LIVE FROM NEW YORK

A new docuseries commemorates fifty years of "Saturday Night Live."

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

It is customary for a person in a situation like mine-preparing to hold forth on "Saturday Night Live"--to divulge which performers would make his ideal cast. The gist of the exercise is to admit particulars of taste, or, more harrowingly, depending on how much the show informed his early identity, to paint a personality portrait before going on to issue judgments. Like so many other once cool, now kooky members of Generation X, the venerable comedy cabaret is fifty years old. Half a century is just long enough for individual details to age into overarching symbols, for casts and one's preferences among them to amount to a generational statement.

So, just for the record, here goes: For his dead-eyed gaze and surprisingly precise physicality, for his ludicrous, barking way of voicing a phrase, I will always pick Will Ferrell first to play on my team.

Eddie Murphy came to "S.N.L." supremacy in the "lost years" of the early eighties, during which the founding producer Lorne Michaels had vanished from the scene and was briefly replaced by Dick Ebersol, so Murphy's contribution-I think he saved the show from obscurity sticks out awkwardly, like a loose thread in brilliant color, against the otherwise seamlessly woven lore of Lorne.

But it's hard to name a person in the history of modern show biz, let alone "S.N.L.," with more sheer stage presence than Murphy. Every time he showed up as James Brown or Gumby or the wholesome, slum-dwelling host of "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood," he reminded viewers of "S.N.L."'s liveness, alerted them afresh to the fact that this was happening on a stage somewhere, and that that stage had been set on fire by this ingenious, wiry, heedlessly nervy kid.