By Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad
Four weeks ago an anniversary attracted a flicker of attention on social media: October 11 marked the 45th anniversary of Saturday Night Live’s very first show. On that date in 1975 television viewers got their first glimpses of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players — Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Garett Morris — and were introduced to a brand of sketch-comedy satire that today is one of the most familiar and popular formats on television.
As historians of the show, however, we feel a slight corrective is in order. It’s more accurate to say that viewers were introduced that night to a work in progress that would become one of the most familiar and popular formats on television today. That first show doesn’t represent the birth of SNL so much as it represents the beginning of the labor pains that resulted, four weeks later, in its birth. And make no mistake: the labor pains were agonizing, and a safe delivery was far from assured.
Much of the tension that infused those four weeks had to do with the acrimonious relationship between SNL and NBC. Over the summer, producer Lorne Michaels had hired a group of performers and writers from the counterculture comedy underground who had zero experience in television. Their lack of experience was the point. The mission — and it was a mission — was to do a show that was nothing like conventional television, which they despised. When John Belushi met with Lorne to discuss joining the show, he’d said he only owned a black and white TV set, and it was covered with spit. There was more than a little pose to this stance, of course. Everyone knew that network television could be a ticket to fame and fortune, but they also believed that disruption of the status quo was their best chance for winning the big prize. For that reason they assumed that pretty much anyone associated with conventional television was an obstacle, if not an enemy.
Not surprisingly, this was not a winning attitude as far as the guardians of the Establishment at 30 Rockefeller Plaza were concerned. It’s important to remember that, in those pre-cable, pre-streaming days, NBC was one of three national networks that completely dominated the television business. It was a comfortable position to be in, and one that caused the powers that be within the network to be reasonably confident they knew what they were doing. Consequently, with a few exceptions, they viewed SNL not so much as a threat as an annoyance. This was true both within Studio 8H, where the production crews referred to the show’s neophyte staff as “The Children’s Television Workshop,” and in the executive suites, where the expectation was that SNL would be canceled by Christmas, if not sooner.
Two things carried the show through this precarious period. One was the support of NBC’s president at the time, Herb Schlosser, whose idea it had been to produce a new, younger- skewing variety program for the late Saturday night time slot. Schlosser was the first to admit that the show he got wasn’t exactly the one he’d imagined, but knowing that SNL was Herb’s baby caused a lot of people at the network to cut it more slack than they might have otherwise. The second saving grace was the determination of Lorne Michaels, who when confronted with resistance within the network simply refused to take no for an answer. He wasn’t above playing the network political game strategically by cultivating relationships with people in key positions who were capable of being charmed, and he was always ready to shop for a yes. When that didn’t work, he quickly and regularly resorted to intransigence or aggression. In the process he earned himself a reputation of, as one network executive put it, “a snot-nosed kid, a boy genius, too clever for his own good,” which helped explain why so many people within NBC were eager to see SNL go down in flames.
SNL’s first show provided plenty of encouragement that those hopes would be realized. Lorne had told Herb Schlosser that he knew what the ingredients for the show would be, but not the proportions, and his recipe for the premiere produced a jumbled hodgepodge. Unsure of what it would take to fill 90 minutes of live television, Lorne radically overbooked the show, with two musical guests (Billy Preston and Janis Ian) and four standup comedians (host George Carlin, Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal and Valri Bromfield). Carlin wasn’t comfortable with sketch comedy, or comfortable taking a chance with such inexperienced writers and performers. It also didn’t help that he was, as he told us, “in another world” on cocaine at the time. So Carlin insisted on staying in his comfort zone — standup — and refused to appear in any of the pieces that had been written for him.
Among the casualties of Lorne’s excess of caution was Billy Crystal, whose segment in the show — what would have been his network television debut — was cut when his manager refused, in a nasty argument with Lorne in the hallways outside 8H, to accept the sliver of time that was being allotted for Crystal’s routine. With the exception of Chevy Chase, who was the featured anchor on the Weekend Update segment, the Not Ready for Prime Time players didn’t fare much better. Carlin’s monologues dominated the show, and the sketches that filled out what time was left failed to make much of an impression.
SNL’s second outing, on October 18, wasn’t so much a sketch comedy program as it was a Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert, thanks to the friendship that had developed over the summer between Lorne and Paul Simon. The reunion provided SNL’s writing and production staffs with a welcome breather, but didn’t do much to further the development of the show’s identity. The third show, on October 25, was a step in that direction, albeit not without its problems.
The host was Rob Reiner, who, like George Carlin, didn’t trust the neophytes he was depending on for material that would make him look good. He also felt entitled, thanks to his co-starring role on the number one show on television at the time, All in the Family, to insist on doing things his way. The result was a week of arguments during which Reiner sometimes threatened to walk. He got his wish to perform a long piece he’d brought with him to the show, playing a sleazy nightclub singer, a not-very-funny version of a character that Bill Murray would make famous after he joined SNL a year later. Meanwhile, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players did, finally, get to appear in several sketches, most of which didn’t involve Reiner.
