In summary:

Lorne Michaels’ first season back at SNL following his five year hiatus from the show is considered one of the worst seasons in the show’s history, along with 1980-81 and 1994-95. Indeed, there are quite a few unignorable problems with this season, and as a whole the quality was below the standard of the first four seasons of the show, or even the later Dick Ebersol years. Yet for some reason, this year has a certain watchability to it that 1980-81 or 1994-95 don’t have.

The big problem this year was the cast. Dick Ebersol may have been able to have a strong season by adding big names to the cast the year before, but Michaels’ group of all-stars were people who weren’t especially versed in sketch comedy, and half the cast was taken up by performers who seemed more like hosts of varying quality than a solid ensemble. Randy Quaid, owing to his skill and experience, caught on pretty fast, but the younger performers’ inexperience was obvious almost immediately. Joan Cusack and Robert Downey Jr. showed promise, but would have benefited from a little more time to hone their skills before being thrust into the SNL grind.

The weakest performer this season was Anthony Michael Hall. What may have been a coup for Michaels in terms of getting a big movie star to join the show ended up being the big glaring problem of the season; Hall was just too green at live performance to work as a regular cast member, something that wasn’t helped by a mid-season break to film a movie. His strange mixture of hammy mugging, visible cue-card dependence, and awkward line delivery also tended to detract from most of the scenes he appeared in. Hall may have brought some attention to the show, but it was a trade-off in terms of quality: if Michaels had responded to the departures of Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg in 2012 by making Justin Bieber a regular, the results would have been similar.

There were also a few performers that were nominally a better fit for the show, but the writers didn’t seem to know what to do with them. Terry Sweeney broke down a huge barrier in terms of being the first openly gay performer on the show, and his drag performances (specifically those as Nancy Reagan) usually brought laughs, but he was pretty much pigeonholed into mostly doing just that. Danitra Vance was a fairly solid performer, particularly in solo performances directly addressing the audience, but the writers didn’t really know how to work her into the fabric of the show, something her dyslexia made more difficult due to the show’s reliance on cue-cards. Damon Wayans was also a reliable presence when he was used, but his growing sidelining on the show as the season went on led to the “Mr. Monopoly” incident that got him fired.

The writers seemed to have the best luck with the performers closest to the mold of the old show, Jon Lovitz and Nora Dunn, whose original characters ended up providing a decent backbone to the season, even if the show would lean a little too hard on them. Behind the Weekend Update desk, Dennis Miller also ended up being a solid fit; he hadn’t completely found his groove by season’s end, but he still managed to bring personality back to the flagging news parody, and made it an island of consistency in the middle of the show. When Lorne Michaels had to revamp the show over the summer, he wisely found a group of performers that meshed perfectly with these three cast members.

It may be the benefit of hindsight talking, but you can see the seeds of the second golden age starting to take root this year. This year had a very solid group in the writer’s room, though a few were still learning how to write for television at the time, and some of the veterans were a little rusty. Despite being hamstrung by the cast’s inability to gel, the writers came up with quite a few good sketches throughout the whole season; it’s just that the overall shows were usually good at best. The best moments of the season were when the show experimented with the format, worked with a host that clicked, or just let a solid performer do their thing.

As perilously close the show was towards cancellation this year, it doesn’t have the ineptitude and doomed aura of 1980-81, nor does it have the burned out, lazy atmosphere of 1994-95. I would also argue that this year is much more watchable than some of the more recent seasons like 2004-05 or 2009-10, where the show seemed to be coasting. Maybe it’s because SNL hadn’t completely ossified into a late night institution at this point in its history, but even the weakest shows this year felt like people were making an effort; Lorne Michaels was just trying too hard to change up the ingredients on a recipe that worked.

Strongest shows: