The Sept. 24 premiere tried to spin the bad news. It started promisingly enough, with a shot of the White House triggering fond memories of Aykroyd’s Nix-on, Chevy’s Ford, Carvey’s Bush. But with Phil Hartman gone, “SNL” is Clintonless, so different east members “auditioned” for the job. Big, hyperkinetic Chris Farley did his motivational-speaker thing, Spacey Adam Sandler sang one of his twisted little tunes. Tim Meadows, the lone black male, shrugged, “I’m not gonna get it, am I?” These “SNL” Oval Office parodies used to define presidencies. Now we get Michael McKean doing Phil Hartman doing Bill Clinton. And nobody feels our pain.

It was supposed to get better, after a 12 percent drop in ratings last season and critical pans of the embarrassing Nancy Kerrigan show. Not counting McKean, who showed up last May, the big new faces are Chris Elliott and Jancane Garofalo. But Elliott’s cynical idiot-boy routine is getting old: he’s laughing at us, not with us. Garofalo has been the most eagerly hyped of the fresh talent, thanks to her Gen-X resume. The kids dig her angry stand-up, her dead-pan turns on “The Larry Sanders Show” and as Wynona Ryder’s Gap-slave girlfriend in “Reality Bites.” But besides playing a heavily nose-ringed lesbian, she’s getting stuck with the same insipid female roles as the departed Julia Sweeney (when she wasn’t doing “Pat”). Norm MacDonald has been upgraded to “Update” anchor, but is watering down the dark misanthropy that made him such a welcome bit player. Kevin Nealon may have squirmed in the “Update” chair-you could see the flopsweat trickling from his brow-but at least he tried. The vibe MacDonald and Garofalo give off is a smug, affectless “whatever.”

You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde, former “SNL” writer Anne Beatts once said. The show’s founder and executive producer, Lorne Michaels, is a mogul now, spreading himself thin over a comedy conglomerate of bad movie spinoffs, CD-ROMs and “Richmeister” mugs. “SNL,” the institution, is slickly packaged in a bland new coffee-table tome out this month, “Saturday Night Live: The First Twenty Years” (264 pages, Houghton Mifflin. $25), that actually thanks George Stephanopoulos in the credits. In Michaels’s perfunctory introduction to the book, he remembers the Bee sketch from the first show and how they kept putting it on the air even though nobody else thought it was funny. A metaphor for what was cool about “SNL” then (defying authority and comic conventions), Lorne’s Bee story is emblematic of what’s wrong now. Although the sketches are actually shorter, they seem longer. They don’t end, just fade into nothingness. When David Spade says “Buh-bye” over and over again in the recurring “Total Bastard Airlines” sketch, it smells like a desperate play for the next marketable character and catchphrase. (Watch for “Total Bastard Airlines: The Movie!”) Revered veteran producer James Downey still recruits writers from his alma mater, the Harvard Lampoon, then subjects them to an insane writing schedule held over from the show’s coked-up heyday. They start from scratch every Monday, then pull all-nighters until the show gets done. Some of the show’s best writers have left: Robert Smigel to “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” Jack Handey to fly-fish and do “Deep Thoughts” books. And with Carvey and Hartman gone, a dozen comic egos are rushing to fill the vacuum, competing for air time and movie deals. Such is the bunker mentality at “SNL” that Downey nicknamed himself Admiral Doenitz, after the German officer stuck with surrendering his country after Hitler’s suicide.

Is it time to put the show out of our misery? NBC won’t as long as “SNL” has a ratings pulse. So Mike Myers will continue to come up with characters with catchphrases in his sleep. G. E. Smith will continue to make his annoying guitar faces. Farley and Sandler, inspired as they can be, may have peaked. Michaels’s defense of “SNL” is that it has always been accused of not living up to its mythical golden age, that the show was never perfect. Millions of people do still tune in to “SNL” on Saturday night, but now get more excited about bashing it on Monday morning. Even Judge Lance Ito, impersonated in this season’s rambling O.J. “Court TV” parodies, said the show “hasn’t been funny for 10 years.” The prosecution rests.