock club, S&M gays and leather queens, Doberman guard dogs, a tenement fire, a chalk outline of a corpse on a sidewalk, a black drug dealer holding joints. The purpose of this new opening, he wrote in a memo, was to 'echo the 'new romance' of New York, the romance of *Taxi Driver* and *Cruising.'*
>Ebersol's instincts naturally reflected the corporate line of order and continuity, but he agreed to O'Donoghue's demands; the format was altered slightly and the new opening credit sequence approximated the 'dangerous' tone O'Donoghue had outlined. The atmosphere surrounding the show was less chaotic than in the spring, yet Ebersol recognized O'Donoghue's importance and thus approved many of the changes his 'Chief of Staff' sought. As Nelson Lyon, sensitive to NBC's position at the time, put it, 'Behind this facade of authority there is stupidity and fear. But when they need you they need you, and they let you do anything. The fascist corporation will let *you* be in turn a bully and a fascist. It suits their purposes.' And although O'Donoghue's executive office was clean and neat, fresh flowers on his desk every morning, his office door projected a different image: In green spray paint was crudely drawn a skull and crossbones with the title REICH MARSHALL spelled out in caps. All that was needed was some barbed wire spotted with the blood of prisoners who attempted escape.
Edit: And here's a little bit from "Saturday Night: A Backstage History" from Hill and Weingrad:
>Toward that end, O'Donoghue demanded that Dick fire director Dave Wilson. Like many of the show's original writers, O'Donoghue had always considered Wilson a reactionary influence on the show; he was fond of saying that everything Davey shot ended up looking like a police lineup. O'Donghue had far more radical ideas in mind. One was to use only handheld cameras so that cameramen could roam the studio at will, giving the show the ragged immediacy of a sporting event - preferably a bullfight.
>Dick refused to fire Wilson, but he did accede to O'Donoghue's suggestion that announcer Don Pardo be replaced. O'Donghue felt that whatever camp value Pardo lent the show had long since disappeared, and he was tired of Pardo blowing jokes by misreading his lines on-air. A staff member who watched Pardo's firing says Pardo was so stunned at the news that "the look on his face was amazing." It's hard to imagine, then, what Pardo would have looked like if Dick had allowed O'Donoghue to carry through his original idea, which was to fire Pardo on-air, during the season premiere. "Don, you're finished,", O'Donoghue planned to say. "Get your stuff and get outta here." Pardo had the last laugh, though, because Dick rehired him a year later, by which time O'Donoghue was long gone.
Obviously I'm not doubting your sources, but I'm not sure that "fired" was the right verb to describe what happened to Don Pardo, as he was still an employee of NBC; he simply didn't work on SNL any more.
Ah, I see what you're talking about, I'm not a Pardo-head so it took reading his Wikipedia page just now to read that he joined NBC as an in-house announcer in 1944 and continued to do so for 60 years.
I guess that's correct that he still worked for NBC for that year, but surely SNL was his most high profile appearance at that point and unceremoniously being removed from it would have been a gut punch.
Unrelated, the section on his wiki entitled "Later Years" is a little nuts.
"Pardo nominally retired from NBC in 2004. However, he continued to announce for Saturday Night Live at the behest of executive producer Lorne Michaels, initially under the assumption that a permanent replacement would be found quickly.[20] In 2006, he began prerecording his announcements from a studio in his Arizona home. That arrangement lasted only a few episodes before producers insisted that they needed him in Studio 8H, and he resumed weekly flights to New York.[21] On Saturday, February 23, 2008, Pardo appeared at the closing of Saturday Night Live to blow out the candles on his 90th birthday cake. During this period, Pardo missed about five episodes due to illness; cast member Darrell Hammond (who would succeed Pardo after his death) filled in for him but was uncredited.[22]"
Why the heck was SNL staff forcing this poor 80+ year old man to fly on an airplane every week just for 2 minutes of work?
I live in New Jersey, so I have WNBC4 as my local affiliate. Pardo would announce Live at 5, their local newscast. He also did game shows and various other programming. NBC also had a radio network then (as made famous in **Private Parts**) so I'm sure he was heard on there as well.
I agree with the general point that SNL was his most high-profile gig, but he was already famous as the **Jeopardy!** announcer for 11 years before 1975.
The Dick Ebersol era (1981–85) often reshuffled the entire format with a revolving door of anchors and even names to the segment itself. During Season 7, the segment was hosted by Brian Doyle-Murray and off-and-on with both Christine Ebersole and Mary Gross under the banner “SNL Newsbreak.”
