James Downey Says Madonna Nearly Killed ‘Saturday Night Live’
Lorne Michaels had been away from Saturday Night Live for five years, and upon his 1985 return, he was determined to return his baby to relevance. He cast young movie stars like Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall to appeal to the kids, and for the show’s season premiere, he booked the hottest star in America: Madonna.
A good idea in theory, but signs of trouble were there all week. During Wednesday’s read-through, Madonna and Hall acted out a sketch about the singer sleeping with a paperboy. Madonna thought it was a good idea to try out a Katharine Hepburn accent. She sounded “like a peppy ‘40s girl — really bad,” remembered writer Bruce McCulloch in Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. As for Hall? The 17-year-old declared he no longer wanted to play teenagers.
It didn’t help that Madonna, despite good reviews for Desperately Seeking Susan, wasn’t much of a comedian. “She was terrified. She had never done this before,” said Damon Wayons in SNL oral history Live From New York. “She was a wreck.”
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The season premiere was a disaster. The New York Times called the episode “tasteless and witless.” NBC logged 140 complaints about a sketch in which the Kennedys murder Marilyn Monroe, with Randy Quaid making his SNL debut by smothering Madonna with a pillow. Another critic, responding to a sketch about Rock Hudson’s death that made fun of AIDs, wrote, “Fold up the tent and let the series die.”
Madonna would do better on SNL in later years, but there’s not a single clip from the 1985 show on SNL’s official YouTube channel. The version on Peacock has been edited down to only 19 minutes — no cold open, no monologue.
It was more than just a lousy episode, according to longtime writer Jim Downey. “It was an offensive, dreadful show,” he explained in Live From New York. Of the hundreds of SNL episodes, “I would say that the Madonna show has got to be considered one of the top five — I mean in an entirely negative way. It really crippled the new season from the get-go.”
Michaels’ gamble on Madonna paid off in one way — millions of curious viewers tuned in to see the pop star and the new cast. But the bad news was the same as the good news, according to Downey: “A lot of people were watching.”
Writer Jack Handey worried that the “viciously attacked” Madonna show would kill SNL. “We were actually worried,” he said. “That was the one year, I think, that people wondered whether the show was going to get canceled.”
While Madonna was mediocre as the host, she wasn’t the real problem. As the season wore on, Michaels realized his decision to cast known stars with no background in sketch comedy was a major misfire. “After five years away, I was off my game,” he said. “I couldn’t make it jell. I went too young.”
But Madonna’s hosting debut doomed that season from the start. “That first show was like an albatross for us,” Downey remembered. “Years later, people would still say, ‘I haven’t watched the show since that Madonna thing.’ It did so much long-lasting damage.”
