Fridays relives early 1980s in comedy similar to SNL
What is it? The Best of Fridays, 16 episodes on five discs from Shout! Factory How much? $39.99 When? Now Aren’t Fridays always great? How can there be a best? Of course Fridays are (usually) awesome. But in this case, Fridays is a TV show.
Back in 1980, ABC tried to get on the late-night comedy bandwagon by creating its own answer to NBC’s Saturday Night Live. That show? Fridays.
It was a sketch comedy series shot live in front of a studio audience, with faux news segments, fake commercials and performances by musical guests.
So, in other words, it was totally different.
OK, that may be a little unfair. The series actually were different in some ways, other than they aired on different nights of the week. Primarily? SNL was shot in New York and Fridays came from Los Angeles.
There’s more to that than it sounds. SNL’s cast and writers tended to come from the Second City, National Lampoon, Ivy League tradition. Fridays drew more from the rising New Wave and Punk scene. Of course, that distinction isn’t obvious to someone who’s not well-versed in the subtleties of comedy styles but I’ll take their word for it.
Over all, Fridays went in for wackiness, parody and skewering politics and politicians and its cast included future stars Larry David, Melanie Chartoff and Michael Richards. It ran from April 1980 to October 1982.
This set includes far-out sketches like a news report on people who kill Muppets for their fur, a documentary on a prison with an ice skating rink and occasional appearances by the M.A.T.Z.O.I. (Mobile Attack Trained Zionists Operation International) — a pair of rabbis who show up in parodies of James Bond and kung fu movies.
The series also loved to attack Ronald Reagan and the religious right, as in the extended The Moral Majority Comedy-Variety Hour, which included an ad for a big book burning.
The show was most famous, though, for the episodes that featured Andy Kaufman. The bizarre comic (and the show) made headlines when he turned a sketch into an all-out brawl. The incident and the aftermath have been discussed in comedy circles ever since.
How funny is it? Not as funny as it could have been. Like SNL, Fridays has hits and misses. Sometimes it’s funny. But the sketches here miss the target at least as often as they hit it. Even sketches with good concepts tend to just peter out. And this was the “Best of” collection.
As for the politically themed sketches, some of them are surprisingly topical for today, but they’re more juvenile and obvious than they are smart.
But it’s not a total loss. If you’re a fan of sketch comedy, it’s worth a look.
What about extras? There’s a whole bonus disc of extra features, including separate hour-long discussions for the actors and the writers in which they talk about specific memories, the way shows were made, and so on. There’s a separate interview with cast member Maryedith Burrell, who was absent from the group chat. Another segment exposes the truth behind the Kaufman incident and there’s an eight-minute contemporary news segment that went behind the scenes of the show.
New this week: Arrested Development, Three Original Seasons; Bewitched, Complete Series; Defiance, Season 1; Gentle Ben, Season 1; Hart of Dixie, Season 2; I Dream of Jeannie, Complete Series; The IT Crowd, Complete Series; The Partridge Family, Complete Series; Vikings, Season 1.
Next week: Call the Midwife, Seasons 1 and 2; The Doris Day Show, Best of Collection; Family Affair, Best of Collection; Kindred: The Embraced, Complete Series; Nikita, Season 3; Silk Stalkings, Seasons 6, 7 and 8.