![]() ![]() That even includes cast members who struggled to find a foothold during their Studio 8H days: You might not have known Tim Robinson if you tended to tune out after Weekend Update in 20, but you almost certainly recognize his I Think You Should Leave characters as the avatars of various cultural pathologies circa 2023. As Bill Hader’s Barry builds toward its final job, and Ted Lasso looks toward a future without Jason Sudeikis, it’s hard to argue against the impact that a peak era of SNL had on Peak TV. The Saturday Night Live talent that put the show back in the zeitgeist at the dawn of the Obama administration is now doing for TV what their predecessors once did for film. But a confluence of factors, and a generation of writers and performers whose talents are particularly suited to the small screen, have shifted these winds. It needn’t be an original concept, either: In the wake of The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World, studios have continually lined up to convert the show’s sketches into films. Until quite recently, the customary next step for an SNL star involved taking the leap to a Tommy Boy or an Anchorman. Ellen Cleghorne and Tracy Morgan each headlined a sitcom for a single season after leaving the show for years, the closest analog to Curtin’s Kate & Allie tenure was Phil Hartman and NewsRadio, a casting coup that arose after Hartman’s attempt to fire up an NBC variety series of his own was extinguished by the network. And yet, few of her fellow SNL alumni followed her example. ![]() Kate & Allie was a Top 20 Nielsen hit in its first four years on the air, became a syndication staple, and earned Curtin two consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. I don’t want people to constantly challenge me. “Movie stars at that time, everyone said ‘You have to stay in movies, you have to go and have a career in movies - it’s the only way to do it,’” Curtin told the Academy Foundation. James to lead the “divorced moms share a big-city apartment” sitcom Kate & Allie. And so, in 1984 - a year whose two top-grossing films, Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters, both starred SNL alumni - she joined Susan St. For Curtin, however, a stint at 30 Rockefeller Center was enough megastardom for one lifetime. After all, it’s what Aykroyd, Belushi, Radner, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and frequent host/unofficial cast member Steve Martin all did. “It seems as though with Saturday Night Live, with that kind of enormity to what you were doing, culturally, at least, it seemed as though you would have to go to movies,” she said in a 2015 Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation interview. Not that Curtin didn’t make her mark on what became a nearly half-century-old sketch-comedy institution: Her even keel and lethal deadpan made her an ideal foil to the antic stylings of Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner.Īnd when it came to choosing post- SNL projects, Curtin was similarly sensible-yet-savvy. “Those first five years, only Jane amongst the cast really was able to have a total personal life,” writer Rosie Shuster recalls a few pages later. “I sort of stopped going to the after-show parties after the first year, just because they weren’t fun,” she says in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ oral history Live From New York. Compared to the other Not Ready for Prime Time Players, the New England native was the one possessed of an old-fashioned professionalism, who did her job, did it well, then went home, eschewing the Bacchanalian backstage behavior that formed the foundation of future tell-alls. ![]() Jane Curtin had always been the outlier among the original Saturday Night Liveensemble. ![]()
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