Oh, Canada

There was a time, between 1981 and 1984, when 11:30 on a Friday evening meant just one thing for me and thousands of other obsessed fanatics: SCTV was on the air! This most brilliant of all sketch comedy shows was made with no budget, no frills, just awesome talents of a group of performers and writers -- among them John Candy, Rick Moranis, Harold Ramis, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty and Martin Short. Working with nothing more than a tiny studio and some threadbare locations in the Canadian town of Edmonton, where they lived virtually cut off from the rest of the world, they deployed an arsenal of character-driven humor and technical innovation to make fun of television itself. Each episode centered around the broadcast day at a tiny local TV station in Melonville, and used parodies of commercials, TV shows, movies, bumpers and interstitials to tell actual stories. Classics include the Emmy-winning "Moral Majority" episode, where the station must radically alter its content under pressure from conservative activists; "CCCP-1," where the station's satellite feed is jammed by programs from the Soviet Union, resulting in an escalation that leads to nuclear armageddon; and the awesome "Godfather" parody, which turns the rivalry between the major networks into a gang war ("Sonny hit PBS!"). Only Ernie Kovacs had used the medium so creatively -- and he didn't have Johnny LaRue or Bobby Bittman.

So return with us now to a time when giants strode the earth, and a little town in Alberta called Edmonton was the center of the universe.