Saturday Night Live first aired on 11 October 1975 on NBC and has continued since to hold that spot in the line-up despite major cast changes, turmoil in the production offices and variable ratings.
A comedy-variety show with an emphasis on satire and current issues, the programme has been a staple element of NBC’s dominance of late-night programming since its inception. What Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In did for the form of US TV variety shows, Saturday Night Live did for content. Disaffected youth of the 60s were finally free to express themselves in front of TV cameras.
The programme was developed by Dick Ebersol with producer Lorne Michaels in 1975 as a result of NBC’s search for a show for its Saturday late-night slot. The network had long enjoyed dominance of the weekday late-night slot with The Tonight Show and sought to continue that success in the unused weekend time period.
With the approval of Johnny Carson, whose influence at the network was strong, Ebersol and Michaels debuted their show, which was intended to attract the 18-to-34 age demographic.
Baba Wawa (the late Gilda Radner) was a famous TV interviewer, ring-tossing Coneheads (Prymaat, Beldar and Connie) came from France, Land Sharks delivered Candygrams, and Shimmer was a floor polish and a dessert topping.
SNL thumbed its nose at tradition and more than any other show on US TV, it had Attitude.
Though it began to run out of steam by the end of the 70s (but regained it later), SNL did make American television ready for anti-Establishment satire of the Dave Letterman ilk. They even had their own cartoon short, way before Tracey Ullman had The Simpsons.
Mr Bill was the supreme tragic character. It was the story of a naive Play-Doh man with a high pitched whine (pictured below) and a cute dog called Spot, trying to make it in this hard, cruel world. He was truly the ultimate victim, and continuously suffered at the hands of Mr Hand – a godlike father figure who pretended to be Mr Bill’s friend: He wasn’t!
Chopped, baked, blended, boiled, smashed and destroyed – Mr Bill and Spot had it worse than Wile E. Coyote. Strange to think that a man made from clay being endlessly destroyed was adult humour at the time. Or maybe not.
Saturday Night Live was one of the landmark programmes of the 1970s, an attempt to bring fresh, often outrageous comedy and the excitement of live TV (from New York) to late-night viewers. It featured “The Not Ready for Primetime Players,” a repertory company of wacky comics who presented 90 minutes of topical satire, straight comedy, and music every Saturday night.
The original Not Ready for Prime Time Players included Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Garrett Morris, all of them from the New York and Toronto comedy scenes.
Featuring a different guest host each week (comedian George Carlin was the first) and a different musical guest as well, the programmes reflected a non-traditional approach to television comedy from the start.
The cast and writers combined the satirical with the silly and nonsensical, not unlike Monty Python’s Flying Circus, one of Michael’s admitted influences.
The programme was produced live from NBC’s Studio 8H for 90 minutes. This difficult schedule and pressure-filled production environment resulted in some classic comedy sketches and some abysmally dull moments over the years. Creating comedy in such a situation is difficult at best and the audience was always aware when the show was running dry, usually in the last half hour.
But this sense of the immediate and the unforeseen also gave the show its needed edge.
By returning to TV’s live roots, Saturday Night Live gave its audiences an element of adventure with each programme. It acquainted the generations who never experienced live television programming in the 1950s with the sense of theatre missing from pre-recorded programming.
For the performers, crew and writers, the show was a test of skill and dedication. The show has undergone several major changes since its beginning. The most obvious of these being the cast changes. SNL’s first “star,” Chevy Chase, left the show in the second season for Hollywood. Aykroyd and Belushi followed in 1979.
The rest of the original cast, including Bill Murray who replaced Chase, left when Lorne Michaels decided to leave the show after the 1979-80 season.
Michaels’ departure created wide-spread doubt about the viability of the show without him and his cast of favourites. Jean Doumanian was chosen as the new producer and her tenure lasted less than a year.
With the critics attacking the show’s diminished satirical edge and the lacklustre replacement performers, NBC enticed Ebersol to return as producer in the spring of 1981.
Ebersol managed to attract some of the original staff for the 1981-82 season, particularly writer Michael O’Donoghue. With the addition of Eddie Murphy, the show began to regain some of its strength, always based in its focus on a young audience and the use of relevant material.
Michaels rejoined the show as producer in 1985 and oversaw a second classic period of SaturdayNightLive. With talented performers such as Dana Carvey, Jon Lovitz, Jan Hooks and Phil Hartman, the programme regained much of its early edge and attitude.
But the nature of the programme is that the people who make it funny (the performers and writers) are the ones who tend to move on after a few years of the grind of producing a weekly live show.
As the programme moved into the 1990s, this trend still affected the quality. But Michaels’ presence established a continuity which reassured the network and provided some stability for the audience.
From the beginning, Saturday Night Live provided America with some of its most popular characters and catch-phrases. Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It’s always something”) and Emily Litella (“Never mind”), Belushi’s Samurai, Aykroyd’s Jimmy Carter, Murphy’s Mr Robinson, Billy Crystal’s Fernando Lamas (“You look mahvelous”), Martin Short’s Ed Grimley, Lovitz’s pathological liar, Carvey’s Church Lady (“Isn’t that special?”) and Carvey and Kevin Nealon’s Hans and Franz (pictured above right) have all left marks on popular culture.
