As most fans of TV comedy know, SCTV had a long evolution. When it started on Canadian TV and U.S. syndication, it was a half-hour show with an extremely low budget. After three seasons in syndication, it was picked up by NBC for a series of 90-minute shows. The episodes that are least familiar to most fans are those from the final run, when it appeared as a 45-minute series on Cinemax. It's that series I want to discuss here.

By the time the show got to Cinemax, many of the original performers had left. Harold Ramis, Dave Thomas, Catherine O'Hara, John Candy, and Rick Moranis (who wasn't an original cast member) were gone. The cast was down to Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin and Martin Short. In the Cinemax run, John Hemphill, Ron James, and Mary Charlotte Wilcox filled out the cast as non-featured players. Also, most episodes in the Cinemax series had one of the former cast members as a guest star.

Many fans of SCTV consider the Cinemax run to be the weakest episodes of the series, but they're actually my favorites. As much as I enjoy John Candy and Catherine O'Hara, my two favorite performers in the entire run of the show were Andrea Martin and Martin Short. And in the Cinemax run, with so few featured cast members, those two were on screen nearly the whole time. More than any of the other cast members, they were adept at broad, physical comedy - thought by some to be too broad, but not by me - so that became the tone of the show during its final season.

Not every episode of SCTV on Cinemax was a gem, but that was also true of the show's other incarnations. Most of them are very good, though.
Martin Short's "Jerry Lewis Sings Bob Dylan" segment is great. An entire episode, "Stalag SCTV", centers around Guy Caballero's efforts to stop a spy from stealing SCTV's scripts by imprisoning all the personnel; that episode is a great chance for the cast to showcase all their station characters, and is very effective, not to mention that Fred Willard is the guest star for that episode. Another good segment, "Gimme Jackie", centers around Jackie Rogers Jr., and almost makes him bearable. Short's Brock Linahan character appears throughout these episodes, and is always funny. We also get to see a lot of Edith Prickley and Pirini Scleroso. There's even a segment of "The Sammy Maudlin Show", although it's been renamed "Maudlin of the Night" in a parody of Alan Thicke's failed talk show. And there are two really great segments of "Half-Wits".

SHOUT! Factory has been releasing SCTV DVDs for a while now. They've put out all the NBC shows; I was hoping the next release would be the Cinemax shows, but instead, they released a "Best of" package from the syndicated run. This doesn't bode well for our ever seeing the Cinemax shows on DVD. I recorded 13 of the 18 episodes back when they aired, and I've jealously guarded those tapes, because I like the shows so much. But it would be much nicer to have DVDs, and it would allow people who haven't had a chance to appreciate those episodes to do so.