The Vanished Media World of the "Not Ready for Prime Time"

Considering the decline of Saturday Night Live as a cultural institution it seems worth acknowledging not just the decline of linear network TV, but the basis for the kind of sketch comedy in which it tended to specialize. With its playing off of well-known celebrities, pop culture, current events, it assumed a comparatively centralized, mass, media world where most people watched the same shows and movies and even commercials, and got their news from one of the Big Three networks' broadcasts (of which the Weekend Update is, of course, a parody). Much of that media remains, but it is just part of something bigger and much more fragmented--all as fewer young people are attentive to it, or have their pop cultural frame of reference defined by it. Indeed, not only does it seem likely that the aging of the show's audience is a matter of old fans continuing to tune in rather than younger people being won over to the half century old show, but it also appears to reflect the fact that that older audience, more than the younger one, still lives in that world--they the ones who still watch network TV much more than their younger counterparts, growing up as they did on streaming.

Meanwhile, along with that goes something that seems to me to affect much more than just "SNL," the gag-based comedy generally--namely the way in which pop cultural memory has shrunk, with all that means for what parodists can do with them. Remembering, for instance, the episode Charlton Heston hosted in 1993 I recall the bits playing off of his starring roles in the original 1968 Planet of the Apes and 1956's The Ten Commandments (all as, I might add, there was a bit in other episodes of that era where Phil Hartman, against the backdrop of a futuristic cityscape, yelled that Soylent Green "is people" with its similar evocation of an older Heston film, curiously unused this time around).

The popular culture of recent decades have left less such impression--perhaps especially among the young--and just as the gag-based comedy seems to me to likely have suffered for it so has it also gone with the ability of the staff of a show like Saturday Night Live to do their jobs in the old way. This is all the more in as anything that does become recognizable is likely to have already been memed to the point of exhaustion and satirized on The Daily Show before the team behind "Weekend Update" can get to it.