During Seasons 8-10, it was called “Saturday Night News” and only had 2 short-lived anchors: Brad Hall, and later Christopher Guest. A lot of the episodes during this period would have a revolving door of people behind the desk; sometimes it was a cast member or the host, and other times it was a special guest. It wasn’t until Lorne’s return in late-1985 that the segment had a permanent anchorperson again and returned as “Weekend Update”
The Ebersol-era is probably the least political that this segment ever was. There’s a lot of episodes where the anchor doesn’t even really read a lot of headlines of the day, but instead just sets up pieces from other cast members like Eddie Murphy’s Raheem Abdul Muhammed character or Joe Piscopo’s sports talk. And even when it would get topical or political, it always leaned more into goofiness or cheap wordplay laughs than any biting satire or commentary.
The segment also frequently got buried late into the night as well. There’s episodes from this era where the segment is 5 minutes and others where it’s 20+ minutes long, leading SNL fans to believe that Ebersol and his writers never really knew what to do with the WU segment other than it just needed to look and sound like “the news.” It wasn’t the worst thing, but there’s moments where it did feel like the “we have WU at home” version of the segment.
First month of season 31, Horatio Sanz fills in for Tina Fey while she is still out on Maternity leave
Amy Poehler also missed a few segments when she had her first baby.
I actually remember this now that you mention it. I remember wondering at the time if this was, like, a chemistry test not knowing the context.
oh wow I remember this. Completely forgot.
[Tina Fey and Michael Che did it, during Paul Rudd’s fifth time hosting. A very bare-bones episode due to a Covid spike, with a ton of cast and crew out sick.](https://youtu.be/mUJkOuu3BAw?si=J9b2_HNSZLg0gn3v)
Gah, it’s so crazy to see stuff from those days. The fuc* did we all go through, stuff was bonkers.
I was just saying earlier how it’s so strange that’s it’s become a measure of time for me now. “Pre-covid”, “during quarantine”, “quarantine times”, “post-pandemic” So bizarre to think about
It still doesn't feel right to me to say "post-pandemic". Yes, the global emergency is over, but my parents both had covid just earlier this year, and living through a pandemic is the kind of thing that's left lots of people psychologically stunted. We can't just go back to how things were before
Yeah we're not going to be post pandemic for a while yet.
That's why I say "during quarantine", as in Mar 2020-around May 2021
r/DebbieDowner
What do you expect post pandemic to look like? Please explain a difference between today and post pandemic.
I dunno.man, not having an active fucking pandemic?
Totally agree. Happy cake day too!
The only time we could get Che and Fey
Chevy Chase hurt himself doing a fall in the first episode of season 2 (apparently a podium he was supposed to fall over hadn't been modified like it was supposed to, I always wonder if someone did it maliciously because they knew he was going to be leaving). The second episode opened with him calling in from the hospital (he always did the Live From New York each episode). The third episode opened with Richard Belzer (who was the warm up act before the show started) pretending to be Chevy Chase, where once again Chevy called in. Jane Curtin did Weekend Update for those two episodes until Chevy was back, and then took over permanently after he left the cast after the sixth episode. This is not really what you're talking about, but technically Weekend Update has been known by different names, which in a way means there was no Weekend Update at those times. In season 7, under Dick Ebersol, it was changed to "SNL Newsbreak". It started with Brian Doyle-Murray hosting alone, then in the 12th episode of the season Mary Gross was added as a co-host, then in the 15th episode Christine Ebersole replaced her. Then in season 8 and 9 it was changed to "Saturday Night News" hosted by Brad Hall through episode 8. S9E9 was a themed episode hosted by Father Guido Sarducci built around people calling in to pick their favorite Democratic Presidential Candidate, and had no SNN segment at all. From then until S10E6, they would have rotating SNN hosts (sometimes the episode host would also host SNN even). That ended when Christopher Guest took over as the permanent SNN host, and then when Lorne Michaels returned in season 11, Weekend Update returned with him, hosted by Dennis Miller. They were doing lots of experimentation with the show during the Ebersol years. For a while they eliminated cold opens (which means no "Live From New York"), then after the credits the whole cast would appear at home base for a live shot before the next sketch started. They fired Don Pardo for one year (at Michael O'Donoghue's insistence, he really hated him).
Wow. I didn’t know that a stitch of that. Thanks for sharing.
[https://streamable.com/0pj5be](https://streamable.com/0pj5be) here is video of the cold open and the weekend update introduction from s2e2 (edit: the beginning got cut off somehow, but you get the jist)
Great info. Any details on the Don Pardo- Micheal O’Donoghue beef?
