The 90s version of Saturday Night Live had a lot of breakout stars, but it also had a lot of cautionary tales.

It seems like every generation of Saturday Night Live mints a whole slew of new comedy superstars. Despite the eighties being rather slow in that regard (except Eddie Murphy, of course), in the nineties, SNL once again recaptured the zeitgeist. For the first time since its seventies heyday, the stars of Saturday Night Live were becoming big screen superstars, often in movies produced by SNL’s master impresario, Lorne Michaels, such as Wayne’s World, Tommy Boy, and a few others. This era gave us Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, and so many others.

However, the 90s era of SNL was also rocked by the untimely death of two charter members, Chris Farley and Phil Hartman. Chris Farley always idolized the original cast, particularly John Belushi. Still, in his efforts to live up to his idol, he dove head-first into a food, drug and alcohol addiction that would kill him before the decade was out, at the young age of thirty-three. 

Despite being a generation older, his frequent SNL co-star, Phil Hartman, also wouldn’t survive the decade. Known as the cast’s most valuable utility player, Hartman never became a leading man, but in many ways, his career was poised to be the most enduring, with him able to parlay his success into character roles in films like Houseguest and Jingle All the Way, and on the sitcom News Radio. Sadly, his life would end violently when his troubled wife, Brynn, murdered him in 1998 amid a drug-fuelled mental breakdown (she’d also take her own life immediately after).

In this special episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, we take a deep dive into those Saturday Night Live scandals and several others that rocked what turned out to be a turbulent decade for the series.