The Mythology Of ‘SNL’: A Look Back At The Inaugural Episode That Upended TV

Saturday Night Live is no stranger to mythologizing, and no episode has been as elevated to the stuff of legend as the late-night sketch comedy series’ inaugural showing.

A tricenarian Lorne Michaels, half a century yet removed from becoming the preeminent juggernaut of television — before SNL produced such comedic powerhouses as Tina Fey and Steve Martin and late-night mainstays as Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon, before Fey’s 30 Rock spoofed it and numerous other sketches were transformed into feature-length projects — and a group of rag-tag yet promising comedians, including Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin and Gilda Radner, comprised the as-yet untested unit piloting NBC’s experiment of sorts to replace reruns of Johnny Carson’s late-night TV program.

Coinciding with the debut of SNL Season 50, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, about the famed 90 minutes leading up to that first Oct. 11, 1975 show in Midtown’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s Studio 8H, added to the grandeur and mystery behind the NBC series.

In lieu of the regularly scheduled programming on Saturdays and amid SNL‘s flurry of jubilees culminating in tomorrow’s final three-hour fete, the network hosted a special re-airing of its first show, then titled NBC’s Saturday Night.

Yesterday, the Valentine’s Day and President’s Day weekend kicked off with a star-studded anniversary concert featuring performances from the likes of Lady Gaga and Robyn, impressions by Will Ferrell and Maya Rudolph and everyone who’s anyone from Bad Bunny to Cher to Steven Spielberg in attendance. Tomorrow, NBC airs the grande finale SNL50: The Anniversary Special, which includes more A-List talent. Among them, the just-getting-started Ayo Edebiri, Quinta Brunson, Sabrina Carpenter; veterans Dave Chappelle, Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks and alumni Martin Short, Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, Adam Sandler, Pete Davidson, Kate McKinnon, Molly Shannon, Jason Sudeikis, Kenan Thompson and Fred Armisen. “The Not Ready for Prime Time Players” will also appear.

And while the initial show did not provide a llama, showgirl and Abe Lincoln, it is textbook SNL: absurdist, hit-or-miss, a mile a minute and also laconic. Watching the first showing is like gazing backward into a crystal ball, a near-prophetic amalgamation of unproven but shining, star-wattage talent.

George Carlin, the dean of counterculture comedians himself, offers a much-needed throughline and stabilizing presence through his stand-up material, alternating from making the mundane profound (“Where’s the blue food?”) to making the profound mundane (“Everything he has ever made has died,” about God’s crappy track record). The idea of him being at all a calming force is ironic, given that he was, as Michaels and Saturday Night puts it, stoned out of his mind.

Before the show’s natural evolution over the course of half a century, SNL more closely resembled a variety show, with spoofs of TV adverts and infomercials that often didn’t cross the one-minute mark. A stand-out satirical ad boasts the arthritis-aiding medicine “Triopenin,” which features a child-proof lock that only serves to frustrate the consumer suffering from joint pain.

Billy Preston and Janis Ian are both MVPs of the night, with the former putting on groovy performances of “Nothing From Nothing” and “Fancy Lady” and the latter lending her soaring voice to pared-down ballad “At Seventeen” and a haunting rendition of “In the Winter,” which closes out the show.

SNL‘s first outing is remarkably self-assured given it was, as Saturday Night depicted, three times as bloated as it needed to be for the allotted hour span going into dress rehearsal. About as confident is Chase, who is a clear star-in-the-making as the inaugural “Weekend Update” host, a role that seems almost fated in retrospect given Michaels was initially supposed to take it on as a cast member. Though Saturday Night excoriates Chase as a haughty frat-adjacent character and the actor’s reputation as being difficult to work with precedes him, an early writer paints a more humble picture. Regardless, Chase nails the gig, providing the show’s only salient political commentary (something it now needs more of) with digs at then-POTUS Gerald Ford (“If he’s so dumb, then how come he’s president?”) and a prostitution joke (played in Saturday Night exactly as it aired) that garnered the night’s loudest laughs, as well as a mischievous eyebrow twitch, smirk and pound on the desk from Chase. It’s brash, charismatic and irreverent — what SNL always wants to be.

Throughout the evening, there are a few bits that underscore SNL‘s experimental format: Andy Kaufman’s lip-synching, Jim Henson’s lost series “The Land of Gorch” and a segment called “Impossible Truth News” that plays a baffling array of satirical ripped-from-the-headlines moments (including one where the age of consent in Oregon is lowered to seven).

Then again, SNL is TV just like anything else: as much as it is a culture-shifter, it is also beholden to the ever-shifting attitudes and norms of its time. This is not so much an excuse as it is a reminder that the show has always been rambunctious, hard to pin down and contextually dependent, sometimes to a fault. As the first Black cast member, Morris has discussed feeling side-lined; Belushi’s misogyny was well-documented and the women of the night’s show, including stand-up Valri Bromfield (initially one-half of a team opposite Aykroyd), are desperately under-used. Later cast members, like Chris Rock and Tracy Morgan, would go on to echo the struggle of finding their place within the show and its writing.

Played almost bit for bit in Saturday Night are additional hits of the night: Belushi’s opening sketch, where he plays a character learning English who foolishly mimics his teacher suffering from a heart attack; the simulated burglary by Trojan Horse Home Security and an advertisement for a dad-replacement service with a scene-stealing Chase.

During one of Carlin’s appearances in the first episode, the comedian previews that there’s a “moment” coming, telling the audience to wait for it, before quipping: “Oh, it’s gone, man. There’s no present — everything is the near future or the recent past. No wonder we can’t get anything together, we got no time, man!”

For a show that has stood the test of time — watching other televisual behemoths rise and die out over the course of a lifespan that is only rivaled by the advent of the TV itself — SNL is perhaps always teetering beyond the present, either glazing over with nostalgia or darting to the days ahead. When it succeeds, it often feels like kismet, a miracle of hilarity and jubilation. When it veers off-course, it feels perhaps inevitable due to the show’s grueling, bonkers schedule.

Not too shabby for a bunch of first-timers with no time trying to do something for the first time.