On March 3, Prime Video in Canada started streaming all six seasons of one of Canada’s most groundbreaking and influential sketch comedy series, SCTV. And just like everything else on TV a half century ago, not all of it holds up.
There are, however, plenty of laughs. There is also great joy in seeing these great comedy players drawn from Toronto’s Second City stage finding their feet on TV.
From 1976 through 1984, 135 episodes were created. The early ones featured John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Harold Ramis and Dave Thomas and occasionally Jayne Eastwood. Both Rick Moranis and Martin Short later added dimension and laughs to the main run of the series
While certain sketches from some episodes have been sampled for years on YouTube and on the Internet, this is the first time the series has found a start-to-finish streaming home. There were rumours for years that Netflix, which had announced an SCTV documentary to be directed by Martin Scorsese, would pick up the series. CTV was also supposed to partner on the doc. A cast reunion special was even shot in Toronto in 2018 with Jimmy Kimmel hosting. Eight years and the death of two more cast members later (Flaherty and O’Hara were pre-deseased by Candy and Ramis), Netflix seems to have passed on from that project.
Several factors probably delayed the streaming rights to the original episodes. One problem was the usual stickler – music clearances. Beyond some of the background music, performances by Wendy O Williams and The Plasmatics, among others – on Candy’s The Fishin’ Musician – simply were never cleared to run 50 years later on a streaming service. Some generic music has been substituted in certain spots and it seems to work a lot better than when this fix was first attempted on reruns of WKRP in Cincinnati.
A review of the first season episodes – shot on a bare bones budget in Toronto and airing on Global – reveal another problem: content. Many of the first sketches were pulled word-for-word off the Second City main stage. If they seemed daring in the 1976-77 TV season, they seem almost jaw-dropping today.
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Ramis was head writer as well as featured on several of the early shows. Skits such as “Mal Practice Lawyer” showed Dave Thomas defending Ramis’s Dr. Jack Sloan for giving patient O’Hara a sex change instead of a tonsillectomy. There are a few gay jokes in an early Johnny LaRue exercise show segment. By episode two, Thomas is playing a Captain Kangaroo character, Captain Combat. Ramis is his Mister Greenjeans, and in showing the kids at home how to clean and load an assault rifle he accidentally kills the puppeteer working the kiddie show’s cuddly rabbit.
Subsequent season one episodes show O’Hara dressed as Sister Mary Innocent flagellating herself; another opens with an ad for “Labrador Slugger” baseball bats that are ideal for clubbing seals!
Beyond the (hilarious) lapses in taste, the other shocker is how little budget there was for those first few episodes. If you ever wondered what SCTV would be like without the magnificent hair and makeup worn by the main players during the NBC run of the series, watch the first few Global episodes. Flaherty, for one example, wears no added hair or makeup and barely attempts an impression as Gregory Peck.
The other astonishing thing is how quickly that all changes. By the fourth or fifth episode, Flaherty is deep into his fondly-remembered William F. Buckley impression. A skit with Flaherty and Candy as NHL stars “Guy LaFleure” and “Darryl Sittlerr” fighting over French and English on the side of cereal boxes is wonderfully silly. Characters who would stick through the entire run of the series, such as Martin’s Perini Scleroso, were already stealing scenes.
By the time the entire cast is costumed up for Masterpiece Theatre-style playlets, SCTV is really on the air. A drawing room scene in the style of Anton Chekhov is upended after Chekov from Star Trek beams aboard. Juxtaposing classics with pop culture quickly became an SCTV hallmark.
Soon we are into the Dialing for Dollars spoofs with Mo Green, more of LaRue and plenty of the Earl Camembert – Floyd Robertson news reports.
This was the Beatles at the Cavern Club version of SCTV – raw, risky, and occasionally out of sync. That they were able to open out of town on Global helped the cast find their feet.
Kudos to Prime Video for streaming it from the very beginning. It gives those of us who grew up with the series 50 years ago a chance to relive it from the beginning. Younger viewers may wince at some of the politically incorrect material that their parents (grandparents?) laughed at, others may be amazed that something that looks this cheap-ass made it to air.
The fact, however, you can see the progression the writers, cast and crew all made season to season is astonishing.
