To be sure, Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney are not (all?) “Gangnam Style”-irrelevant over a year later, but few could have predicted how much more turbulent the new 2013 season would be for the show. In addition to the above-mentioned, gone are reliable everymen Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. And when “Weekend Update” co-anchor Seth Meyers takes over Late Night early next year, as Splitsider notes, the remaining cast members will all have been born after SNL’s halcyon premiere year of 1975.

But you know the old saying: the more things change, the more they ObamacareshutdownDrunkUncleMileytwerk. Few television shows are as simultaneously resistant to and reliant upon rapid changes in casting, news cycles, and zeitgeists as Saturday Night Live, an ontological ebb and flow that owes largely to its liveness.  The first two episodes of the show’s new season capture this dynamic perfectly.

The season premiere began with a cold open addressing the political theme of the week, a routine the program began at roughly the same time Jon Stewart proved the demographic utility of mixing comedy and news.  Host Tina Fey’s subsequent monologue lightly hazed the five new cast members in order to set up that most SNL-iest of sketches, the gameshow whose premise wears thin right after its title card.  “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?,” however, seemed less about further embarrassing freshmen cast members than it was about reminding them (and viewers) of the show’s proud place in the American television heritage.

If SNL’s season premiere re-asserted its right to self-importantly navel gaze, last week’s Miley Cyrus-hosted follow up found the show manically reaching outside its comfort zone for relevance.  With more familiar faces behind the impersonations, sketches like the “50 Shades of Grey Auditions” or the Piers Morgan Live parody might have felt a little less slapdash. Instead, the episode struggled to turn its instantly dated cultural references into a proper showcase for both the veteran and new performers.

Certainly, given the dearth of competition at the timeslot combined with the growing size of its cultural footprint, SNL isn’t going anywhere despite a pretty forgettable start to the season.  What is clear from the early returns, though, is that this season marks one of those once-a-decade changings of the guard.  The show will additionally have to find an original way to engage with digital media culture, and it cannot continue to ignore its absurdly high quotient of white dude-ness.  Yet for all these changes, SNL will return this weekend, putting forth an effort very different from, and yet somehow fundamentally similar to, what it has offered for almost 40 years.  Doing so–even in today’s time-shifted, cross-platform, demo-obsessed media milieu–continues to make it a key case for understanding American television culture.

**This post is part of our series, Mediating the Past, which focuses on how history is produced, constructed, distributed, branded and received through various media.

In a 2009 episode, Family Guy joked about a world in which JFK had never been shot. This was not an earnest exploration of historical causality however, but a setup to a gruesome site gag replacing JFK’s assassination with Mayor McCheese’s. To make matters worse, after the parody’s eerily accurate recreation of the event, Jacqueline Kennedy climbs onto the back of the car not to flee, but to eat the McViscera. Of course, offensive humor is Family Guy‘s stock in trade and a spin around the young-skewing dial from FOX to Comedy Central to Adult Swim reveals a host of gags about collective traumas from the assassinations of the 1960s to the catastrophes of 9/11 and Katrina in the 2000s. Even more recent events like the Penn State scandal and the Aurora shootings have comics laughingly asking, “Too soon?”

Joking on these topics offends because they are sacred moments in popular culture’s understanding of its own history. Reportage defines these events using a combination of extreme seriousness and emotion, marking them as sacred in the senses of their importance, uniqueness, and as common touchstones for popular memory. Indeed, the two most archetypal “national traumas” remain the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. The cliche stating that everyone recalls where they were when they first heard about either highlights their importance to both individual and national history. The rules governing humor in bad taste highlight the complex and often ambiguous conflicts of different values in culture. In these instances for example, solemnity regarding the events runs against the respect for free expression tested by sick jokes.

More practically for television, this humor represents an attempt to corner valuable young demographics, but risks public, advertiser, and regulatory flak. So while this humor is governed by the time elapsed since the initial event and decorum of the period, its appearance on television gives particular insight into the growth of narrowcasting and sick humor in the last half century. As the archetypal national trauma of the television era, the JFK assassination not only demonstrates this growth, but the ways in which television comedy has come to play with these events, in a sense rejecting the sacred framework.

In 1983, Eddie Murphy grew tired of his signature SNL character and decided to kill Buckwheat. While obviously in dialogue with the recent shootings of John Lennon and the pope, the bit alluded most directly to the recent Reagan shooting. Certainly, Reagan’s survival helped make this event available for SNL‘s humor, but while Buckwheat’s assassin was a composite of Reagan’s and Lennon’s mentally ill shooters, Buckwheat’s assassin, John David Stutts (also played by Murphy), was killed while being led down a hallway in handcuffs. SNL thus played it relatively safe by limiting its most direct references to Oswald’s death and not JFK’s. Nevertheless, this is one of the first (possibly the very first) example of a comedy show parodying the assassination in any way and it occurred notably on a late-night show known, even as late as 1983, for its edginess.

