{"id":899931,"date":"2026-10-30T13:20:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T13:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/899931\/"},"modified":"2026-10-30T13:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T13:20:11","slug":"sctv-the-first-great-better-than-saturday-night-live-sketch-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/899931\/","title":{"rendered":"SCTV: The first great “Better than Saturday Night Live” sketch show"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Netflix documentary SCTV: The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of pays tribute to one of the most influential sketch comedy series of all time<\/a>. Directed by Jason Hehir (The Last Dance), the film is what you\u2019d expect from a nostalgic look back: It\u2019s sentimental, stuffed with great clips, and features fun interactions with the troupe\u2019s surviving members. And, because the interviews were conducted in 2025, The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of also includes among the last conversations with Catherine O\u2019Hara, who died<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s only two minutes into the film before somebody brings up what everyone knew was coming. Talking about how much SCTV meant to her as a kid, Kathryn Hahn declares, \u201cI\u2019d seen SNL, but SCTV, it was like their cooler, older cousin that was out smoking cigarettes in the back.\u201d She\u2019s not the only one to compare the two shows. Discussing SCTV\u2018s importance, frequent SNL host Tom Hanks notes, \u201cSaturday Night Live impacted society and created stars. SCTV impacted the art form.\u201d Fred Armisen, who was an SNL cast member for 11 seasons, admits, \u201cSomething about SCTV, with me and my friends, it was more like a secret code. Like, it made us feel cool.\u201d The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of doesn\u2019t just want to convince you of SCTV\u2018s greatness\u2014it wants to drive home the fact that the Canadian sketch show that helped give the world John Candy, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty, and other comic legends was cooler, hipper, and simply better than Saturday Night Live.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not here to argue for or against that claim. (Hot take: They\u2019re both fantastic.) But perhaps what The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of most definitively proves is that SCTV was the first of many terrific sketch shows\u2014because of a media narrative or how the show\u2019s talent actually felt\u2014that would be positioned as superior to that square\/boring\/corporate SNL. There are legitimate reasons why SCTV would feel competitive with its New York counterpart, which the documentary thoughtfully explores. But the film also suggests that, all these years after SNL\u2018s launch in 1975, SNL remains the cultural heavyweight that every other sketch program must be compared to. As a result, SCTV will always be the first show that comedy fans considered a badge of honor to love more than Lorne Michaels\u2019 creation.<\/p>\n

Running under 90 minutes, Hehir\u2019s film breezily strolls through the history of Second City Television, which began as an improv troupe in Toronto that was an offshoot of Chicago\u2019s Second City. Through archival interviews and present-day sitdowns, the SCTV cast, including Andrea Martin and Dave Thomas, reminisce about the Canadian stage show, their memories accompanied by wonderfully low-grade video footage from the 1970s. But soon, some of those unknown Canadian performers would be poached by Torontonian Lorne Michaels, who was starting a television show originally titled NBC\u2019s Saturday Night, signing up Second City MVPs Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To keep others from being stolen away, producer Andrew Alexander hatched the idea of making their own television show. And as opposed to Saturday Night Live, SCTV would not be live, giving the cast a chance to refine their prerecorded sketches. Also, SCTV would be organized around a central premise: Each sketch was a takeoff of something\u2014anything\u2014that you might see on television, all of it supposedly existing on the same fictional small-town Canadian TV station.<\/p>\n

By naming this SCTV salute The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of, Hehir is being playfully disingenuous. Comedy aficionados are well aware of SCTV, even if they\u2019ve never seen a single episode. Whether it\u2019s O\u2019Hara\u2019s passing or the SCTV-adjacent documentaries that have come out in the last 12 months\u2014namely John Candy: I Like Me<\/a> and You Had To Be There<\/a>, which chronicled the many future Second City performers who first met on a production of Godspell\u2014SCTV and its legacy are very much in the public\u2019s consciousness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the documentary\u2019s title is fitting, because it suggests SCTV\u2018s underdog appeal\u2014which has nothing to do with the quality of the impersonations or the writing. Everybody knows Saturday Night Live. SNL is like Star Wars or Titanic or Harry Potter\u2014it\u2019s one of those big, popular, ubiquitous cultural totems that you and your buddies share because you all consumed it at a formative age. But there\u2019s nothing cool about something that popular. What\u2019s cool is finding something that nobody else knows about\u2014it becomes your thing because you discovered it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tellingly, some of the famous SCTV fans Hehir collects speak rhapsodically about how hard it was to see this oddball show. You knew how and when to watch SNL, but SCTV was something unsuspecting fans stumbled upon by accident. Finding other people who had also discovered SCTV made you members of an elite club. (Conan O\u2019Brien, who wrote on SNL from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, puts it succinctly: \u201cIf someone tells me, \u2018Yeah, I watched SCTV, it wasn\u2019t for me, I didn\u2019t get it,\u2019 I kinda don\u2019t want to know \u2019em.\u201d) \u201cThe Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of\u201d is a brag: \u201cI know about this awesome thing and you don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even while celebrating SCTV, Hehir doesn\u2019t shy away from the complicated shadow Saturday Night Live cast over the program\u2019s roughly 10-year run. SNL\u2018s unsuccessful attempt to lure SCTV loyalist Candy is recounted, and Thomas\u2019 ill-fated audition for SNL is also examined. As much as there was a rivalry between the sketch series, some of the Canadian cast members felt tempted to jump ship because, as Thomas explains, SNL \u201cwas the big time.\u201d What was SCTV\u2018s draw\u2014that it was quirky and niche, truly not ready for primetime\u2014also left it feeling marginal. SCTV might have been cooler, but SNL was what everyone watched.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those tensions between hipness and popularity\u2014staying true to a proudly peculiar vision versus \u201cselling out\u201d\u2014are the best part of The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of, and those conflicting drives continued to play out in the programs that came after SCTV. One of Hehir\u2019s expert voices is Bob Odenkirk, who wrote for SNL before co-creating the excellent HBO sketch series Mr. Show with David Cross in 1995. In between those shows, he also worked on the short-lived-but-much-adored The Ben Stiller Show. Both programs reveled in their edgy, sometimes postmodern humor\u2014these young upstarts were the antithesis of SNL\u2018s more commodified, \u201crespectable\u201d comedy. In some ways, they saw their shows as a corrective, or an antidote.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything that I learned at SNL that I never got to use when I wrote on SNL, I used to make Mr. Show,\u201d Odenkirk told Variety<\/a>. \u201cAt SNL it was very easy, especially for young writers, to get their ideas shot down very quickly by older writers. \u2026 When I went to Mr. Show and I was in charge over there with David Cross, I sort of made it a rule that you don\u2019t shoot anything down. You have to talk about everything. You have to fully understand the writer\u2019s idea before you let it go. So it was a good thing to learn what not to do from Saturday Night Live.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not an uncommon sentiment from those who have been on SNL and then found a better landing spot somewhere else. Tim Robinson, who started as a performer on the show before being switched to a writer, triumphed with I Think You Should Leave, which has incorporated some rejected SNL sketches. The Netflix show\u2019s co-creator, Robinson\u2019s old SNL writing partner Zach Kanin, recalled in The New Yorker<\/a>, \u201cThe stuff we wrote [for Saturday Night Live] was mostly for the back half of the show, the way Lorne puts it together.\u201d Such comments\u2014and the fact that I Think You Should Leave is decidedly odder and more combative than SNL\u2014naturally implies that it\u2019s a better show simply because Robinson is no longer being held back by the staid, sleepy SNL machine.<\/p>\n

