The “most important performer” in ‘Saturday Night Live’ history, according to co-creator Dick Ebersol
Based entirely on the sheer volume of icons, legends, and superstars who’ve passed through the doors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s Studio 8H over the last 50 years, trying to name the single most important performer in Saturday Night Live history sounds like an impossible task.
A lot of it is down to personal preference, but what can’t be argued is that SNL remains Hollywood comedy’s most fertile proving ground, with dozens upon dozens of names cutting their teeth on the long-running sketch staple before taking their talents to the big screen and experiencing huge success.
Even the 11th season, which premiered in 1985 and is generally regarded as one of, if not the worst run in the show’s history, featured Robert Downey Jr as a cast member, so it’s not as if the calibre of talent to roll off the production line is tied to the quality of the material they’re forced to work with.
From Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase to Bill Hader, Will Ferrell, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, via Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, and Mike Myers, to name but a very small few, all of them became household names on SNL before taking their careers to new heights once they’d left the weekends behind to focus on their cinematic adventures.
Lorne Michaels has been the driving force behind SNL since its inception, but he didn’t bring the series to the airwaves single-handedly. He might be credited as its creator, but it was NBC’s then-director of weekend late-night programming, Dick Ebersol, who, along with network president Herbert Schlosser, approached Michaels to assist in developing a Saturday night variety show.
Although he hasn’t been actively involved in Saturday Night Live for the last four decades, it hasn’t dropped off his radar. As far as he’s concerned, out of all the fresh-faced comics and mercurial talents to have hopped on and off the carousel over the last half-century, nobody has been more important, or crucial, to its sustained success than Eddie Murphy.
He was so blown away that, in his role as executive producer, he decreed that Murphy appear onscreen at least three times during the first half of every show that he was on, because he knew the soon-to-be A-lister was the brightest talent SNL had at its disposal, and the easiest way to keep audiences glued to their screens.
The series wasn’t at its highest point when Murphy joined in 1980, and even though he was only 19 years old at the time, Ebersol knew he was destined for big things. More than that, though, he believes that the Beverly Hills Cop and Trading Places superstar dragged SNL up to his level, sparing it from the creative and ratings doldrums.
“Eddie’s the single most important performer in the history of the show,” he told The Washington Post. “He literally saved the show.” With viewership sliding, Ebersol is convinced that “it would have been very difficult to have kept the show on the air without Eddie,” and if he wasn’t there, “it would have been pretty hard to keep up the show long enough to get to the next year.”
Michaels hasn’t gone out on a limb and named the best SNL performer ever, although he did rank Will Ferrell in the top three, but Ebersol has no doubts that Murphy is number one.
