Perhaps Saturday Night Live was ready for primetime after all. The venerable NBC sketch show has earned more Emmys than any TV project, but that wasn’t the path its team could foresee when it launched 50 years ago.
Creator Lorne Michaels’ series debuted as Saturday Night on Oct. 11, 1975, and its rocky start was the subject of last year’s Sony movie of the same name from director Jason Reitman. Featuring a cast of fledging performers who became household names — John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd and the list goes on — the show gradually built its reputation. Attention-grabbing highlights of the first season included Land Shark, commercial parodies like Bass-O-Matic and host Richard Pryor’s word association with Chase. “There were no promos to let anybody know what this show was,” original castmember Laraine Newman tells THR. “As it caught on, it was thrilling that it was so well received. The Sunday after [an episode aired], I would be walking down the street with Gilda, and people would call out lines that we had said the night before. That was the first inkling we had that it was actually being watched.”
Emmy voters were clearly among those watching, as the first season landed seven nominations. During the 28th Emmys ceremony on May 17, 1976, Saturday Night nabbed four awards, which included prevailing over its lone competitor — CBS’ The Carol Burnett Show — for best comedy-variety series. After praising the show’s cast and crew in his acceptance speech, Michaels went on to thank “the members of my family, who were always there when I was complaining and yelling about the very people I’m thanking tonight.” It also won best writing, directing and variety supporting actor for Chase, who quipped from the podium, “Needless to say, this is totally expected.”
Half a century later, SNL — which recently parted ways with a number of castmembers, including Heidi Gardner — is set to launch season 51 as the most lauded series in Primetime Emmy history, with 90 trips to the podium (Game of Thrones is next with 59). And that’s before any wins it earns from its seven nominations this year.
“I don’t think any of us really watched the Emmy Awards before that because we were a bunch of hippies,” Newman admits of the first-season accolades. “But make no mistake — this was really exciting.”
This story appeared in the Sept. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
