Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live: A Deep Dive into Every Season of the Iconic Comedy Show
Saturday Night Live began its 50th season last fall, around the same time as the premiere of Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night, which dramatizes the program’s 1975 debut. All of this has put fans into something of a retrospective mood, especially if they happen to have been tuning in since the very beginning. For others, SNL is a show they haven’t been watching all that long, used to watch, or watched at one time and have started watching again. With its ever-changing cast, writers, sketch concepts, and overall comedic sensibility, it’s never remained the same for too long at a stretch, and though many viewers have their favorite seasons, few grasp the full sweep of its history as a television institution.
Now, anyone can get a sense of SNL in its entirety with Everything You NEED to Know About Saturday Night Live, a YouTube series that, true to its title, recounts the show’s most notable performers, characters, innovations, troubles, and moments planned or otherwise (often the latter, given the nature of the broadcast). Each season gets its own episode, starting with the first, whose Not Ready for Prime Time Players included such young up-and-comers as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner.
As that list of names would imply, this “hip comedy variety program for baby boomers that dared to stay up late” soon became a veritable force of era-defining funnymen and funnywomen. Then as now, SNL tends to send its breakout stars to Hollywood, albeit with varying results.
That contributes to the constant churn that has brought onto the show’s roster such household-names-to-be as Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Adam Sandler, and Tina Fey, while also featuring non-cast-members like Penn and Teller or guest hosts like Steve Martin, whose appearances greatly raised their own profiles. To watch through these encapsulations, which as of this writing have reached season nineteen (1993–94), is to take a journey through American popular culture itself. Creator Lorne Michaels’ recently declared lack of intent to step down any time soon bolsters SNL’s aura of unstoppabilty, built up over five decades of influential personalities, still-quoted gags, and instantly recognizable characters — if also the occasional uncooperative host, chemistry-free cast, or accidentally uttered bit of profanity. But what’s the fun of doing half a century of live TV if it goes without a hitch?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.