By the time of Saturday Night Live’s third season, one of the big transition points had occurred. Yes, Chevy Chase was gone (though he came back to host an episode), but you also get the sense that the show found its way. It was still “edgy” and edgy. There is – at its best – the sense of chaos intertwined with great comic timing. You never knew what you were going to get in the sketches, which – like always – tended to run too long.

But it also played favorites. Steve Martin hosts three times this season, offering the Festrunk brothers to the show’s mix of returning characters. And it was the Festrunk brothers turned Martin’s comedy album title “Wild and Crazy Guy” into a catch-phrase. Martin is the sports car of SNL hosts, always smooth and reliable, though never dangerous. That said, the third season has some of the show’s most famously off-kilter moments. Contained herein is the episode where Elvis Costello stops what he’s playing to break into “Radio, Radio.” You can see the palpable hostility in Bill Murray at the end of the Chevy Chase episode - the episode in which during one of the commercial breaks one tried to strangle the other.

The show was born around returning characters, and Dan Akroyd’s Leonard Pinth Garnell and his numerous variations on bad art turn up here with great laughs at terrible artistry, and so does his E. Buzz Miller, with Larraine Newman at her best. The joke with both may be a bit one note, but it never gets old. Whereas Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella - who also comes back - was never that funny to begin with. To offer some variety, Radner also offers Rosanne Rosanadana, who is equally unfunny and to which the joke also doesn’t change. With Litella, it’s mishearing something until “nevermind… Bitch!” and with RR it’s how she can take anything and then turn it into an opportunity to talk about something really gross. But Radner redeems herself with Lisa Loopner, whose partnership with Bill Murray’s Todd is always delightful as the show’s reoccurring nerds characters. The two bring each other to such life, it’s really a partnership of good writing, and good jokes when it works.

There’s always been and always going to be gimmick hosts, and this season offers Hugh Hefner, Ray Charles, contest winner Miskell Spillman, and O.J. Simpson (not yet mastering giving a good performance). Hefner plays endless variations on his lothario role as the head of Playboy, while Ray Charles does a good monologoue, and at least two sketches that are reasonably funny (one in which he turns the tables on Michael O’Donoghue in a way that works considering it’s the easy out). Miskell Spillman seems to get the joke that she’s not really a great performer, so the show does a good job in couching her with little to do (with backup from Buck Henry, who also appears three times the season). And O.J. is simply not much of an actor, with one of the most leaden opening monologues of all time. Still, even these “off” episodes have their moments.

There are two episodes that rank as classics. Charles Grodin hosts and the entire time he breaks character in-character as Charles Grodin. They say he didn’t practice his monologue because he was out buying gifts for the cast. The progressive annoyance, and the delicate way the show tweaks everyone involved makes it great theater, and plays to one of the show’s great strengths: its self-awareness. The other is when Michael Palin hosts. In his opening monologue, Palin goes off on a long weird rant and then insists on shoving two cats and a pile of meat down his pants. I haven’t laughed that hard at anything on SNL in ages. The rest of his episode is also filled with a number of absurdist bits that remind you when SNL was firing on it’s A game, it was masterful.

Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd do Weekend Update this year. Ackroyd is great behind the desk, but I preferred Curtin on her own. Bill Murray’s weakest business is as the insincere Hollywood reporter, the man who loves everyone, seriously, don’t change. But he also does his lounge singer throughout, which always gets a good laugh or two. “How about those Star Wars.” Garret Morris may have said something funny. And there’s a lot of hay made about Belushi’s drug usage. Like, a lot. These sets have proven essential viewing, and this may be the best year of SNL as a whole yet. By Season five there’s going to be something of a downturn, and here everyone was getting to be really famous, but weren’t completely insufferable yet.

Universal presents the twenty episodes over seven discs with the shows looking okay – for what they are – in full frame 2.0 mono. There’s three episodes a disc, with the final disc offering “Things We Did in the Summer” (43 min.), which was directed by Gary Weiss, and offers two Blues Brothers songs, along with a number of not that funny bits. There’s also a wardrobe test with John Belushi and Howard Shore (2 min.)