‘Saturday Night Live’ is more than a show. And there is nothing like it

On January 18, 2025By Littum

“Saturday Night Live” is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and things are happening.

Jason Reitman’s backstage dramedy “Saturday Night,” released last year, is set around the show’s first episode. There is an executive producer profile Lorne Michaels in the New Yorker this week, taken from Susan Morrison’s forthcoming biography, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night.” Peacock, NBC’s streaming arm, has an engaging docuseries, “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night,” now streaming, and its standalone episodes focused respectively on auditions (“Five Minutes”), the creative system (“Written by: A Week Inside the SNL Writers”) Room”), an iconic sketch (“More cowbell”), and when Michaels returned to host the show after a five-year hiatus (“Season 11: The Weird Year”).

Premiering Jan. 27 on NBC, “Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music,” co-directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez, looks at the show’s rich history of musical performances, musicians making comedy and comedians making music ; it opens with a long, elaborate mash-up/medley of performances that makes one glad to have been alive in its time, and just glad to be alive. And on Feb. 16, NBC will air and Peacock will stream “SNL50: The Anniversary Special,” a three-hour primetime event. It will of course be live.

Much about the show, which has been analyzed and reported on for half a century, is obvious. It’s not always good – practically (or completely) never through an entire episode, and some would say an entire season. It survives on constant churn. Counted out more than once, it has risen from the mat to fight again, new victories erasing old losses – a once and future champion.

Over time, it has become something more than a show – a network, a world. Favorite guest hosts and musical guests return again and again and define “SNL” as much as the regular cast or writers. The cold opens up Christmas episode 2024hosted by Martin Short — a season 10 cast member — visited the premise of the “Five-Timers Club,” whose members have hosted (at least) five times, and featured cameos from Tom Hanks, Paul Rudd, John Mulaney, Emma Stone, Tina Fey , Kristen Wiig, Scarlett Johansson, Melissa McCarthy, Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Fallon. (There are more in that club, including Dwayne Johnson, Justin Timberlake, Candice Bergen and Christopher Walken, who played the record producer who called for “more cowbell.”)

A group of people in dark clothes stand on a stage.

Whipped up out of nothing over six days (on the seventh they rest), “SNL” is inevitably imperfect. Sketches are getting too long. Jokes fall flat. Some hosts, especially those from outside show companies, do not fare well. At the same time, the show, though revised at the last minute, is tightly organized, a machine that involves dozens of workers creating sets and wrangling costumes in the last few days before airing. (Writers are responsible for directing their sketches.) There is little or no improvisation. The system, which seems to have remained largely the same over the years, is designed to mitigate failure, but failure is part of the process as ideas are rejected and sketches are cut. And what works in dress may not work on air.

In the beginning, television was live by technological necessity; in 1975 it was exclusively for sports and news and special events. Created to replace reruns of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” “SNL” called back to the spirit of Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” from the 1950s, but delivered its version of variety with a countercultural, youth-led spin. (Caesar was still considered groundbreaking. A collection of sketches, “Ten from your show of shows,” captured on kinescope, had been released in theaters in 1973; he would host “SNL” in 1983.) It wasn’t live because it had to be, but because “live” was exciting and dangerous and, by network TV standards, raw; it courted disaster, and sometimes disaster won.

It also tied the audience, who attended in real time (on the East Coast, anyway), to the event and to the players. The compact first cast, Not Ready for Prime Time Players – Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Chevy Chase, replaced in the second season by Bill Murray – was covered as a rock band (the rock press has use for the rest of the television), and consumed as one. Producer Michaels played himselfas a character.

Two men in sweaters stand next to each other. The man on the right is smiling.

Looking back, the series got off to a rough start but came into focus pretty quickly. Early classics include Radner’s “The Judy Miller Show, live from her bedroom,” Aykroyd’s self-destructive Julia Child, an old Belushi visits the Not Ready for Prime Time cemetery as the only surviving cast member, Chase and host Richard Pryor in an escalating, racially charged word association test. Everything about Murray feels strangely contemporary, such a strong impact he’s made on the culture and so fully formed his personality was from the beginning. But not all humor travels well. (Curtin looks back from 2023 to an old episode, told People magazine that “not one thing was funny.”) Two sketches that have stuck with me from that era aren’t comedy at all—the recurring “Olympia Restaurant,” whose only “jokes” are the repetition of the word “cheeseburger” and the phrase “No Coke, Pepsi” and the dejected “Reunion,” a two-hander for Aykroyd and Curtin, when two former high school friends accidentally sat next to each other at a lunch counter. These are really plays from the show’s experimental youth, and they have stayed fresh.

