I was lucky enough to have experienced SCTV the first time around. Thirty years later, it's nice to hear that others of a new generation still find it as funny. It wasn't just the cheap weed after all. There were too many high points to list exhaustively: Dr Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses, the best movie satire ever made (The famous Godfather), the Schmenges, etc., etc. Read Dave Thomas's book for a great behind-the-scenes story. Between bootlegs dating back to the 70s, the 2001 NBC rebroadcasts and the TVLand broadcasts in 2003-4, I may have most of the original shows. The Rhino DVDs are good, but woefully incomplete. Their best contribution is the commentary. MAD-TV, with director John Blanchard and writer Paul Flaherty comes closest to the same spirit as SCTV. Still, despite some good skits and some actors, that show's weakness is having a live audience: like SNL, it dictates shtick. SCTV's greatness came from its isolation from critics and audience. That and the isolation of Edmonton. All the actor/writers had left was the purity of the show. Post-SCTV, like the Beatles, the parts never equaled the whole. Still a great hallmark of comedy! And Dave Thomas should sue Bill O'Reilly for stealing his Bill Needle character!

The skits of the SCTV - Second City TV - series are interesting not only because many of them are hysterical but also because the young cast is loaded with people who went on to become movie comedy regulars: John Candy (Planes, Trains and Automobiles), Eugene Levy (A Mighty Wind), Catherine O'Hara (Beetlejuice), Martin Short and Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters).The list of writers on the show is also impressive: John Candy, Brian Doyle-Murray, Robin Duke, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, Martin Short, Jim Staahl, Dave Thomas.The regular cast portrayed dozens of very odd characters on the show. My personal favorite is Joe Flaherty's "Count Floyd", the host of "Monster Chiller Horror Theater." Flaherty's Count Dracula makeup and his goofy transylvania/yiddish accent are a hoot.Some of the other memorable characters are:John Candy's Johnny LaRue, Dr. Tongue, Orson Welles and Curly HowardEugene Levy's Earl Camembert and Yosh Schmenge (also a personal favorite) Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug McKenzieHarold Ramis's Moe Green and Swami Banananda.The series has held up well (it's a little dated with some of the topical references) but the skits are well-written and full of laughs.

As a previous poster has said, SNL and SCTV were both comedy sketch shows, but that's where the resemblance ends. SNL far too often descended into juvenile, and sometimes even infantile, humor and its casts were way too uneven. It had the brilliant and manic John Belushi, but it also had the mediocre Garrett Morris, who really didn't do much of anything. It had the gifted Gilda Radner, who could do damn near anything, but it also had Laraine Newman, who didn't do all that much, either, and many of the cast members in its later shows really had no business being there. SNL's cast did various running characters, but, with few exceptions, each person's character wasn't really distinguishable from the actor himself. SCTV had no such problems. John Candy's Johnny LaRue, Josh Shmenge and Gil Fisher ("The Fishin' Musician") were about as different from each other and Candy himself as you could possibly get, as were Rick Moranis' Doug McKenzie and Rabbi Yitzhak Karlov, Andrea Martin's Edith Prickley and Mrs. Falbo, etc. Another big difference between the two shows was the writing. Virtually every episode of SCTV was as sharp, incisive and devastatingly funny as anything that ever came out of television; SNL on the other hand could go for weeks without having a decent show, and in fact went for several YEARS in the '80s without having any even HALFWAY decent shows. SCTV integrated all of its guest stars into the actual storyline of the episode itself, with often surprising results (musicians Dr. John, Tony Bennett and Fee Waybill of the Tubes, for example, turned out to be quite good). SNL put its guest hosts into some of the sketches--with many of them obviously reading their lines off of cue cards--and most didn't acquit themselves particularly well.One of SCTV's main strengths was that it gave its audience credit for having the intelligence to understand what it was trying to say and do, which was something that SNL often lost sight of, especially in its later years. And how could anyone forget such brilliant pieces as "Abbott and Costello in a Turkish Prison"; "Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses"; the side-splitting parody of "Ocean's 11" with the monumentally untalented Vegas schlock comic Bobby Bittman and his even less talented idiot son Skip; the hapless Count Floyd of "Monster Chiller Horror Theater", who--no matter how pathetic the movie ("Tonight's film: 'Bloodsucking Monkeys from West Mifflin, Pennsylvania'!") he was showing--always stubbornly claimed, "Oooh, wasn't that scary, kids?"; "The Sammy Maudlin Show"; "Farm Film Report" ("They blowed up real good!"); the list goes on and on. Most of the sketches are so sharp, witty and clever that they don't date at all, even though they're almost 30 years old. SCTV set a high standard for sketch comedy, and so far no other show has measured up.

Like SATURDAY NIGHT, SECOND CITY TV was a sketch comedy show with a repertory cast. But there, the resemblance ended. Instead of a bunch of disconnected sketches with musical interludes, SECOND CITY TV was a concept show about the programs and behind-the-scenes shenanigans of a cheesy, low-budget TV station. Therefore, unlike SNL, which took potshots at anything from current events to whatever celebrity was guesting, SECOND CITY TV concentrated on the television industry.The results were some of the most incisive and skillful parodies in TV history, from commercials for useless products to self-congratulatory talk shows to pompous "cultural" programming. The talented cast members skewered such icons as Bob Hope and Barbra Streisand and created such memorable characters like Joe Flaherty's sleazy station owner Guy Caballero and Andrea Martin's vulgar station manager Edith Prickley. Unlike SNL, SECOND CITY TELEVISION never pandered to the lowest common denominator; it always respected its audience with intelligent humor that satirized the foibles of both the television industry and the people in it. The syndicated show's success would result in a 90-minute network version.