1976, Melonville Revisited

Toronto Second City producer Andrew Alexander didn’t like losing so many of his stage performers to an upstart New York TV series (some live show on Saturday night). Alexander struck a deal for Second City’s own TV show, and, SCTV was, as the show’s now-famous intro declared, on the air.

Dave Thomas: [Original head writer] Harold Ramis’ concept was to take the cheesy nature of this little network called SCTV and make the cheesiness part of our charm. Guy Caballero, as the sort of Panamanian president of SCTV, basically set the tone: “Here at SCTV, we don’t like to spend a bunch of money on expensive programming.” We used the fact that we didn’t have any money to make the comedy. Our budget was so low that we couldn’t get the props or costumes we needed. It was frustrating to conceive something as a writer, then not be able to properly execute it.

Joe Flaherty: We started with six half-hour shows, to be aired once a month, on the Global Television Network – and I’m using quotation marks around “network” because it consisted of stations in places like Barrie, Ont. It took a while for the show to catch on. We had to have faith in what we were doing.

Andrew Alexander: One day, I’d ordered Swiss Chalet for the crew instead of the usual meal, and John Candy became so upset that he put his fist through the Global studio wall. John was always protecting the crew, and he thought the chicken was cheap.

Thomas: I drew a frame around the hole in the wall using Magic Marker. That was up there for a long time. Years.

Robin Duke: I remember Rick Moranis taking me out for a chicken cutlet on Church Street, around the corner from where we were writing in Toronto. I remember just how good that chicken cutlet was, but I can’t remember which restaurant. I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to find that chicken cutlet. On a kaiser bun. So good.

1977, California Dreaming

The SCTV cast lived together in a house in Los Angeles for three months, writing the second season. It was the first time any of them had been to California.

Catherine O’Hara: It sounded fancy, coming from Toronto, that we were going to live in Bel Air. It was fun. We’d write together around the dining room table. We had a big party the night before we left California. John Candy had garbage cans filled with beer – it doesn’t take much to impress you in your early 20s – and we were all excited because people like Chevy Chase were coming.

Alexander: John had Chevy Chase in a headlock for two hours! He walked around the party with Chevy in one arm and a rum and Coke in the other. Chevy was a skinny guy back then and John would not let him out.

Andrea Martin: Wow. I don’t know that story. I didn’t live in that house. I stayed with my husband and our two new babies in a house that Charlie Chaplin had lived in. Maybe I was in a world of my own.

O’Hara: The party went all night, and I had a car coming at five or six in the morning. I puked all the way to the airport, but it was just all those winding roads in the hills. Honest.

1978 – 1981, Growing Pains

Global dropped SCTV after the 1978–1979 season. Following a short hiatus, the cast moved to Edmonton, where the show was produced by local station ITV for a couple of years and developed a cult following in Canada and the U.S.

Thomas: Doing the show in Edmonton was kind of like doing campus radio: We didn’t think anyone was watching; we thought we were just doing it for ourselves.

Flaherty: Three-quarters of the way through the season in Edmonton, that’s when we started getting noticed. It was magnificent when we realized that people out there were fans of the show. It was also gratifying when we started getting nominated for Emmys. But we were always humble. I never saw the craziness that sometimes comes with stardom.

O’Hara: The arguing was mostly creative – arguing about ideas and sketches – but there was some tension in the later years.

Flaherty: Okay, yes, a clique did develop and it became a little difficult for a while. You know how in group dynamics, there’s suddenly a whipping boy? There were a few people who did that for a while, and we had to put up with it. I’m not going to say who it was.

Alexander: When Bob and Doug McKenzie [Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas] became famous, that started the fissures within the company.

Flaherty: I never cared how much other people were making, and I knew that none of us were getting rich. Even Rick and Dave weren’t getting a lot of perks when Bob and Doug became popular.

Thomas: Our first inkling of the success of the McKenzie brothers was when Rick and I got a call to go to Winnipeg to have drinks with the Blue Bombers cheerleaders. We looked at each other and went, “How bad could that be?” When we got off the plane, there were over 1,000 Bob and Doug fans waiting. We had no idea.