Saturday Night Live

• 1. Introduction

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  Saturday Night Live premiered on NBC on the 11th of October 1975, hosted by comedian George Carlin, and it has not stopped since. For more than five decades, the show has broadcast live from Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, making it one of the longest-running network television programs in the United States. Its 84 Primetime Emmy Awards sit alongside 6 Writers Guild of America Awards and 3 Peabody Awards. As of 2022, no television program in history had accumulated more Primetime Emmy nominations. How did a late-night variety show built around sketch comedy become a fixture of American culture? How did it survive cast departures, drug scandals, network interference, a global pandemic, and near-cancellation more than once? And what has it meant, to politics, to film, to comedy itself, that this single show on Saturday nights became a launching pad for so many careers and a stage for so many national moments?

• 2. A Show That Almost Was Not

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  Johnny Carson's late-night reruns filling Saturday nights on NBC affiliates were not the result of network vision. Beginning in 1965, those weekend slots simply ran old Tonight Show material. In 1974, Carson himself petitioned NBC to pull the reruns so they could air on weeknights and give him time off. NBC president Herbert Schlosser turned to Dick Ebersol, the vice president of late-night programming, and asked him to fill the Saturday night gap. Ebersol and Lorne Michaels then developed Michaels's concept over three weeks: a variety show built on high-concept comedy, political satire, and music designed to draw 18- to 34-year-old viewers. NBC placed the new show in Studio 8H, a converted radio studio that had housed election night broadcasts and coverage of the Apollo moon landings. Revamping the studio for the premiere cost $250,000. By 1975 Michaels had assembled an initial cast that included Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, and George Coe. Show writer Herb Sargent gave them their name: the Not Ready for Prime-Time Players. Much of the talent for that inaugural season, including original head writer Michael O'Donoghue, came through The National Lampoon Radio Hour.

• 3. The First Five Seasons

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  The original title, NBC's Saturday Night, was not the show's choice. The Saturday Night Live name was already in use by Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell on rival network ABC. After Cosell's show was cancelled in 1976, NBC purchased the rights to the name and officially changed the title at the start of the 1977-1978 season. Cast members in the first season were paid $750 per episode and, according to Michaels, essentially lived at the offices. The show found its footing by its fourth episode, hosted by Candice Bergen. Iconic characters from those first five seasons included Belushi's samurai, the Coneheads (played by Aykroyd, Curtin, and Newman), and Radner's Roseanne Roseannadanna. Chevy Chase was the first cast member to leave for a movie career, departing midway through the second season and being replaced by Bill Murray. By the 1978-1979 season, cocaine had become, in the words of authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, an integral part of the working process on the show. The season that ended in May 1980 was the show's highest-rated in its history. As it concluded, Michaels asked NBC to place the show on hiatus. When NBC president Fred Silverman refused, Michaels left. Nearly the entire writing and cast staff followed him out the door after the 24th of May 1980 finale.

• 4. Near-Death and Revival

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  Jean Doumanian assembled a new cast quickly and faced immediate unfavorable comparisons to what had come before. In a February 1981 episode, cast member Charles Rocket used an expletive during a sketch. Rocket later said he was trying to fill time before the show's close. Doumanian was dismissed after only ten months. Dick Ebersol was brought in as producer and gradually removed all the new cast members except Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. Under Ebersol, Murphy rose to prominence with characters such as Mister Robinson's Neighborhood and Gumby, having been underused during Doumanian's tenure. Ebersol's distaste for political humor steered the show away from jokes about President Ronald Reagan. For the 1984-1985 season Ebersol hired established comedians including Billy Crystal and Martin Short, producing what many considered one of the funniest seasons, though it moved away from Michaels's original approach. When Ebersol made the same demand as Michaels had in 1980 - a hiatus to recast and rebuild - NBC rejected it and instead returned to Michaels. Michaels came back for the 1985-1986 season, overhauled the cast again, and by the 1986-1987 season sought unknown talent such as Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman rather than established names. That new cast successfully restored the show's reputation.

• 5. Politics as Comedy

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  Chevy Chase's bumbling portrayal of President Gerald Ford during the 1976 presidential election was cited as an influence on that race. The show's political reach has only grown since. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Tina Fey returned for guest appearances as vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Writer Robert Smigel called it the show's biggest moment since the 1970s, and Michaels said it made Fey a huge star, adding that you could see perception changing completely. A quote widely attributed to Palin herself - "I can see Russia from my house" - was actually spoken by Fey in character. Governor Palin later appeared on the show alongside Fey's impression, drawing fourteen million viewers, the show's largest audience in fourteen years. Alec Baldwin's recurring portrayal of Donald Trump during and after the 2016 campaign led to what Vanity Fair described as a shot of relevance for the show and a significant ratings increase. Trump was sufficiently irritated that in 2019 he tweeted that the Federal Election Commission or the FCC should look into stopping SNL from targeting him without balance, and sources told The Daily Beast in 2021 that he had repeatedly asked advisers and lawyers to stop negative portrayals through FCC or Department of Justice interference. The so-called SNL Effect was measured during the 2008 campaign, when two-thirds of polled voters said they had seen politically charged SNL content and ten percent said it had influenced their vote.