The one significant exception proved to be a breakthrough in SNL history, the moment that foretold the true potential of what the show could be, and would soon become. It occurred in a sketch in which John Belushi played a character he hated, one of the Bees. At Lorne’s behest, the Bees had appeared briefly in the first two shows because he was looking for a way to present all the cast members together, as an ensemble. Their silliness was the point, but Belushi felt that appearing in a giant bee costume undermined his dignity as a comedic artist. He characteristically made no secret of that conviction to anyone who would listen, and to many who wouldn’t. It was this resentment that inspired the breakthrough.
The sketch began with Reiner and guest Penny Marshall (his wife at the time) playing lovers talking over their troubles at a restaurant table. A group of Bees gradually surround them, some sitting at other tables, two serenading the customers with fiddle and guitar. Belushi plays the Bee waiter who brings the check, at which point Reiner, sounding a lot like he had backstage throughout the week, breaks character (supposedly) and starts ranting.
“I was told when I came on the show that I would not have to work with the Bees, and now here they are! This is my big dramatic chance to do something and they stick a whole stage full of Bees around me…. How many times do I have to say it? I don’t want the damn Bees!”
That provoked a response from Belushi’s waiter. “I’m sorry if you think we’re ruining the show, Mr. Reiner. But see, you don’t understand — we didn’t ask to be Bees. You see, you’ve got Norman Lear and a first-rate writing staff [on All in the Family]. But this is all they came up with for us. Do you think we like this? No, Mr. Reiner, we don’t have any choice.”
John walked away but then returned to confront Reiner more forcefully. “You see, we’re just like you were, five years ago, Mr. Hollywood California Number One Show Big Shot! That’s right — we’re’ just a bunch of actors looking for a break, that’s all. What do you want from us? Mr. Rob Reiner, Mister Star! What did you expect? The Sting?”
This was the first example of what would become two SNL staples: a bit that incorporated the show’s backstage life into its onstage humor, and a Belushi rant. It also marked SNL’s declaration of independence from the tyranny of its hosts, and it went a long way toward defining the show’s cast as the underdog rebels of network TV, waving their freak flag high.
In its fourth show, on November 8, 1975 (fortunately, not a presidential election year), Lorne got the ingredients and the proportions right. His ability to do so was thanks in no small part to its host, Candice Bergen. Unlike Carlin and Reiner, she was the first host to come in singing the show’s praises, acting as though it was she who was honored to be there. She had, in addition, no pretensions to be a comedian, and so put herself entirely in the show’s hands, another first. Bergen later compared the experience of hosting SNL to being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. You either converted and became Tanya, she said, or you died. Bergen definitely converted.
The results were magical. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players were in nearly every moment of the show, true co-stars with Bergen, and they shined. One highlight was the Jaws II sketch in which Chevy, wearing a huge foam-rubber shark’s head, persuades unsuspecting women to open their apartment doors by muttering “Candygram” and other indistinguishable blather in a tight little voice. The sketch involved every member of the cast and the host and was most definitely not like anything you were used to seeing on network television.
At the end of the show the entire cast gathered around Bergen, each handing her a red rose. This was the first time the players joined the host onstage to bid the audience good night. The show’s format had been established and would remain the same for the next 45 years. SNL had found its voice and rhythm, and nothing would hold it back.
That SNL’s format has remained so static for so long is one of the reasons its critics say the show has long since lost any claim to being a boundary-breaker. But while the basic recipe is the same, Lorne, who left the show for five seasons and returned in 1985, has been willing over the years to change the ingredients both in front of the camera and behind it. Most noticeably, cast members come and go, and in recent years there’s been a decided emphasis on celebrity guest stars. The structure of the show is a frame that allows for considerable freedom within it.
What’s really changed is the audience. SNL in its first years had the benefit of appealing to a baby boomer demographic that was primed for the sort of counterculture humor it offered, and the show’s staff matched that profile. As has been said innumerable times, SNL was the first show by the TV generation for the TV generation. Today’s SNL’s audience is less cohesive, and generally younger. SNL also now competes with legions of other shows that benefit from the more permissive standards it helped widen. And, of course, SNL now finds itself navigating a vastly more expansive technological universe than it did in 1975.
When we interviewed Anne Beatts, one of the show’s original writers, she recalled how SNL began hearing that it had stopped being original in about its third season. “You can only be avant-garde so long before you become garde,” she said. However garde it may be 45 years later, it’s also true that SNL still manages to raise the occasional hackle.
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Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad are the authors of “Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live.”
