Saturday Night Live and American TV by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780253010902
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

In exploring the struggles of professional identity surrounding NBC’s triple-dipping from the legacy of SNL in 2006–2007, this chapter has been only tangentially concerned with the production of the late-night sketch comedy series itself. At some level, that series became merely grist for the mill from which two new configurations of network television production sought to develop their own industrial identities under the umbrella of a shared network struggling in the post-network economy. Nevertheless, through that production, both series engaged with the cultural legacy of SNL—a piece of broadcast television heritage to which each production community found it advantageous to lay claim, even as those opposing claims required the articulation of differentiable production identities to stake out their unique positions within that shared tradition. While economically devalued and increasingly perceived as culturally irrelevant, SNL continued to have purchase as networks and producers alike sought the ability to control, articulate, and alternatively include and distance themselves from its heritage. As I have suggested, this complex network of stakeholders in the reiteration and mediation of SNL’s work world might be considered a form of franchising in that SNL became a set of backstage meanings and identities shared and exchanged across heterogeneous production communities and spaces of identity in broadcast television. Whether we quibble over that “franchising” term, the point is that SNL had clearly become something larger than a single television series: an organizational umbrella under which both the economics and the cultural significance of NBC’s programming came to be mediated and understood. Indeed, in popular reception, the different contexts of production and the competing production identities of SNL, Studio 60, and 30 Rock often did not preclude understanding them as a shared entity. On NPR’s All Things Considered, for example, host Robert Siegel perceived the new series as “both based on or spin-offs from Saturday Night Live.”40 On a definitional level, and certainly in the context of the managed public disclosures offered by talent like Michaels and Fey, this is patently false. Yet in terms of a structure of feeling, this misstatement captures the significance of the relationships among these series. In the post-network era, a perceived-to-be-obsolete SNL had become increasingly relevant to and persistently meaningful in the construction of production identities in network television and the mediation of network comedy work worlds.

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