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On December 4, 1993, Charlton Heston hosted Saturday Night Live. While the show was solid overall, the start of the episode — including the cold open, opening montage and monologue — was something truly unique among SNL’s 900-plus episodes. Rather than try to describe it myself, however, I’ll leave it to the man who wrote and conceived of it: veteran TV writer David Mandel.

Mandel later worked on Seinfeld and Veep, but before that, he was a writer on Saturday Night Live where the opening of the Heston episode was his crowning achievement.

The Night ‘SNL’ Went to the Apes

I love format-breaking. I did the documentary episode of Veep, and I did the backwards episode of Seinfeld. Over the years, Saturday Night Live had done some very cool format-breaking that a lot of people had forgotten about. In the Charles Grodin episode, the concept is that Charles Grodin did all this...

Last summer, at a press conference to promote what would turn out to be the final TV series of his career, CBS' "The Crazy Ones," Robin Williams was asked what it was like to spend decades walking into rooms where everyone expected him to be instantly, wickedly funny. "I think the pressure to be funny all the time, it’s like, 'Dance funny man, you know?'" he admitted. "I think sometimes there’s that pressure." In a too-short life that was often wildly successful and at times — up until his apparent suicide at age 63 — deeply troubled, Williams coped with that pressure to be funny at a moment's notice with remarkable grace, energy and talent. Even if we leave out his brilliant, Oscar-winning film career and focus solely on his TV work, so many scenes and jokes come instantly to mind: his star-making turn as daffy alien Mork from Ork,...