The first seasons are of course ancient history; the original cast members are in their 70s or 80s or have passed on. Fifty years before “SNL,” movies still had two years to wait before they could talk; Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush,” Buster Keaton’s “Go West,” and Harold Lloyd’s “The Freshman” were released; “The Great Gatsby” was published; Scope’s “Monkey Trial” took place; The Mount Rushmore Memorial was dedicated; and the world’s first motel opened. It’s an all-too-repeated trope that one’s favorite “SNL” cast is the one you met in high school (which suggests there’s a teenage edge to its humor), and most of the cast today grew up on the show from the 21st century. “Right now,” “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,” “Consume Mass Quantities,” “But no!,” himself “Wayne’s World” shout “We are not worthy!” — these catch phrases won’t ring any bells with younger viewers.

A man in a black T-shirt and ripped jeans holds a white electric guitar while sitting next to a man with drumsticks.

“We’re not worthy!”: Mike Myers, left, as Wayne and Dana Carvey as Garth in a “Wayne’s World” skit. (Alan Singer/NBCU)

Two women in suits hold their chins in their hands as they lean against a news anchor desk.

The ladies of “Weekend Update”: Tina Fey, left, and Amy Poehler. (Dana Edelson/NBC)

It is an institution, a frame in which to appear, a portal to pass through on the way to greater things, or other things, or lesser things. Some players last a long time, some a little time; some go of their own accord, some are shown the door. “SNL” is not the only focal point of modern American comedy, or the only path to success. But in terms of exposure, there is nothing like it. On rare occasions, well-known properties have joined the cast — Kenan Thompson, on the show for an unprecedented 22 seasons and counting, had already starred in a name-in-the-title Nickelodeon series “Kenan & Kel” and its successful movie spinoff “God Burger.” But more often than not, “SNL” is where careers take off.

Eddie Murphy, Phil Hartman, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey (establishing their double act anchoring “Weekend Update”), Melissa McCarthy, Tracy Morgan, Maya Rudolph, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Chris Rock, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Chris Farley, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Leslie Jones, Norm Macdonald, Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Julia Sweeney and Bobby Moynihan are among the long-term alumni. Through Fallon and Seth Meyers, the show has colonized late-night television. (Both of their shows are produced by Michaels’ Broadway Video.) Stephen Colbert auditioned for “SNL” — a clip of his audition is included in “Five Minutes” — and was rejected. Things worked out for him anyway.

The world has come a long way since 1975, and “SNL” has left little trash in its wake. In particular, the show has been slow to evolve on matters of diversity. White cast would often play non-white cast, such as Billy Crystal’s blackface (if loving) Sammy Davis Jr. It’s a long way from the days when Morris was required to play all black characters, male or female, but it was as early as 2013 when Thompson refused to portray black women and demanded that the show hire actual black women instead. Bowen Yang, who is of Chinese descent, was named to the 2019 repertory cast, making him the first “full-blooded” Asian cast member.

A man in a black tuxedo stands near a set of stairs covered in cream and red carpeting.

Bowen Yang in a season 49 sketch. He was “SNL’s” first Asian cast member. (NBC/Lauren Clements/NBC)

A man dressed as Little Richard in a black suit adorned with sequins.

Kenan Thompson as Little Richard last year. He is the longest-tenured “SNL” cast member. (Will Heath/NBC)

I can’t say I consume it all anymore, at the time of broadcast or by DVR, although apparently people do – 4 or 5 million or more, to count Nielsen’s Live + First Day ratings. It’s not my “SNL” now, which is not meant as a criticism, just an admission. But the show’s practice of repeating sketches and characters means you can get a pretty good idea of what it’s about just by glancing around. YouTube clips — there are 15 million subscribers to the “Saturday Night Live” channel — and social media sharing that I credit for guiding me to Nate Bargatze in “Washington’s Dream,” can keep abreast of the latest developments.

And at 50, it looks pretty good. (I’ve checked in, in the spirit of the anniversary.) A few younger players in the current cast make an amorphous impression, but the line-up of veterans is strong: Thompson, who has been with the series for nearly half its life, and at . 46, nearly half his; Mikey Day (44); Heidi Gardner (41); Bowen Yang (34); Chloe Fineman (36); Ego Nwodim (36); Michael Che (41) and Colin Jost (42), who have anchored Weekend Update for more than a decade. (In a cast of 15 “repertory players” and three “featured players,” they stand out simply by virtue of having been around longer.) And some of the younger players will continue to become older players as new younger ones players move in. behind them, and thus the circle of life turns.

You don’t have to look far to find viewers declaring that the show isn’t as funny as it used to be. It’s a common enough complaint when it comes to comedy. Changing with the changing times, but not changing so much as losing itself, “Saturday Night Live” has survived everything the last 50 years have thrown at it, charting a path between a little to the left of the mainstream and more than a little to the left of the mainstream, between familiarity and surprise. What it offers, Saturday after Saturday, is opportunity. What can go right? What could go wrong?