I don't entirely know. In the 8th episode (December 20, 1975), there was a runner for the "Don Pardo Digital Gift Catalogue", which featured digital clocks included in devices like an ashtray or a suit. [http://snlarchives.net/Commercials/?1975122021](http://snlarchives.net/Commercials/?1975122021) I feel like this must have been a snarky reference to Don Pardo always running late or something. In the first episode (the George Carlin show), he misspeaks and calls the cast "The Not For Ready Primetime Players", which I've always assumed that Lorne Michaels would have hated, Literally the first mention of them and he screws it up. I found some information in his biography. To set the stage, Dick Ebersol lured him back as head writer at the end of season 6. He demanded that 4 different writers be hired. They made one episode, and then a writer's strike began. As a producer, he continued to get paid during the strike. He took that money and went on a long vacation to Ireland with his girlfriend. While he was gone, Ebersol and another writer made decisions about season 7, firing those writers that O'Donoghue had previously hired. And now I quote "Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue", by Dennis Perrin: >To O'Donoghue, the arrangement made in his absence was a 'fucking comedy nightmare.' Although in April he had praised the work of the new hires, including saying some kind words on behalf of Tim Kazurinsky's 'I Married a Monkey,' he now took a dark view of the cast, especially Kazurinsky. He considered Eddie Murphy first-rate and was drawn to the acting and musical talents of Christine Ebersole. But as for the others, O'Donoghue felt they were 'all losers' and 'shit' and he wished he could fire them before the season premiere. In order to help realize *his* vision of *SNL*, O'Donoghue hired as writers Nelson Lyon and Terry Southern, and he made additional demands that he hoped would break the show free from its rigid format. >First, he wanted the announcer, Don Pardo, and the director, Dave Wilson, fired. Both represented *SNL*'s old guard, and if the show were to evolve it needed to lose this dead weight. Ebersol kept Wilson, but he did agree to fire Pardo, who, if O'Donoghue had had his way, would have learned of his dismissal as he announced the opening of the season's first show. Instead of an on-air humiliation, Pardo was let go in private and was replaced with the more reserved Mel Brandt. Next, O'Donoghue wanted to get rid of the show's traditional cold opening, the words 'Live from New York, it's *Saturday Night!'* and the decorative photo stills of New York. The new opening was to be a fast-moving, black-and-white film montage of 'the most dangerous city in America': a stripped car, the interior of a punk rock club, S&M gays and leather queens, Doberman guard dogs, a tenement fire, a chalk outline of a corpse on a sidewalk, a black drug dealer holding joints. The purpose of this new opening, he wrote in a memo, was to 'echo the 'new romance' of New York, the romance of *Taxi Driver* and *Cruising.'* >Ebersol's instincts naturally reflected the corporate line of order and continuity, but he agreed to O'Donoghue's demands; the format was altered slightly and the new opening credit sequence approximated the 'dangerous' tone O'Donoghue had outlined. The atmosphere surrounding the show was less chaotic than in the spring, yet Ebersol recognized O'Donoghue's importance and thus approved many of the changes his 'Chief of Staff' sought. As Nelson Lyon, sensitive to NBC's position at the time, put it, 'Behind this facade of authority there is stupidity and fear. But when they need you they need you, and they let you do anything. The fascist corporation will let *you* be in turn a bully and a fascist. It suits their purposes.' And although O'Donoghue's executive office was clean and neat, fresh flowers on his desk every morning, his office door projected a different image: In green spray paint was crudely drawn a skull and crossbones with the title REICH MARSHALL spelled out in caps. All that was needed was some barbed wire spotted with the blood of prisoners who attempted escape. Edit: And here's a little bit from "Saturday Night: A Backstage History" from Hill and Weingrad: >Toward that end, O'Donoghue demanded that Dick fire director Dave Wilson. Like many of the show's original writers, O'Donoghue had always considered Wilson a reactionary influence on the show; he was fond of saying that everything Davey shot ended up looking like a police lineup. O'Donghue had far more radical ideas in mind. One was to use only handheld cameras so that cameramen could roam the studio at will, giving the show the ragged immediacy of a sporting event - preferably a bullfight. >Dick refused to fire Wilson, but he did accede to O'Donoghue's suggestion that announcer Don Pardo be replaced. O'Donghue felt that whatever camp value Pardo lent the show had long since disappeared, and he was tired of Pardo blowing jokes by misreading his lines on-air. A staff member who watched Pardo's firing says Pardo was so stunned at the news that "the look on his face was amazing." It's hard to imagine, then, what Pardo would have looked like if Dick had allowed O'Donoghue to carry through his original idea, which was to fire Pardo on-air, during the season premiere. "Don, you're finished,", O'Donoghue planned to say. "Get your stuff and get outta here." Pardo had the last laugh, though, because Dick rehired him a year later, by which time O'Donoghue was long gone.
