How a “piece of shit” TV show led to the creation of ‘Saturday Night Live’
When Saturday Night Live started, no one really believed it would work. In hindsight, it’s an insane idea. It’s the ultimate prime time television slot, usually one populated by a crowd-pleaser or a game show. So the decision to give that space to an off-kilter sketch show? Of course, everyone thought that would backfire.
We also need to consider that this bold move was not even being made by a huge name in the comedy world. Instead, it was being made by Lorne Michaels, who had respect in the industry but didn’t have notoriety.
The team Michaels employed to make SNL with him didn’t have stardom either. Instead, he essentially gathered a rag-tag group of outsiders who perfectly captured the type of humour the TV show has become known for, existing somewhere between silly and deadpan sarcastic.
Captured perfectly in the 2024 movie Saturday Night, the mission to make the show was a mess right up to the very first moment action was called. With their network essentially hoping SNL would immediately fail so they could give up on the risk and fall back on a sure-fire, more traditional programming, the pressure was high to make it work.
Now, SNL’s original cast and first writing team are famed worldwide. Names like John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman were made by that show, launching legends in the comedy world. It seemed that the show had a Midas touch as, throughout its history, it has launched the careers of massive stars, including Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, and even more recent successes like Pete Davidson.
SNL has defied the odds and become one of America’s favourite TV shows, and that defiance is even more miraculous given that the spark of the idea all came down to some totally trash TV.
It started with Al Franken, one of the show’s first writers, watching TV with his housemate and fellow writer Tom Davis one night. “We weren’t making money at the time, and the only variety shows around were Johnny Carson’s – and we’re not joke writers, so we couldn’t do that – and Carol Burnett’s, which was a good show but not our territory. Oh, and I think Sonny and Cher was on, which was a piece of shit,” Davis recalled.
Watching the limited landscape of comedy shows, witnessing how poor the quality seemed to be and how they would never fit into it, Franken and Davis decided to make their own fun. “Actually, we wrote a perfect submission for Saturday Night Live, a package of things we’d like to see on TV – a news parody, commercial parody, and a couple sketches,” he said as they basically just dreamed up their own perfect show.
When they heard about what Michaels was trying to make, they sent in that idea. “Basically from that, we were hired,” Franken said. It’s another example of how Michaels was taking wild risks. “We were the only writers hired by Lorne who he didn’t meet,” Franken remembered as they were basically hired blind, “We always thought that if he had met us, we wouldn’t have gotten the job.”
Even the network warned against hiring the two LA-based comedians, as it would cost even more to move them across the country. “But Lorne insisted on us,” Franken said, and suddenly, a night of watching the trash Sonny and Cher show changed not only their lives, but changed cultural history.
