On this Day: Saturday Night Live Debuts

On the night of Oct. 11, 1975, tensions ran high. NBC’s fledgling sketch comedy show was set to premiere, but no one was sure how it would pan out. George Carlin, who had been scheduled to host the program and act in sketches, at the last moment decided to stick to performing pre-rehearsed bits from his stand-up comedy act.

For months, the writers and actors furiously created scripts and fended off worried inquiries from NBC executives. NBC’s Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center, long empty since taping of the NBC Symphony Orchestra ended, had been cleaned out and prepared for its new inhabitants.

Now it all came down to the final moments. Other actors prepared to fill in for Carlin’s parts and at 11:30 p.m., the comedian took to the stage and launched into his famous “football and baseball” monologue. He was received with raucous applause. “NBC’s Saturday Night” was on the air.

After a decade of airing reruns of “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson at 11:30 p.m. every Saturday, NBC was eager for some new programming to fill the hole. With shows like “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” drawing in audiences, NBC wanted an original comedy sketch show of its own.

Producer Dick Ebersole turned to comedy writer Lorne Michaels to develop a show that would be edgy, current and, of course, funny. Michaels began recruiting some of comedy’s up-and-comers: from National Lampoon he tapped Michael O’Donoghue and from West Coast comedy clubs he found writers Al Franken and Tom Davis. The first cast was almost entirely from Chicago’s The Second City comedy troupe.

“I wanted a show to and for and by the TV generation,” Michaels told Time magazine in 1976. “Thirty-year-olds are left out of television. Our reference points, our humor, reflect a life-style never aired on TV. Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda are the most up-to-date shows on the air now, but they are liberated '50s."

From the beginning, Lorne Michaels envisioned a program that would be called “Saturday Night Live,” but it turned out his timing was off. In the same season that the NBC show was slated to premiere, ABC’s “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell,” a sports show starring Howard Cosell, also debuted. Featured on ABC’s show was a cast Cosell called “The Prime Time Players.” In a clear jab at ABC, Lorne called his acting troop, “The Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players.” Lorne’s show debuted as “NBC’s Saturday Night,” but by 1976, Cosell’s show flopped and NBC bought the rights to the name. On March 26, 1977, the show debuted under the name it still uses today.

Although Michaels originally conceived of “Saturday Night Live” as a development lab for spin-offs and ideas, he didn’t know how successful the show would be on its own terms. From the very beginning, the show was a launching pad for its actors’ and writers’ careers. The original cast members, such as Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and John Belushi, among others, went on to wildly successful film and television careers.

The show’s unique format—which featured a different host and musical act every week—also helped jump-start the careers of its guests. In its first year alone, “SNL” reunited Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, gave Jim Henson’s Muppets one of their first grown-up homes and put Candace Bergen in the spotlight.

In terms of spin-offs, “SNL” sketches have proved fertile ground for feature-length releases. Although five-minute sketches might be hilarious, that’s no promise of success when stretched to two hours. “The Blues Brothers” was one of the first, and also most successful, adaptations of a “SNL” sketch for the big screen. It was followed by releases such as “Wayne’s World,” “Coneheads,” “A Night at the Roxbury,” “It’s Pat,” and others.