August 13, 2022 5 min to read

Fridays

The Best Of

Overview

The program was ABC’s attempt to duplicate the success of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which, at the time, was in its fifth and final season featuring the original “Not Ready for Primetime” cast, along with several writers (and SNL band leader at the time, Paul Shaffer) who had been promoted to feature player status, as well as newcomer Harry Shearer. Like SNL, Fridays featured popular musical guests and, beginning in the second season, celebrity guest hosts, some of whom had appeared on SNL before and after Fridays aired, such as Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal, William Shatner, Mark Hamill, and George Carlin. (Carlin, who had hosted the very first SNL in 1975, was also Fridays’ first official “guest host” in 1981.)

The show featured many recurring characters and sketches, short films, and a parody news segment called Friday Edition, with Melanie Chartoff as the anchor (later joined by Rich Hall in seasons two and three). Veteran comedian Jack Burns served as show announcer and made on-screen appearances on the show. Initially, the show was compared unfavorably to Saturday Night Live as a weak clone that resorted to shock humor for laughs. The third episode (original airdate: April 25, 1980) was the last episode to air on some affiliates due to objectionable content concerning zombie gore and cannibalism (“Diner of the Living Dead”), disgusting habits (“Women Who Spit”), and blasphemous humor (“The Inflatable Nun”).[1]

When Saturday Night Live’s sixth season was met with negative reviews and low ratings over the new cast, new writers, and new showrunner Jean Doumanian, critics who once panned Fridays praised it, citing the show as being sharper, edgier and funnier than Saturday Night Live at the time. Some critics attributed this to the sprawling, ambitious, and often pointed sociopolitical and situational sketches.

Some examples of this include:

A Bing Crosby-Bob Hope buddy comedy parody about the United States’ dealings with El Salvador (“Road to El Salvador”);
A Close Encounters of the Third Kind parody about refugees from an impoverished Central American country mistaking a Playboy magazine location scout and an American military invasion for extraterrestrials coming to save them (“Close Encounters of the Third World”);
A Marx Brothers parody of Iran’s revolution (“A Night in Tehran”);
Palestinian radio DJs (played by Bruce Mahler and episode guest star George Carlin) broadcasting a morning show from a PLO bunker (“K.P.L.O”);
A live-action Robert Altman Popeye movie parody with Popeye (Mark Blankfield) and a band of first-wave hippies fighting back against a fascist regime led by Bluto (“Popeye’s Got a Brand New Bag”);
The US Founding Fathers worrying that the Second Amendment (“The Right to Bear Arms”) will be abused in the future while ignoring suggestions for amendments granting equal rights to women and African-Americans;
A variety show run by the Moral Majority featuring a magician that makes minorities disappear, a top ten list of things the Moral Majority hate, and a punk band performing bowdlerized hits for conservatives (“The Moral Majority Comedy Hour”);
A parody of Altered States where Ronald Reagan (John Roarke) uses sensory deprivation and psychedelic mushrooms to find a way to bring America back to its glory days, but ends up transforming himself into Richard Nixon (“Altered Statesman”);
A spaghetti western centered on the creationism vs. evolution argument featuring Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci (“A Fist Full of Darwin”), and,
In what is considered the show’s magnum opus, a 17-minute parody of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Ronald Reagan (John Roarke) as Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank N. Furter creating the perfect Republican, who turns out to be a militant black man who leads Reagan’s followers in a revolution.

Unusual for a sketch comedy series at the time, Fridays occasionally featured serious interludes and dramatic sketches, such as a segment that aired soon after the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan involving all nine of the cast members recalling where they were at the time of previous assassinations and attempts[1] and a sketch where a punk rocker (Michael Richards) visits his father (John Roarke) who rejects him by yelling, “Who are you?” and “I have no son!”. After a long, heartfelt speech from the punk about how his father should accept that he is from a different generation and learn to love him, the punk discovers that the old man was right: they aren’t father and son because they have different hair colors.

From its inception, Fridays embraced the emerging new wave rock music scene and its associated culture to a greater extent than Saturday Night Live did at the time, widely incorporating it into their selection of musical guests, hosts and sketches. Unlike Saturday Night Live, Fridays did not have a show band on set. Pop art drawings were displayed and accompanied with a fuzz heavy electric guitar solo whenever the show went to and came back from commercial breaks, though season one featured cartoons by B. Kliban with some kind of pun as the punchline.

Three seasons of Fridays aired on ABC (see § Episodes). The last episode aired as a primetime sketch show. The show was originally 70 minutes in its first season. It was expanded to 90 minutes in seasons two and three.

SNL executive producer Dick Ebersol gave all Fridays cast members an offer to join Saturday Night Live in 1982, but most turned him down. Only Larry David, Kevin Kelton and Rich Hall worked on SNL for a short time after Fridays was completed (all of them worked on Saturday Night Live during its tenth season in 1984; Hall was a cast member while David and Kelton were writers).