I remember when there used to be original programming on network TV on Saturday night – “The Carol Burnett Show” aired on Saturday nights for a while, and so did “The Golden Girls,” and “The Love Boat,” and “Fantasy Island,” and so on. But as viewing habits changed, and cable programming increased, Saturday viewership declined, and now the networks largely program Saturday night with reruns of shows that aired earlier in the week, and sometimes with news programming.

Tonight, and I can’t recall noticing this in the past, NBC has an edited-down “Saturday Night Live” rerun from earlier in the season airing  from 9-10 (Central), not long before tonight’s original SNL episode at 10:30. This seems an unusual choice, but perhaps NBC thinks that the prime time rerun will serve as promotion for the original episode.

VH1 already airs two recent prior-season reruns on Saturday night, so if you were so inclined you could have watched three hours of SNL reruns tonight, as a warmup for the original episode.

Is that promotion or overkill? I’m not sure. NBC has also been rerunning the documentaries about the various eras of the show’s history on Sunday nights.

The VH1 reruns, and NBC’s prime-time rerun, are all edited from the original 90 minutes down to 60. Since almost every SNL episode contains some gristle, this usually makes the 60-minute episodes seem more entertaining, even if they lack the urgency and topicality of the live episode. In this case, though, it’s not as if we’re comparing different eras of the show; I don’t know which seasons VH1 has the rights to air, but most of the episodes they actually run are recent enough that the episodes include many of the same cast members.

Interestingly enough, the 60-minute reruns on VH1 alter the show’s original running order by putting the musical guest after Weekend Update, while the 60-minute rerun on NBC tonight had the musical guest right before Update, just as it is in the live show. (In any case, the 60-minute versions generally have only one of the musical act’s two performances.)

SNL, of course, has the continual problem of competing with its own cast. Depending on your age and demographic, what you consider the show’s “golden age” was derided, on its original airing, as unfunny and unworthy of comparison with the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players. In one sense, nothing can compare with that original cast, if only because they were unlike anything else on network television up to that time. But even the original cast had unfunny episodes and bad sketches. The show has had its ups and downs ever since, but even the worst seasons have some funny stuff, and even the best seasons have misfires. It’s the nature of putting together 90 minutes of original comedy in one week’s time. And, since SNL usually seeks to reach the youth market, as codgers like me get older we’re less likely to get all of the cultural references. That’s as it should be. I still remember the first time SNL had a host that I not only wasn’t familiar with but hadn’t even heard of. And for someone who is sometimes over-saturated in pop culture, that’s saying something. Anyway, it made me feel old.

I’ll be interested to see if NBC keeps up the prime-time SNL experiment.

I am usually a defender of “Saturday Night Live,” even during some previous seasons when I was in a very small minority. It has to be difficult to produce 90 minutes of fresh comedy in a week’s time, and the current cast always has to compete with our highly-selective memory of years past.

Even so, there’s been a lot to dislike about the past couple of seasons. It’s one thing to have a recurring bit, and it’s another thing to have a skit that’s silly and built on the most thread-bare of premises. Either is excusable, but the past couple of years SNL has taken lame skits, which don’t lend themselves to repetition, and ridden them long past their welcome.

“What’s Up With That?”, featuring Kenan Thompson as a talk show host more concerned about singing his theme song than actually talking to his guests, was funny the first time it ran. But it’s a one-joke premise, and the show has insisted on beating it to death. One week, they actually ran both “What’s Up With That?” and “The Manuel Ortiz Show,” another recurring bit about a talk show interrupted by musical interludes, in the same episode – apparently no one on the writing or production staff realized that both sketches are based on the same joke! That’s just a bankruptcy of ideas.

I think there are a number of talented people in the current cast; the writing is the problem. New cast member Jay Pharoah, judging from his recent appearance on David Letterman, does a much better Obama than Fred Armisen, and should have been given the job by now.

What I’m about to write is hideously presumptious. I’m a small-town newspaper reporter with no knowledge of what it’s like behind the scenes at SNL. So you can take this next portion with a grain of salt – but I keep coming back to it:

Steve Higgins is serving as both the producer of SNL (his name is right after Lorne Michaels’ in the credits) and Jimmy Fallon’s announcer/sidekick. I respect Higgins’ history with the show, and as I say I don’t know anything about its internal workings, but I can’t understand how it’s possible to have a second job while producing something as complex as SNL, and I wonder if that’s part of the problem too. I would think that producing SNL would be – or should be, if done correctly – an all-consuming full-time job.

It may be time for a behind-the-scenes overhaul – not the cast overhaul which the show has sometimes done in the past.

However, “Weekend Update” is still consistently funny. Seth Myers definitely needs to stay at the Update desk.

I tend to be an apologist for “Saturday Night Live,” and there have been seasons that everyone else thought were cruddy in which I still found some enjoyment. It’s surely not easy to produce 90 minutes of live topical comedy every week, and it’s very easy to romanticize past seasons (from which we remember the highlights, not the low points) in comparison to the current season.

But the fact of the matter is, this has been a pretty crappy season so far. Tonight, they’ve had, within the space of a half hour, two skits with nearly the exact same premise — an ostensibly-serious talk show interrupted by silly musical numbers. And the first such skit, “What Up With That,” was a recurring skit.

In between the two talk shows was a skit about an over-affectionate family which was funny the first time they did it, a season or two ago, but which is completely redundant as a remake. The “Lawrence Welk Show” parody in the cold open was another one-joke skit that’s been brought back too many times.

“Weekend Update” is just about the only reason to watch SNL at all this year. I think they have some talented performers in the cast this year; it’s the writing that stinks. I think a house-cleaning is in order.