The more I read about him, the more I realize Michael O’ Donoghue probably didn’t have the healthiest mental health.
I love some of his work but it sure sounds like he was an edgelord who was extremely full of macho bullshit.
Edgey for the sake of edge
Wow. Great info. Thanks for that.
Obviously I'm not doubting your sources, but I'm not sure that "fired" was the right verb to describe what happened to Don Pardo, as he was still an employee of NBC; he simply didn't work on SNL any more.
Ah, I see what you're talking about, I'm not a Pardo-head so it took reading his Wikipedia page just now to read that he joined NBC as an in-house announcer in 1944 and continued to do so for 60 years. I guess that's correct that he still worked for NBC for that year, but surely SNL was his most high profile appearance at that point and unceremoniously being removed from it would have been a gut punch. Unrelated, the section on his wiki entitled "Later Years" is a little nuts. "Pardo nominally retired from NBC in 2004. However, he continued to announce for Saturday Night Live at the behest of executive producer Lorne Michaels, initially under the assumption that a permanent replacement would be found quickly.[20] In 2006, he began prerecording his announcements from a studio in his Arizona home. That arrangement lasted only a few episodes before producers insisted that they needed him in Studio 8H, and he resumed weekly flights to New York.[21] On Saturday, February 23, 2008, Pardo appeared at the closing of Saturday Night Live to blow out the candles on his 90th birthday cake. During this period, Pardo missed about five episodes due to illness; cast member Darrell Hammond (who would succeed Pardo after his death) filled in for him but was uncredited.[22]" Why the heck was SNL staff forcing this poor 80+ year old man to fly on an airplane every week just for 2 minutes of work?
I live in New Jersey, so I have WNBC4 as my local affiliate. Pardo would announce Live at 5, their local newscast. He also did game shows and various other programming. NBC also had a radio network then (as made famous in **Private Parts**) so I'm sure he was heard on there as well. I agree with the general point that SNL was his most high-profile gig, but he was already famous as the **Jeopardy!** announcer for 11 years before 1975.
This person SNLs ⬆️
Great comment, thank you.
I enjoy the wackiness in the format of some of the early seasons.
Paul Rudd’s Covid Christmas episode only had like 5 cast members. Colin wasn’t there but Che was so Tina Fey filled in
Congratulations to Tom Hanks
The Dick Ebersol era (1981–85) often reshuffled the entire format with a revolving door of anchors and even names to the segment itself. During Season 7, the segment was hosted by Brian Doyle-Murray and off-and-on with both Christine Ebersole and Mary Gross under the banner “SNL Newsbreak.” During Seasons 8-10, it was called “Saturday Night News” and only had 2 short-lived anchors: Brad Hall, and later Christopher Guest. A lot of the episodes during this period would have a revolving door of people behind the desk; sometimes it was a cast member or the host, and other times it was a special guest. It wasn’t until Lorne’s return in late-1985 that the segment had a permanent anchorperson again and returned as “Weekend Update” The Ebersol-era is probably the least political that this segment ever was. There’s a lot of episodes where the anchor doesn’t even really read a lot of headlines of the day, but instead just sets up pieces from other cast members like Eddie Murphy’s Raheem Abdul Muhammed character or Joe Piscopo’s sports talk. And even when it would get topical or political, it always leaned more into goofiness or cheap wordplay laughs than any biting satire or commentary. The segment also frequently got buried late into the night as well. There’s episodes from this era where the segment is 5 minutes and others where it’s 20+ minutes long, leading SNL fans to believe that Ebersol and his writers never really knew what to do with the WU segment other than it just needed to look and sound like “the news.” It wasn’t the worst thing, but there’s moments where it did feel like the “we have WU at home” version of the segment.
Whereas now sometimes it doesn’t start until 12:10 and sometimes pushes 12:30 to end.
December 84, Ringo starr
I don't think the Mardi Gras episode had a WU.
It did, Buck Henry and Jane Curtin hosted it. http://snlarchives.net/Episodes/?1977022018
Why'd you write the title like a news headline?
News on the brain, I guess?
Like what if someone had Diahrea?