For decades now, new sketch shows have been perceived in the media as a response to the NBC program. In Living Color was hailed as \u201cthe Black SNL,\u201d<\/a> touching on aspects of the culture that the predominantly white SNL didn\u2019t understand. (Discussing the two shows, In Living Color castmate Tommy Davidson boasted<\/a>, \u201cWe beat their ass every time.\u201d) Mad TV was seen as a grungier, crasser<\/a> version of SNL. The Kids In The Hall, also featuring a Toronto comedy troupe, was more surreal and transgressive, its male performers often performing in drag. And even if a particular show isn\u2019t necessarily trying to compete with SNL, it nonetheless finds itself having to talk about Michaels\u2019 long-running program. Key & Peele\u2018s Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele were asked to address controversy<\/a> regarding SNL\u2018s lack of diversity both in front of and behind the camera. In a sense, all these shows\u2014whether via the public\u2019s perception, the media\u2019s treatment of them, or even how Hehir pits SCTV\u00a0against the\u00a0iconic NBC program\u2014are not fully defined by their originality but, rather, how they are different from\u00a0Saturday Night Live.<\/p>\n

Of course, some comedians consider it a badge of honor that their shows are nothing like SNL. Tim Heidecker of Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, one of the pinnacles of anticomedy, was asked<\/a> about moving into the mainstream as his style of humor became more accepted. Heidecker took exception: \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve moved anywhere near the mainstream,\u201d he retorted. \u201cI mean, we\u2019re still on our little cable channel at 12 o\u2019clock in the morning.\u201d Later in the same interview, he noted, \u201c[W]e\u2019re not like Saturday Night Live, where we have this broad team of writers and performers that we\u2019re trying to create this mass appeal type of comedy.\u201d Heidecker was proud to be on cable doing strange bits that would never work with a conventional live studio audience. Some sketch programs are great precisely because a lot of folks just won\u2019t get it. Cherishing such programs is a way to separate yourself from the boring normies.<\/p>\n

When it started, Saturday Night Live was a hip and edgy show\u2014a counterculture program attacking American conformity\u2014that eventually became a beloved institution. But cutting-edge comedians abhor being \u201cbeloved,\u201d and, likewise, journalists and fans consistently seek to anoint new sketch series as the next big thing. But eventually, Mr. Show, Key & Peele, and all the others fell by the wayside. SNL is still going. Watching The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of makes you realize how remarkable it is that we haven\u2019t just had SNL for more than 50 years but, also, more than 50 years of programs that have worn the crown of the anti-SNL.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the documentary, Hehir includes newspaper clippings of reviews from back in the day in which critics favorably compared SCTV to SNL, setting the stage for a half a century of future critics doing the same thing with subsequent programs. Like all the other anti-SNLs, part of SCTV\u2018s allure is that it didn\u2019t last. So many of SCTV\u2018s alumni went on to have incredible careers, but SCTV has lost none of its cachet because it didn\u2019t become SNL\u2014it didn\u2019t go on forever. It\u2019s the Velvet Underground, not the Rolling Stones. It\u2019s Andy Kaufman, not Jerry Seinfeld. Things that endure are commendable, but we often prefer things that don\u2019t\u2014they remain perfect because they didn\u2019t get old or tired or familiar. The cycle continues. Each Sunday morning sees someone proclaim that SNL UK is way funnier than the original SNL. Any sketch show worth its salt is eventually proclaimed to be better than Saturday Night Live. But whether they know it or not, they\u2019re all following in SCTV\u2018s brilliant, silly footsteps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Netflix documentary SCTV: The Greatest Show You\u2019ve Never Heard Of pays tribute to one of the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":899932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":["post-899931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}