The E! Network is rerunning the very first episode of Saturday Night Live on Monday. Actually, it wasn't even called that on its first broadcast in October 11, 1975. The now-forgotten Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell had prior claim on the title so the new late night program was called NBC Saturday Night. Didn't matter. For some reason, everyone — fans, TV critics, everyone — just started calling it Saturday Night Live and a few months after the Cosell show evaporated, the SNL name went on the NBC show officially. (I believe some prints of some of the reruns were altered to slap the name on them.)
What I find most interesting about that first NBC Saturday Night is that the idea seemed to be to throw everything at the wall and then see what stuck. Today, we think of the show as 90 minutes of sketch comedy with one guest host and one musical act. But when they started out, the sketch comedy was but one of many elements and not even the most important. In addition to comedy sketches, the first episode featured…
- Stand-up comedy. George Carlin hosted and he did three stand-up spots. There was a monologue by Valri Bromfield and Andy Kaufman did his record pantomime to the theme from "Mighty Mouse." (An additional stand-up spot didn't get in. Just before airtime, a kid named Billy Crystal was told he'd have to trim his routine to the bone and at the advice of his managers, he walked.)
- Two musical acts: Janis Ian and Billy Preston performing two numbers apiece.
- "The Land of Gorch" featuring the Muppets.
- A film by Albert Brooks.
- A spot with Paul Simon plugging his appearance the following week.
- Five pre-recorded parody commercials.
- Weekend Update with Chevy Chase.
The Chevy Chase spot was probably the biggest hit. The other sketches — the kind of material that would become the core of Saturday Night Live — were few in number and short in length. There was the cold opening with Chase, Michael O'Donoghue, and John Belushi. (Although he would not be counted as a member of the original cast, O'Donoghue had more to do in the first episode than some who were and was billed as one of the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players." So was character actor George Coe, who quietly disappeared from the troupe soon after.) There were a few other short skits, the longest of which — a courtroom scene — was an old routine that had been done almost precisely the same way on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.
Then the second week, Paul Simon hosted and the show was devoted primarily to music. In addition to Simon, they had Art Garfunkel, Phoebe Snow, Randy Newman and the Jesse Dixon Singers. Add in another Muppets spot and another film by Albert Brooks and there wasn't much time for sketches.
It wasn't until the third week, hosted by Rob Reiner, that sketch comedy had a significant chunk of the show. Even then, the longest comedy segment was the Albert Brooks film, which was so long they had to insert a commercial break in the middle of it.
Producer Lorne Michaels was later quoted as saying something like, "I had the ingredients from the start but it took me a while to figure out how much of each to include." If you watched the episodes in sequence, you'd see it take around four episodes (over five weeks) before they decided they had a sketch show, and a while longer before they began to subordinate everything else to that. That was a quick discovery process. Michaels had originally negotiated a deal with NBC that gave them 17 shows and with it, an understanding that they'd tinker with the format and probably not solidify things until around Show Ten. Ordinarily, one of the great lies of network television is when they say, "We won't even look at the ratings for the first few weeks" but in this case, they seem to have at least been sincere about giving the show room to develop.
That would probably not happen today. Despite the history of shows like SNL and Seinfeld that were given time to grow and which became insanely profitable, a TV show is now expected to debut in pretty much its finished form. Not long ago, a producer sent the following to me in an e-mail. It's from an article he was writing about a recent, unhappy experience…
What I learned was that nowadays, a show goes on the air and based on the ratings of the first one, it's declared a provisional success (if they're good) or a provisional flop (if not). If you're a provisional flop and your ratings go up the second week, you might have a fighting chance at proving yourself. If you're a provisional flop and you go down the second week, it's pretty much over. You're a bomb and the smell of death rises into the air. Your promotion disappears, your guest stars drift away, and advertisers write you off. It's a premature verdict but it has a way of coming true from its own momentum.
Lorne Michaels' new show had some things going for it when it debuted. For one thing, it had no competition. For another, NBC was looking to open up that time slot for new programming and it would have been embarrassing and injurious to that effort not to stick with the new show for a time. They also had nothing else to put on.
As it happens, the first Saturday Night did pretty well and it was hailed as something innovative. Looking back on that first episode, it's hard to see why. So much of the show was George Carlin's stand-up act…funny but hardly a major breakthrough in television programming. Apart from Weekend Update, the freshest bit of material on the first broadcast was probably Andy Kaufman's "Mighty Mouse" routine…and he wasn't even a regular.
No matter. The show appealed to a generally-neglected, younger audience. It felt new, even if it wasn't, and in TV, that can be the hard part. In a few more weeks, it would actually start to be innovative. One can only wonder how many hastily-cancelled shows might have managed that if they'd had a few more weeks.