SCTV Lands on Netflix, and the Hand Still Reaches Out

By Marcus Bennett

SCTV has started streaming on Netflix, and the documentary SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of dropped on the platform Friday. For viewers who grew up on the Second City Television crew, that arrival carries a particular charge: the sense, as one critic put it, of being in on something, of belonging, of finding your comedic people.

The rivalry is generational. There were SNL people, and there were SCTV people. To a kid in the manicured, homogenized cul-de-sacs of suburban Philadelphia, SNL seemed like everything one imagined late-'70s and early-'80s New York to be: young, hip, a little sexy, a little sleazy and maybe even a bit dangerous. Its Harvard Lampoon-inspired satire was sharp in its early years, though it carried the smug self-satisfaction of those Ivy League roots. It quickly became a vehicle for cast members trotting out characters with signature catchphrases they hoped would catch on in schoolyards and breakrooms.

SCTV was something else. More than anything else, it was Canadian. If SNL was a smirking upperclassman in a rumpled private-school uniform, SCTV was a lovable dirtbag in a denim jacket and jeans.

What made SCTV different?

The focus of its satire was narrower. SCTV did not riff on the culture at large; it riffed on the culture of television. That specificity keyed directly into a TV-poached brain, and for the SCTV kids of the era, it was much, much funnier.

The conceit: SCTV was a tiny television station — later a network — broadcasting out of a Canadian backwater called Melonville. Each episode's sketches comprised a typical programming day: talk shows, game shows, variety shows, music shows, movies-of-the-week, children's programming, specials and, mostly, hilariously, ads.

Not just any ads. The series reveled in the particular joys of low-rent local television: the cheaply made commercials thick on the ground in the 1980s, all chyrons and star-wipes. Ads for Tex and Edna Boil's Prairie Warehouse and Curio Emporium. Harry's Sex Shop. Phil's Nails. Al Peck's Used Fruit.

How precise were the impressions?

Celebrity impressions were a key ingredient, but they each came outfitted with a laser-focused point of view. Writers would build sketches around some particular aspect of a celebrity's persona so small and specific that a viewer could convince himself only he had noticed it — and there it was, expertly filleted for everyone to see.

The examples are exact. Eugene Levy picked up on the fact that Alex Trebek — long before Jeopardy!, back on High Rollers and Pitfall — had a reputation for getting tetchy with contestants who could not follow the rules. Enter the sketches High Q and Half Wits, in which "Alex Trebel" goes off on Catherine O'Hara's Margaret Meehan and Martin Short's Lawrence Orbach.

Andrea Martin noticed that the smoky-voiced actress Brenda Vaccaro took conspicuously audible breaths between lines in her Playtex tampons commercial. Martin simply turned up the volume, transforming those breaths into increasingly emphysematic wheezes.

Catherine O'Hara appeared in the "Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas" sketch as the then-70-something Lucille Ball, first channelling Ball's abysmally froggy musical turn in Mame by croaking the word "Christmas" like a death-rattle, then capturing the over-it, bitterly dismissive persona late-period Ball brought to Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore. It was tough love for a comedy legend, and a little mean — but so breathtaking in its clarity, so sharply observed, so deftly delivered that one could do nothing but respect it.

Why does this matter now?

The playwright Alan Bennett, in The History Boys, has the teacher Hector describe the best moments in reading: coming across a thought or feeling you believed special and particular to you, set down by someone you have never met, "as if a hand has come out and taken yours." That, the critic writes, remains timeless about SCTV. When you watch it, that hand reaches out — only it takes the form of Martin Short's Fred Rogers wailing on John Candy's Julia Child with a King Friday puppet.

The new Netflix documentary makes the case through fellow comedians. Conan O'Brien, Bill Hader, Bob Odenkirk and Kathryn Hahn talk about their own moments of realization and recognition with the show. For a series that built its identity on the smallest observable truths, its second life on streaming offers a new generation the chance to feel that hand close around theirs.