When the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1990s turned towards conspiracy theorist’s view of history, JFK’s death figured heavily. Along with The X-Files, Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK was arguably conspiracy culture’s central text. Television’s growing penchant for parody in the 1990s meant shows like The Simpsons, The Critic, and The Ben Stiller Show would reference the film. But a 1992 episode of Seinfeld left the greatest mark on pop culture. In explaining why they “despise” Keith Hernandez, Kramer and Newman convey the story of having been spat on, launching into an extended stylistic parody of JFK.

Although airing during prime time, Seinfeld skewed young, urban, and liberal–especially in 1992 when it had yet to dominate the ratings. During the season in question, the program aired at 9:30 Eastern in between the risque, if juvenile, humor of Night Court and Quantum Leap, a show often about working through historical trauma. More importantly, though playing with the imagery of the assassination, Seinfeld acts more as a parody of Stone’s stylistic excess rather than a joke about Kennedy’s death.

Despite its apparent edginess, the magic loogie bit would pale in comparison to the ways in which parodists like self-consciously sick Family Guy played with this imagery later. Despite rocky beginnings this program has surpassed The Simpsons as the crown jewel in FOX’s valuably young-skewing Sunday night lineup and acts as the centerpiece to a growing cadre of Seth MacFarlane productions. In 1999, but since cut from reruns, a young boy holds up his “JFK Pez Dispenser” just as a stray bullet shatters its head. Ominously, the child consoles himself with his Bobby Kennedy dispenser.

Like the 2009 Mayor McCheese gag, this joke plays on juxtapositions between sacred politicians and childhood trifles. But they also elicit “I-can’t-believe-they-just-did-that” laughter. They stack uncomfortable humor on top of the fundamental joke. Even by Family Guy‘s standards though, the 1999 gag was edgy. But the shattered plastic of 1999 is downright tame compared to Jackie Kennedy eating Mayor McCheese’s head.

Since the early 80s then, this type of sacrilegious humor has not only grown more extreme, but has moved from fringe programming hours into prime time. To some extent, general social factors like generational shift, the time elapsed since 1963, and broadly-labeled “permissiveness” account for these examples’ increasingly flippant attitude towards sacred history. More pointedly, the network tendency towards ever-more-specific demographics has allayed standards & practices, network, and FCC fears with the assumption that easily offended audiences would not be watching. For a particular demographic, often one too young to remember the moment directly, moments of common historical importance are increasingly being inflected with the flippant attitude of sick humor.

Tonight, the always-awesome Betty White hosts Saturday Night Live. White’s role is in large part thanks to the Facebook group “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” which at last count had 507,998 fans. In other words, she’s not there because NBC and SNL decided on their own volition that it would be great to have a host who is 5.5 times as old as Justin Bieber. But why not? What’s wrong with having old people on network television?

It’s a question which White’s Boston Legal character Catherine Piper asked in the Season 5 episode, “Juiced,” in which she aims to sue the TV networks for not programming for senior citizens. The episode came after it was well-known that Boston Legal would not return for another year, and it self-referentially mourned its imminent passing as the only network show with multiple central cast members over 50. As Piper complains:

We’re just shoved aside as a nuisance. I can’t even watch television shows, for God’s sake, because the networks consider me irrelevant. You’d think they don’t program for anybody over 50. Is it any wonder I’m out knocking over convenience stores?

Of course, she’s right (what, you doubted Betty White?!). The Nielsen demo that matters most to network TV is 18-49. Let’s put that into context, courtesy of the Census’ 2010 Statistical Abstract, which tells us that in 2008, 73.9 Million Americans were under 18, while 94 Million were 50 and over. In other words, the demo that matters to the networks represents only 45% of the population, while the one that they really don’t give a damn about represents almost a third of the population.

Why? In part because the market in audiences pays top dollar for harder-to-get audiences (i.e.: young men), in part because of an antiquated notion that old people don’t have much expendable income and can’t be moved by ads to change their long-held brand loyalties. I’ve yet to read anywhere that the latter has been proven since Betty White was my age, and instead it seems to be yet another example of what Timothy Havens calls “industry lore,” assumed yet baseless truths that calcify over years in Hollywood.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I invite anyone who thinks otherwise to take a trip to England. I once bet my father that you couldn’t go a day without seeing something nostalgic on one of the UK’s five terrestrial channels about World War II, clearly aimed at an audience who had been alive and well back then; he took me up on the bet, and proved me wrong … but only after three and a half weeks. Gardening programs make it into prime time, shows about antiques, and shows with old people in love. The visibility of senior citizens on Brit TV isn’t simply limited to sixty year-old guys with twenty year-old girlfriends, either: there are older women, and entire communities of old people. Brit TV looks like another planet for many Americans as a result.

