A dozen documentaries on one stage: The incredible star power of Saturday Night Live’s 1975 premiere
Earlier this year, Sky announced that it would be introducing a new UK version of the comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live to its subscribers in 2026, personally backed by SNL’s long-reigning maestro, Lorne Michaels.
The news was met with a mighty wave of scepticism from a British public that has seen this story play out before. Programmes like Saturday Live, Saturday Zoo, and the 11 O’Clock Show weren’t short on talent, but they all failed to meet the impossible challenge of recreating Michaels’ singular New York institution on British soil.
The failure of late-night sketch comedy on UK TV is sometimes explained as a simple consequence of the differing comedic sensibilities of the Britons and Yankies; an excuse that’s also been deployed when various UK-style panel shows have tanked in America.
The more astute observers, however, will recognise that comparing Saturday Night Live to other comedy shows, including those in America, has less to do with the format and more to do with history. While the BBC will happily rebroadcast ten-year-old episodes of Have I Got News For You, those witty quips about UKIP and David Cameron don’t tend to have legs with today’s audience.
By contrast, SNL has managed the remarkable trick of not only staying on the air for 50 years, but maintaining a weirdly vibrant reverence for its entire back catalogue—50% of which contains outdated political satire and obscure pop culture jokes about forgotten tabloid celebrities.
Why do Americans love watching old episodes of Saturday Night Live from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s? Well, nostalgia is certainly part of it, but the star power is the real unreplicable factor that’s made SNL a monolith—one of the last unsinkable ships of network television.
Crazier still, it’s been like that from the very beginning.
Long before young, unproven cast members like Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Tina Fey, and Maya Rudolph ever showed up at Studio 8H inside 30 Rockefeller Centre, Lorne Michaels had already built the reputation of Saturday Night Live as an A-listers’ hangout, starting from its very first cast and its very first episode, aired live on NBC on October 11th, 1975.
That first broadcast, which was the subject of an entertaining, semi-fictionalised 2024 film called Saturday Night, introduced America to the sketch group known as the Not Ready for Primetime Players, led by no shortage of future Hollywood heavy hitters, including Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner. Because the SNL format also included a weekly guest host, guest musician, and other cameos, the level of talent onstage that first night is absolutely staggering in retrospect.
If we can agree that it takes a certain level of success and notoriety to warrant someone making a professional, widely-viewed documentary film about your life, then the list of people involved with SNL episode one has to rank among the largest, semi-casual gatherings of “important” American entertainers of the Baby Boomer generation. Consider the following participants that night and the mostly excellent biographical documentaries you can now enjoy about their careers.
Documentaries about the performers on the first episode of SNL:
- George Carlin, stand-up comedian, guest host: George Carlin’s American Dream (Jeff Morrow, 2022)
- Billy Preston, musical guest: Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It (Paris Barclay, 2024)
- Janis Ian, musical guest: Janis Ian: Breaking Silence (Varda Bar-Kar, 2024)
- John Belushi, cast member: Belushi (RJ Cutler, 2020)
- Chevy Chase, cast member: I’m Chevy Chase And You’re Not (in production)
- Andy Kaufman, guest comedian: I’m From Hollywood ( Lynne Margulies, Joe Orr, 1989), Thank You Very Much (Alex Braverman, 2023)
- Albert Brooks, comedian, director of short film: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (Rob Reiner, 2023)
- Jim Henson, puppeteer, director of a sketch: Jim Henson: Idea Man (Ron Howard, 2024)
- Gilda Radner, cast member: Love, Gilda (Lisa Dapolito, 2018)
- Al Franken, staff writer: Al Franken: God Spoke (Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus, 2006)
- Paul Simon, guest cameo: In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon (Alex Gibney, 2023)
That’s a total of at least 12 documentaries made about people who were all in one room together, at their primes, at the launch of SNL in 1975. Can we expect a similar impact when Sky’s UK SNL arrives next year? Probably not, but it might take 50 years to know for sure.
