After hours of watching ads for it during the Kentucky Derby pregame yesterday, I couldn't resist watching NBC's "Saturday Night Live in the 90's" special. It was a surprisingly gloves-off look at the show both during its peak (for my lifetime, anyway) early in the decade and its almost immediate descent into self-satisfied unfunniness later on. The program's director elected to make it more of a documentary than a clip show, and that was the right choice. Otherwise, it would have been awfully depressing, moving as it did from Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and Phil Hartman to Chris Kattan, Ana Gasteyer, and Jim Breuer. But instead of just running clips at the viewers in vaguely chronological order, an effort was made to provide a journalistic look at the show's ups and downs. I was especially pleased to see so much screen time given to Norm MacDonald. Way to go running his classic "anal rape" "Weekend Update" bit in a prime-time special, NBC! I don't think "SNL" has ever recovered from MacDonald's clumsy firing, the exact point in time when the show went from water-cooler edgy to an irrelevant movie-franchise generator.

I would have liked to see the deaths of Phil Hartman and Chris Farley handled a little less rapidly, and the odd emphasis on Alec Baldwin clips seemed like rather heavy-handed promotion for "30 Rock." Indeed, besides features on repeat guests like Baldwin and John Goodman, the special really glossed over the many notable guest hosts the show brought in during that period. Since the idea behind the whole special was to give a bit of an insiders' view, you can understand why not dwelling on the guests would be a good idea. Why then all of the time filled with clips of various musical guests? Were the 90's really all about the Barenaked Ladies, Oasis, and Macy Gray? I remember liking music in the 90's. I could have lived without seeing Aerosmith meet Mary Katherine Gallagher again. By contrast, I can't believe they overlooked Michael Jordan's interview with Stuart Smalley.

On the whole, I'm surprised by how much "SNL" I watched in the 90's. I seem to remember the show plunging in quality rapidly as Carvey, Myers, Hartman, and Chris Rock left, and giving it up entirely after MacDonald's enforced departure, but all of the stuff from the Ferrell/Shannon years they showed were bits I remember seeing before. Is there anything unfunnier in the whole history of "SNL" than the "Spartan cheerleaders" sketches? And they made like 40 of them. Watching the drop in quality from Hartman's Bill Clinton to Darrell Hammond's is like going from Bruce Campbell's Elvis to George Cheung's. And not only did the later group of cast members fail to meet the high standard set by the early-90's group, but Lorne Michaels was unable to keep the writing staff together. What really seems to distinguish the personalities who rotated in for the 1995 season or later is that save for Will Ferrell, few of them were very good writers. While it's true that a ton of the cast members from my junior high days basically just did standup routines while looking straight into the camera (especially David Spade and Kevin Nealon, making Nealon's emergence as an actual sort-of dramatic actor on "Weeds" all the more impressive), at least they could come up with their own material. The later years' ridiculous reliance on using the same characters and gags over and over again seemed to me the product of a lack of good writers. But, again except for Ferrell, most of these people just aren't funny.

There has been something of a rash of "SNL" tell-alls in the past few years, between the Please Kill Me-inspired group oral history, Jay Mohr's book, and Aaron Sorkin and Tina Fey's competing TV series about proxies for the venerable show. Therefore, I guess there wasn't much point trying to pretend like it wasn't chaos behind the scenes at NBC in the 90's. The three-way clash between what the cast found to be funny, where Lorne Michaels' sensibilities were at, and what network executives did and didn't approve of probably led to vast amounts of very funny material getting killed well before taping. One of these least satisfying elements of the special was the random treatment of many former stars' post-"SNL" careers. There was an attempt made at addressing Chris Rock's frustrating stretch on the show (with Rock very candidly admitting that while he was working for "SNL" the only way he felt he could get material on the air was by ripping off Mike Myers), but for the guys not marked as special by race or death, it seemed completely arbitrary. David Spade got way more respect than he deserved, and Rob Schneider slightly less than he maybe had coming, not that either have done much since. The discussion of how Adam Sandler broke the rules for "SNL" performers with his variety of weird, punchline-less manchild characters and how he was able to translate that same shtick into box office superstardom was unsatisfactory since Sandler himself didn't participate.

What I really would have liked to see is a less glossed-over take on the talented comedians who didn't stick on "SNL" during the nineties for whatever reason. The discussion of the troubled 1994-95 season focused most on the names who left, not the ones who showed up to take their places. Chris Elliot, Janeane Garofalo, and Jay Mohr are all funny people, so what went wrong? The few former castmembers from this transitional period who were interviewed for the documentary, Sarah Silverman and Mark McKinney, were only shown gently praising the other performers and Michaels. This is especially surpising on the part of McKinney, who went as far as take a part on Sorkin's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" as a character who blamed the whole collapse of his life on losing his late-night comedy job.

The trouble with "Saturday Night Live in the 90's" was similar to the problem with "Saturday Night Live" itself in the period under examination. Way too much thought went into what Lorne Michaels might think. Sure, he's a comedy legend, and that Beatles gag was a masterstroke. But while the special implied Michaels lost touch with the show's audience even during its period of highest cultural visibility, it lacked a third act in that story, dealing neither with Michaels' final delegation of ultimate control or the rather undeniable fact that in 1993 everybody cool in America watched "SNL" and nowadays it's just a label you see on a YouTube clip.