NBC put on a terrific two-hour special last night with clips from, and interviews with stars and writers of, the original Saturday Night Live. The special really went a long way toward showing what genius (and eccentricity) went into that show all the way back in the latter half of the 1970's.
If you were a kid growing up in New York at that time, as I was, there's no way you could watch this show and not feel huge nostalgia, and sadness. The show was really an embodiment of a bygone era in New York: grit, grime, danger and an abundance of brilliant, creative people who could afford to live here even if they were under-employed. The show hasn't been funny since the original cast left a quarter century ago. And New York, while still the greatest city in the world, has seen a gradual and dangerously complete erosion of the sort of creative vitality it had back then.