• 6. The Talent Factory

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  As of Season 51, the show has featured 172 cast members, recruited largely from improvisational comedy groups and stand-up circuits. The Groundlings supplied Laraine Newman, Phil Hartman, Will Ferrell, Jon Lovitz, and Kristen Wiig. The Second City contributed Dan Aykroyd, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Tim Meadows. Chevy Chase was the first to depart for a film career in the middle of the second season, a pattern that would repeat throughout the show's history. The Weekend Update anchor seat became one of the most coveted positions, with alumni including Dennis Miller, Norm Macdonald, Colin Quinn, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers each finding larger careers afterward. In 1999, Tina Fey became the first woman to serve as SNL's head writer. By 2005 she was earning $1.5 million per season for her combined role as head writer and performer. Writer Conan O'Brien was brought in through The Groundlings in 1988, went on to write for The Simpsons, and eventually hosted his own show. Former head writer Adam McKay co-founded the comedy website Funny or Die with Will Ferrell. Writer Jim Downey served as head writer for ten years between 1985 and 1995, and wrote for the show on and off for thirty years in total, formally retiring in 2013 as the longest-tenured writer in the show's history. In 2001, Will Ferrell became the highest-paid cast member, earning $350,000 per season.

• 7. Representation and Controversy

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  A 2016 study of 826 SNL episodes from 1975 to 2016 found that over 90 percent of episodes had white hosts; 6.8 percent had Black hosts, 1.2 percent had Hispanic hosts, and 1.1 percent had hosts of another racial minority. Since the show began, only eight Black women have served as cast members: Yvonne Hudson in 1980, Danitra Vance in the 1985-1986 season, Ellen Cleghorne from 1991 to 1995, Maya Rudolph from 2000 to 2007, Sasheer Zamata starting in 2014, Leslie Jones from 2014 to 2019, Ego Nwodim from 2018 to 2025, and Punkie Johnson from 2020 to 2024. As of the 2025-2026 season, more than half of SNL's seasons have not included a Black female cast member. In 2013, when longtime cast member Kenan Thompson suggested producers were not finding Black women who were ready, media outlets argued it was the show, not the talent pool, that was not ready. Chris Rock left the show to perform on In Living Color, citing frustration with being limited to roles as a rapper or Black political activist. Asian representation was similarly sparse until Bowen Yang was promoted from writer to on-air performer in 2019. Terry Sweeney, who appeared in the 1985-1986 season, was not only SNL's first openly gay male cast member but also the first openly gay series regular on network television. Among the show's most discussed non-representation controversies was singer Sinead O'Connor's 1992 appearance, in which she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II in protest of the Catholic Church, prompting hundreds of viewer complaints and widespread criticism at the time.

• 8. The Show Behind the Show

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  Each SNL episode follows a precise, compressed production schedule. Monday begins with a two-hour free-form pitch meeting in Michaels's office. Tuesday is dedicated entirely to writing, with actual scripting often not beginning until 8:00 p.m. and continuing through the night. On Wednesday at 5:00 p.m., approximately fifty people gather for a round-table read-through of at least forty sketch ideas, a session that lasts upwards of three hours. Michaels then selects which sketches proceed. By Saturday evening there is a full dress rehearsal before a live audience at 8:00 p.m., after which Michaels reviews the show to ensure it meets a 90-minute length. Sketches that have survived to that final rehearsal can still be cut. The opening monologue can be written as late as Saturday afternoon. The 2013-2014 season had a budget of over $70 million, for which it received a subsidy of $12.3 million from New York State. Announcer Don Pardo served in the role from the show's beginning until his death on the 18th of August 2014 at age 96, following the 39th season. He continued flying to New York City to announce live until 2010, when he began recording from his home in Arizona. Photographer Edie Baskin created the original bumper photographs for the show, always shooting in black and white with hand-drawn neon or pastel color applied directly to the prints. Since 1999, Mary Ellen Matthews has served as the official photographer, shooting hosts on Tuesdays and musical guests on Thursdays in makeshift studios built on-site at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.