Jane Curtin, a member of Saturday Night Live‘s inaugural broadcast and season, had one way of coping for the late-night NBC sketch series since-historic first taping — now the subject of Jason Reitman’s well-reviewed Saturday Night.
“I never really paid much attention to the audience,” she told the New York Times in a recent retrospective interview, saying she felt the initial show went by quickly. “I thought, well, anybody that’s watching this must be really stupid. It gave me a lot of angst. So the way I dealt with it was, I was in this bubble, and we had a job to do within the bubble.”
However, the actress and comedian, who was on the show for five seasons, said she enjoyed escaping the bubble once SNL was became more well-known.
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“You’d pass by people and they would shake,” she recalled. “They had a physical reaction to you, because they could feel the energy behind what was happening at 30 Rock. And it was very, very exciting.”
Elsewhere in the piece, colleague Valri Bromfield somewhat echoed Curtin’s sentiments, explaining that TV would have “watered down” the type of humor she wanted to perform: “You really couldn’t do [that kind of comedy] on television, because there was such a strange, bland process that absolutely watered down anything you did.”
This isn’t the first time Curtin has been candid about her experience in the time capsule that was SNL in the mid-70s. Last year, the alum told People she gathered her family to watch the early tapings and “it wasn’t funny. Not one thing was funny. There was not one utterance of a laugh or a giggle.”
“So we sat around the TV, and I had that sort of anticipatory, open-mouth grin that people have when they’re waiting for something to happen, that they know is going to be really great. And … it never happened,” she said.
The original Not Ready For Prime Time Players member attributed SNL‘s seemingly lackluster longevity to it being “dated” as a topical commentary series: “Remember, this was almost 50 years ago. But after we rewatched, I was like, ‘That really wasn’t a very good show. It was terrible!’”
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