The programme’s regular news spot has been done by Chase, Curtin, Aykroyd, Nealon and Dennis Miller, among others and, at its best, provided sharp comic commentary on current events. It was particularly strong with Miller as the reader.
Saturday Night Live has seen many of its cast members move on to success in other venues. Chase, Aykroyd, Murray, Murphy and Crystal have all enjoyed considerable movie success. Short, Lovitz, Carvey, Jim Belushi, Chris Farley and Joe Piscopo have been mildly successful in films. Curtin, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Hooks and Phil Hartman moved on to other television shows.
Among the notable comics to emerge from the constantly changing cast in later years were Chris Rock (1990), Adam Sandler (1991), David Spade (1991), Chris Elliott (1994), Janeane Garofalo (1994) and Molly Shannon (1995), the latter best known for her nervous Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher.
As a stage for satire, few other American programmes match SaturdayNightLive. As an outlet for current music, the show has featured acts from every popular musical genre and has hosted both old and new artists (from Paul Simon, The Rolling Stones and George Harrison to REM and Sinead O’Connor.)
Due to its longevity, SNL has crossed generational lines and made the culture of a younger audience available to their elders (and the opposite is also true).
Ultimately, Saturday Night Live must be considered one of the most distinctive and significant programmes in the history of American television.
Chevy Chase
1975-1976
John Belushi
1975-1979
Dan Aykroyd
1975-1979
Garrett Morris
1975-1980
Jane Curtin
1975-1980
Laraine Newman
1975-1980
Gilda Radner
1975-1980
Bill Murray
1977-1980
Albert Brooks
1975-1976
Gary Weis
1976-1977
Jim Henson’s Muppets
1975-1976
Don Novelo
1978-1980
1985-1986
Paul Shaffer
1978-1980
Al Franken
1979-1980
1988-1995
Tom Davis
1979-1980
1988-1995
Denny Dillon
1980-1981
Gilbert Gottfried
1980-1981
Gail Matthius
1980-1981
Joe Piscopo
1980-1984
Ann Risley
1980-1981
Charles Rocket
1980-1981
Eddie Murphy
1981-1984
Robin Duke
1981-1984
Tim Kazurinsky
1981-1984
Tony Rosato
1981-1982
Christine Ebersole
1981-1982
Brian Doyle-Murray
1981-1982
Mary Gross
1981-1985
Brad Hall
1982-1984
Gary Kroeger
1982-1985
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss
1982-1985
Jim Belushi
1983-1985
Billy Crystal
1984-1985
Christopher Guest
1984-1985
Harry Shearer
1984-1985
Rich Hall
1984-1985
Martin Short
1984-1985
Pamela Stephenson
1984-1985
Anthony Michael Hall
1985-1986
Randy Quaid
1985-1986
Joan Cusack
1985-1986
Robert Downey
1985-1986
Nora Dunn
1985-1990
Terry Sweeney
1985-1986
Jon Lovitz
1985-1990
Damon Wayans
1985-1986
Danitra Vance
1985-1986
Dennis Miller
1985-1990
Dana Carvey
1986-1993
Phil Hartman
1986-1994
Jan Hooks
1986-1991
Victoria Jackson
1986-1992
A. Whitney Brown
1986-1991
Kevin Nealon
1986-1995
Mike Myers
1989-1995
G.E. Smith & the Saturday Night Live Band
1989-1995 Chris Farley
1990-1995 Chris Rock
1990-1993 Julia Sweeney
1990-1994 Ellen Cleghorne
1991-1995 Siobhan Fallon
1991-1993 Tim Meadows
1991-2000 Adam Sandler
1991-1995 David Spade
1991-1996 Rob Schneider
1991-1994 Melanie Hutsell
1991-1994 Beth Cahill
1991-1993 Sarah Silverman
1993-1994 Norm Macdonald
1993-1998 Jay Mohr
1993-1995 Michael McKean
1994-1995 Chris Elliott
1994-1995 Janeane Garofalo
1994-1995 Mark McKinney
1995-1997 Laura Kightlinger
1994-1995 Molly Shannon
1995-2001 Morwenna Banks
1994-1995 Jim Breuer
1995-1998 Will Ferrell
1995-2002 David Koechner
1995-1996 Cheri Oteri
1995-2000 Nancy Walls
1995-1996 Ana Gasteyer
1996-2002 Chris Kattan
1996-2003 Tracy Morgan
1996-2003 Colin Quinn
1995-2000 Chris Parnell
1998-2006 Horatio Sanz
1998-2006 Jimmy Fallon
1998-2004
Chopped, baked, blended, boiled, smashed and destroyed – Mr Bill and Spot had it worse than Wile E. Coyote. Strange to think that a man made from clay being endlessly destroyed was adult humour at the time. Or maybe not.
