Phil Hartman is often cited as one of Saturday Night Live’s greatest performers. Whether playing it funny or straight (which was also often funny), his very presence made strong sketches stronger and kept weak ones from collapsing. Hence his nickname around SNL’s digs in 30 Rockefeller Plaza: “Glue.”
After his then-record-setting 153rd and final episode on May 15, 1994, cast members showed their appreciation by presenting Hartman with a bottle of the sticky stuff secured to a small pedestal. He’d already won a Primetime Emmy and been nominated for several others, but this honor touched him far more deeply.
The much-appreciated appreciation aside, his valedictory season had for the most part been unfulfilling and dispiriting for Hartman. As younger cast members rose in the ranks and began stealing the spotlight—and not, he made clear, because SNL creator Lorne Michaels was supposedly pissed at him for leaving—Hartman had increasingly been sidelined as his usually thick stacks of Wednesday readthrough scripts grew thinner. (Almost from the start, writers wanted Hartman in their sketches because they knew he’d make them sing—or at least not suck).
“The shows are getting less sophisticated,” he told Entertainment Weekly a couple of months before bowing out. “There’s less political satire. The younger audience loves Adam Sandler. He appeals less to the intellect and more to that stand-up sensibility of ‘Let’s go out there and be insane.’ I like Adam Sandler, but that’s not my kind of comedy, so, yeah, in a way it makes me feel like, ‘Well, it’s time for me to go.”’ (After the article came out, he apologized to castmates for his harsh and impolitic comments).
Hartman, however, wasn’t about to quit the best gig of his career without a landing pad. And the prospect of shooting in L.A. instead of New York, so that he could spend more time at home in Encino, held a lot of appeal. He’d long had lucrative side hustles, including television commercials and Fox’s animated hit The Simpsons—you might remember him as the voice of washed-up D-movie actor Troy McClure, star of such classic driver’s ed films as Alice’s Adventures Through the Windshield Glass and The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot)—but that work was inconsistent. He’d need another full-time job to support his family—not to mention his expensive hobbies, boating and flying among them.
So he began developing an exit plan in the form of a televised comedy-variety series that would revolve around him. He’d never had a breakout character on SNL a la Mike Myers’ Wayne Campbell or Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, but this venture—reportedly an enticement from NBC to keep Hartman at SNL when he pondered leaving in 1991—would surely remedy that. Its working title: The Phil Show.
Intended as a primetime mid-season replacement, The Phil Show would strive to (as Hartman proclaimed in one interview) “reinvent the variety form the way David Letterman reinvented the talk show” via “a hybrid, very fast-paced, high-energy” format “with sketches, impersonations, pet acts, and performers showcasing their talents.”
Ideally, he added, it would also have “an interracial cast of at least two or three males and females.” A fledgling comedy writer from Rhode Island named Brian Mulhern, who with his brother Kevin helped Hartman formulate script ideas for the show early on, said Hartman also pushed for the inclusion of his wife Brynn. (Four years later, in late-May of 1998, Brynn would fatally shoot Phil and then herself in a shocking murder-suicide).
“There was a lot of talk about her and her role,” Brian told me. “He was hell-bent on making that happen and making her a cast member and trying to get her career off the ground.” Although Hartman swore they had “great chemistry” that would “translate well over the airwaves,” the brothers thought his SNL colleague Jan Hooks was a far better choice. But Hooks, who left SNL in 1991, had no interest in relocating to Los Angeles for production.
While Phil rode out his remaining days at SNL, the Mulherns worked with him from afar on sketches for The Phil Show. More than a few of them played to Phil’s strengths as an impressionist. Here’s a sampling of the premises:
- Frank’s Place: Phil plays the Chairman of the Board hosting a talk show from his home in Palm Springs.
- Hollywood Babylon: Phil plays a gossipy Tony Curtis.
- Happening L.A.: Phil plays “Bobby Vaneare,” a showbiz cheeseball who wears metal-tipped cowboy boots and a leather jacket with fringe.
- Collage: Phil plays an approximation of PBS talk show host Charlie Rose refereeing a bunch of loudmouths.
- Inside the Third Reich: Phil plays Hitler’s “personal architect” Albert Speer, who somehow abides his evil boss’s bad behavior in the name of career advancement.
- Hollywood Tribute: Phil plays “a Beverly Hills matron” who for no particular reason interviews people famous and obscure at a charity event.
- Rescue 911: Phil, as William Shatner, hosts a parody of the television reality show.
- Bosun Bob’s Kartoon Korner: Phil plays Bob, a 1950s throwback, who doodles, plays with puppets, and raises weighty political issues.
- Edge of Love: A soap opera parody with well-coiffed stars.
