A technical glitch during the broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” this weekend caught my eye. I was watching because I wanted to see not only the cold open political parody of “Family Feud,” but also the two performances by Stevie Nicks, who made her first appearance on the show in forty-one years.
About a half-hour into the show, she sang “The Lighthouse,” a new tune inspired by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, urged viewers to vote and “Don’t let them take away your power.” Forty minutes or so later, she was scheduled to perform again, this time one of her classics, “Edge Of Seventeen,” with Waddy Wachtel playing the iconic opening guitar riff.
But before Stevie could do that, the show had a commercial break consisting of a couple of minutes of network spots and ninety seconds of local inserts. After those ran, a bumper slide appeared as usual, but it stayed on the air longer than it should have. That’s when the broadcast veteran in me knew something was amiss.
Remember what I wrote yesterday in my review of the “Saturday Night” movie about how anyone doing a live broadcast has to deal with circumstances like this? As the seconds ticked by, I was riveted to the screen wondering what had gone wrong and imagining some raised voices in the control room.
After nearly a minute, instead of the live show resuming, up came another commercial break which lasted three more minutes. Then the slide reappeared before fading out as host Ariana Grande calmly re-introduced Stevie, who sang as if nothing had happened.
I told my wife about this oddity the next morning. She worked behind the scenes in local television and immediately understood the problem I was describing and the ruckus there would have been in the control room.
So did my old friend Bill Sobel. He and I have been media freaks since high school. To this day, Bill and I call each other whenever we see or hear about something like this. It might mean nothing to most people, but it still piques our interest enormously. Since Bill worked for NBC at 30 Rock many years ago, he could picture the scenario exactly as we both speculated on what could have caused the live broadcast delay.
If this were the late eighties, Bill and I would have logged onto CompuServe’s Broadcast Professionals Forum, where someone would have posted the answer within minutes — followed by dozens of others chiming in and adding further details. Without that resource, we had to wait for Jed Rosenzweig to report on the LateNighter website that a sound board failed during the break and technicians had to scramble to either fix or replace it.
There were some cascading issues, however. Because that extra set of commercials had run earlier, the show found itself in something of a pickle in its second-to-last act.
The original rundown had called for there to be a commercial break between the Jennifer Coolidge “Maybelline” sketch and the show’s next live sketch, which was to have been a new edition of “Cinema Classics” featuring Kenan Thompson as Reese De’what and Ariana Grande as Judy Garland.
That break would have given the crew time to reset for the next sketch (and for Grande to do a quick wardrobe change). Without it, the show was forced to run a dress rehearsal version of the cut-for-time “Hotel Detective” sketch as the live audience watched along on monitors.
It wasn’t immediately clear why “Hotel Detective” was chosen over the dress rehearsal version of the “Cinema Classics” sketch that had been planned. We can only assume it came down to a question of timing.
This isn’t the first time that timing and/or technical reasons have forced Saturday Night Live to air a dress rehearsal version of a sketch during a live show, but it’s been more than two decades since it’s done so.
Even though we’ve all been out of the broadcast business for a long time, the three of us — Bill, my wife, and I — still got a big kick out of this.