Last of the Summer Wine: not American network TV

So I’m excited to see Betty White, but disheartened that she’s almost in a category of her own. It’s also not surprising to hear that a whole slate of other guests may crowd her out (as Myles McNutt discusses here). Ours is a television system that is so hostile to the notion of being responsive to older people beyond playing older shows in syndication. Even the soaps are abandoning older viewers.

On one hand, I want to cynically note that White’s only got this hosting gig in the first place because a bunch of 18-49 year-olds demanded it. But on the other hand, I wish Hollywood would note that even that/my age group can get behind 88 year-olds. One of the White/SNL promos sees her seemingly joking about wanting to host the Academy Awards, but how about we go one better and demand she gets her own TV show (and not just a talk show), 61 years after The Betty White Show first premiered?

Ten (or more) media industry stories you might have missed recently:

1. Google has introduced a new social media service called Buzz. The biggest news surrounding it has been negative, though. In particular, privacy concerns abound, and some users have found themselves difficult situations thanks to Buzz’s autonomy. Google has responded with some fixes and suggestions, but Jeff Jarvis thinks Google would have been best off designating this as a Beta version in the first place. At least Buzz is better off than the dying MySpace, whose CEO resigned this week after only nine months on the job. TechCrunch says MySpace’s only hope is to separate from parent News Corp.

2. Social media came up with a great idea for traditional media: a Betty White fan started a Facebook page called Betty White To Host SNL (please?)!. The page now has over 280,000 fans (more than SNL’s own page). And the campaign has gotten a lot of mainstream attention and support, though SNL’s Olympics hiatus might cool the furor.

3. Mostly bad news for video games, as sales are down (2009 had the lowest average sales figures since 2005) and layoffs are up. Some think online gaming can rescue the industry. Or how about Microsoft figuring out how to design game consoles for the military? Finally, I got a kick out of this article: 10 Literary Classics That Should Be Videogames. I would totally play The Metamorphosis.

4. With the death of Miramax signaling the end of an era for indie cinema, some are questioning the future of independent film in an Avatar world. It’s a different story in the music industry: there indie music is thriving through advantages indie film apparently doesn’t have, while it’s the big music labels that are floundering. But Scott Macauley calls for a more nuanced understanding of independent cinema’s place, and Ted Hope thinks indie filmmakers can steal Hollywood’s “event picture” ideas for future success.

5. New York Magazine has a great in-depth profile on the madness that is Oscar campaigning. The Academy plans to do some campaigning of its own this year via social media. And The Root offers a (rather depressing) history of African-Americans at the Oscars.

6. Usually contemporary remakes of classical Hollywood movies are a bad idea from start to finish (The Women anyone? That’s right, no one). But the rumored Mildred Pierce remake at least has a few good things going for it: Todd Haynes, Kate Winslet, HBO. My only question: five hours?

7. Air America has died out, and some analysis of why and what’s next for liberal radio can be found at AlterNet, Huffington Post, the New York Times, and the LA Times.

8.  This week I learned about the Bechdel Test for films — 1) there are at least two named female characters, who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man — and was dismayed by how few recent films I could come up with that pass it. But The Wrap insists that female-driven blockbusters are all the rage. This is the position we’re put in: we’re supposed to be happy about Dear John hitting #1. Speaking of which, I’d like to take this opportunity to quote the great opening line from Roger Ebert’s review: “Lasse Hallstrom’s Dear John tells the heartbreaking story of two lovely young people who fail to find happiness together because they’re trapped in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel.”

9. The Super Bowl ads were largely deemed to be awful this year, and they were especially denounced for being overwhelmingly misogynistic, emasculating, and all-around gender-disturbed. One good thing to come out of that: this YouTube response to the Dodge Charger ad.

10.  I’ll close with links to my own bloglinks, my favorite stories out of those I’ve posted on News for TV Majors recently: the Chuck-pocalypse, Survivor’s survival and the upside of reality tv, MTV’s dropping “music television” from its logo while Comcast renames its services Xfinity, Bones showrunner Hart Hanson gave an awesome keynote address about making TV for the masses, can Apple conquer TV?, and six Super Bowls later, CBS and the FCC still aren’t done with Janet Jackson.

One last thing: if you’ve still got nothing for Valentine’s Day, send your loved one a Lost card.