'SNL' enters its 28th season for better or worse

NEW YORK -- A new season, the 28th, dawns on "Saturday Night Live" this week and, as always, the question is how the pendulum will swing.

The NBC comedy institution is uniquely elastic in quality. You can chart its health on a graph like the stock market, from glory years to gory years and all sorts of middling seasons in-between.

Right now, the show is on a high. After a descent into bathroom humor during the mid-1990s, the comedy is now sharp and topical.

The "Saturday Night Live" writing staff, largely together for about seven years, returns to work this week with a new Emmy Award in hand.

But the loss of two performers -- Ana Gasteyer and Will Ferrell -- may herald a challenging year. Ferrell, in particular, was a valuable utility player in the mold of Dan Aykroyd or Phil Hartman.

Matt Damon is host of Saturday's season-opener, with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Arizona Sen. John McCain on deck the next two weeks.

"Is it a transition year from several good years into one of its lulls?" asked Tom Shales, a television critic for The Washington Post and co-author, with James Andrew Miller, of a just-published oral history of the show, "Live From New York."

He's anxious for the answer, and so is Lorne Michaels, the show's founder and executive producer.

"I think it's a big loss," Michaels said. "But the nice part of the show is, having lived through these transitions a lot of times, from the audience's perspective, people are patient with it."

Even during the down years, there are still a handful of good shows, he said.

"When a cast is at its peak and the writing staff is solid, you get an evenness," Michaels said. "It never goes below a certain level."

Taking it personally

During the years that "Saturday Night Live" is bad -- think early '90s or mid-'80s -- viewers seem to take it personally, Shales said.

"It's like the official satirical television show of the United States," he said. "Therefore, we demand that it be consistently hilarious and clever all the time. That's a lot to ask for. They sure work hard to do it and don't always succeed."

Shales' and Miller's book is both breezy and illuminating, particularly about the show's formative years.

Written with Michaels' blessing, it combines tabloid fodder -- backstage escapades and Laraine Newman's stories about how she sniffed heroin while Gilda Radner downed ice cream -- with insights into the program's creative chemistry.

"SNL" was the first network television program controlled by baby boomers and has changed with each succeeding generation, Shales said.

"The form wasn't completely new but the content was -- the attitude, the youthfulness, the point of view," he said. "It put TV into the hands of a generation that had grown up with it. It's a pretty trite thing, but it's true. It hadn't been done before."