Jane Curtin

Curtin's retrospective builds to a genuinely radical posture for one of the most treacherous stages in television history: she simply refused to perform for the people who could give her things. She walked into her SNL callback with nothing prepared, grabbed a tape from her purse and Gilda Radner from the hallway, and got the job, then spent years skipping the Tuesday-night airtime scramble entirely because she was, by her own admission, a terrible salesperson who once sold exactly one spoon. Lorne Michaels communicated with her through Gilda; she made Weekend Update deadpan and controlled anyway. Her theory of her own longevity is almost too modest to register, low ego about the business and high standards about the work, which turns out to describe fifty years of survival.