- Hell’s Kitchen: Phil plays New York-based PI Chick Hazard (reprising a character he’d created years before at The Groundlings), who solves ridiculous cases involving monsters, aliens, and mummies.
- A few others with more self-explanatory titles: “Phil Hartman Interviews Himself as Donald Trump” (a short film); “The Brutally Honest Psychic Friends Network”; “Unemployed Game Show Host.”
Besides the Mulhern brothers, who were talented but green, Hartman asked Joel Gallen—who was then making a name for himself as the maestro of MTV awards shows—to executive produce. He also wanted to bring aboard his old Groundlings mate Tom Maxwell and Maxwell’s creative partner Don Woodard as head writers. “It looks like we’re making some incremental progress,” Hartman informed the Mulherns in an early-1994 voice message. Before too long, he hoped they could begin working out “an overall strategy and start staffing up for the pilot.”
Gallen, for one, was bullish on The Phil Show’s future. “He really felt like this was going to be his big solo break,” Gallen told me. “It had so much potential to be a really groundbreaking, unique sketch-comedy show from a different point of view.”
That potential was short-lived. By the summer of 1994, prospects for a Phil Show pilot—let alone a series—had dwindled. NBC Entertainment, Phil lamented in another voice message, was “preoccupied with the problems of the new season,” which meant replacement shows were low-priority.
His plan, he said, was to begin outlining and scripting in earnest that fall, but nothing was certain if network suits continued to drag their well-shod feet—and not for no reason. A host of new comedian-hosts on all but one of the major networks had recently flopped in high-profile slots, including Chevy Chase and Robert Townsend on Fox and Paula Poundstone on ABC. On NBC’s own airwaves, Conan O’Brien—then just beginning what would become a long and celebrated late-night run in Letterman’s recently vacated NBC spot—was struggling to find his footing, in the process repelling critics and earning abysmal ratings.
And two more nails in the proverbial coffin awaited hammering. One of them, NBC’s sexy, sassy, youth-oriented Friends, would be a genre-revolutionizing hit, becoming a template for network comedies going forward. More damaging to Hartman’s cause, The Martin Short Show (a weekly NBC sitcom that premiered on September 13) would get axed before month’s end after only three of 13 episodes had aired.
“[W]hen his show went under, I got scared,” Hartman later told David Letterman of his time in post-SNL limbo. “I shouldn’t say ‘scared,’” Hartman went on. “Well, for several weeks I shivered in the corner naked with the lights out. That’s not fear. It could have been the flu bug.”
He needn’t have worried. When the network officially passed on The Phil Show in the fall of 1994 (during the same 1995 Letterman appearance on which Hartman cracked wise about shivering naked, he casually remarked, “I just decided not to do it”), NBC steered their valued employee to an early-stage workplace comedy called NewsRadio. Created and smartly crafted by former Letterman and The Larry Sanders Show writer Paul Simms, its cast included Dave Foley, Andy Dick, Khandi Alexander, Joe Rogan, Stephen Root and Maura Tierney.
Not long after Hartman read (and loved) the pilot script, which was shot in late 1994, it got picked up to series by NBC, where it ran for five seasons between 1995 and 1999. Though never a huge commercial success, NewsRadio was a critical darling and a cult favorite that garnered Hartman ample acclaim as the arrogant and blithely offensive broadcaster Bill “The Real Deal” McNeal.
As had long been the case, ensemble comedy was where he shone most brightly. And yet, he initially doubted his contributions. “Shortly after his arrival at Newsradio, Hartman called me in a bit of a panic,” Brian Mulhern recalled recently. “He felt as if he was letting his fellow cast members down by not pulling his weight. I really believe that might have been a leftover pang from being denied what would have finally been his own show. But I assured him that regardless of whatever it was he found himself doing, he always made it better—all the while wondering how, if I had to talk someone with Phil’s pedigree off the ledge at the tender age of 24, I’d ever have a chance at making it in this business.”
As for whether The Phil Show would truly have been Hartman’s big solo break: “I’d like to believe that if The Phil Show had ever come to fruition, it would have raised his career profile to an even higher level,” Mulhern said. “But realistically, I’m not convinced.”
He’s probably right. After all, just two years later Hartman’s SNL cohort Dana Carvey tried his own hand at a comedy sketch show, staffing it with the likes of Robert Smigel, Dino Stamatopolous, Louis C.K., Steve Carell, and Stephen Colbert. And still it tanked—fast. In retrospect, it seems Hartman did what he was built to do—and what millions of fans loved him for most—until the end of a life tragically cut short.
Mike Thomas is the co-author, with Bill Zehme, of the recent New York Times bestseller Carson the Magnificent, a biography of Johnny Carson. Mike also wrote You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman, from which this article is adapted in part.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
