#Whattowatch Speaking of SNL, the show would not have survived cancelation in the late 70s had it not been for a little help from a funny man from Minnesota. Johnny Carson was candid with Lorne Michaels and NBC about his feelings toward airing reruns of his Tonight Show on the weekends. He felt it would cheapen the namesake of his wildly successful and popular show. Johnny Carson was the first host on Saturday Night Live. Before Carson took over in October of 1975, the show was a mix of music and sketches, similar to NBC’s Sunday night variety show, “The Good Time Hour,” which ran from 1969-1974. And for a long time after he left in May 1992, it seemed like no one else could sit in that big chair. It took Dennis Miller from SNL to prove that wrong 14 years later. The Lorne Michaels-helmed show was originally supposed to be called NBC’s Saturday Night. Michaels was responsible for the hiring of Dick Ebersol, who was in charge of booking the show’s hosts.

A Kid Named Lorne

What happened next wasn’t the kind of thing you would expect, though. Variety shows were big and often bloated during the 1950s, but in the late 60s and early 70s, they had given way to talk shows, game shows, and serialized dramas. A decade after being a major part of television programming, variety shows old and new had become a niche; there was still a place for them, but numbers had dwindled. And so it came to be that Variety Show Fever was born out of a desire to recapture the glory days of variety programming in comedy. For NBC, this was their chance to try something new while also remembering what was old.

As a child growing up in the 80s and 90s, Saturday Night Live was one of my favorite shows. The first episode aired on October 11, 1975. This was only the second live network comedy series (after ABC’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In). SNL is still going strong today, but it didn’t come easy. The show struggled in its first season to find itself. A variety show co-hosted by Canadian comedian Rich Little and American singer Linda Ronstadt was considered for the time slot.

The circumstances bring us to the biggest historical anomaly of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which isn’t that it took place in a woman’s prison, but that it was the end result of a network not moving forward on a show because there wasn’t an “established star” heading up the program, and what led them to greenlight not only the same concept but morphed it into something else with an entirely new host.

By late 1974, Michaels not only had assembled a fresh and innovative cast, but he had also secured the show’s first sponsor. A young comedian in New York named Andrew Duncan had worked with Michaels on an NBC pilot earlier in the year. Upon seeing the set from the pilot, Duncan was inspired to create a drink called “Saf-Tee" for which he wanted advertising time during the new show.

Johnny Carson was the first host of Saturday Night Live and the longest-running host with a record 14 seasons of hosting. The way the show started is that Michaels came up with the idea and decided to pitch it to NBC. As you might have guessed, he got rejected.

Not Ready For Primetime

Tonight’s host was Johnny Carson. He’d been watching from his high perch the previous three days but now, on Saturday Night Live, he was just another guy going live into the studio. Answering a higher authority hadn’t prepared him for this. He practiced at home, imagining all the squabbles he might have with producer Lorne Michaels that night if something didn’t go right.

When Saturday Night Live was first developed back in the late ‘70s, it was intended to showcase the comedy of original cast members John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase. Soon after joining the program, however, Lorne Michaels brought on several other performers including Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, and Garrett Morris.

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