The 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live hit differently for me. Half a century is a milestone that demands more than a nostalgic glance backward — it demands the full archaeological dig. So I did what any reasonable person with an overactive sense of completionism would do: I started at the very beginning, all the way back at Season 1, October 1975.
I’m now through the entire first season, and I have thoughts. Lots of them. Buckle up.
Saturday Night Was Sacred
Growing up in Northern Virginia in the early 1990s — playing football at TJ and spending weekends at Springfield Mall — Saturday nights had a liturgy. You’d go out with friends, come home, and SNL was on. It wasn’t optional. It was just what you did. The show was already fifteen years old by the time I really started watching it, but it didn’t feel like a legacy act. It felt alive, immediate, like a shared cultural secret between anyone who stayed up late enough to catch it.
And it wasn’t just the show itself. By my teens, SNL had already demonstrated a remarkable ability to transcend the TV screen entirely. Wayne’s World — one of the defining comedies of my adolescence — began as a two-minute sketch on that same small stage in Studio 8H. Ditto The Blues Brothers, which had already made its mark on older siblings and cable reruns. The idea that a live sketch comedy show could incubate full-blown cultural institutions was baked into my understanding of the world before I ever thought analytically about it. The show had earned a kind of mythology.
This made actually sitting down and watching Season 1, episode by episode, a fascinating exercise in separating the myth from the material.
The Setup
Before diving in, a confession: I came into this knowing the mythology far better than the actual content. I knew the names — Belushi, Aykroyd, Radner, Chase, Morris, Curtin, Newman — the way you know the names of historical figures you’ve read about but never really studied. I knew the big moments by reputation. I had seen references and parodies of the parodies. But I had never actually watched Season 1 soup to nuts.
The show was originally called NBC’s Saturday Night — because ABC had already claimed the Saturday Night Live name for a Howard Cosell variety program that ran simultaneously (and mercifully briefly). The cast was billed as “The Not Ready for Prime Time Players.” In retrospect, that name was prophetic. They really weren’t ready for prime time. But they were ready for something.
The Cast: A Mixed Bag (And I Mean That Honestly)
Let me start with what I suspect will be the most controversial thing I write here: I didn’t find John Belushi particularly funny. I know. I know. The man is a legend, enshrined in the comedy pantheon, and I’m sitting here in 2026 watching him do his samurai bit and thinking, “Is that it?” Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe it’s that the energy that felt revolutionary in 1975 registers as frantic fifty years later. But episode after episode, his physical intensity came across as pretty banal to me.
Dan Aykroyd surprised me even more, though. I kept waiting for the guy who gave us Ghostbusters, my all-time favorite comedy, to show up and make me laugh. He just… didn’t. In Season 1, Aykroyd felt pretty one-dimensional — competent, professional even, but not magnetic. It’s a good reminder that talent is often latent, and that the gap between “capable” and “iconic” can be years of iterative development. Season 1 Aykroyd had clearly not yet found his footing.
Gilda Radner is the exception I’ll offer here. I didn’t really find her very funny either, but she had an authenticity and warmth that still radiates through the screen across fifty years.
And then there’s Andy Kaufman, who appeared as a guest performer in the season and whom I simply don’t get. I understand intellectually that he was doing something genuinely avant-garde at the time — subverting the very idea of performance, making the audience’s discomfort the point. But watching his segments, I kept waiting for the joke to arrive and it never quite did. I suspect Kaufman is one of those artists who is far more interesting to read about than to actually watch, at least from the remove of fifty years. If you’re a Kaufman devotee, I respect your position and invite you to make your case in the comments.
Garrett Morris, meanwhile, is the cast member I most wanted more of. He was criminally underutilized throughout the season, with material that often felt like an afterthought. The same goes for Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin — all three clearly capable, consistently given less to do. Whether that was a function of the writers’ room demographics, Lorne Michaels’ instincts, or just the chaos of building something from scratch, the women and Morris deserved better. Given what we now know about comedy and representation, it’s hard to watch and not feel the absence of a broader perspective behind the camera.
And then there was the casual racism woven through most episodes that I genuinely was not prepared for (but probably should have been). It wasn’t subtle. Some of it played as edgy commentary; some of it was just… cringe.
Chevy Chase and the Art of the Expected Surprise
I didn’t find Chevy Chase’s cold open pratfalls funny at first. The first few times President Ford (Chase) stumbled, bumped into a door, or face-planted at the podium, I smiled politely and moved on. It felt like a one-note joke searching for a second note.
But something happened by the back half of the season. Once you knew the fall was coming, the comedy shifted. It stopped being about the fall itself and became entirely about the anticipation. How is he going to work this in? How absurd will the setup be this time? It turned into a game, and it’s a game I found myself genuinely enjoying by the end. There’s something to be said for a bit that earns its laughs through accumulated expectation rather than surprise. Not every joke has to be a blindside.
Weekend Update: The One That Held Up
Weekend Update is the part of Season 1 that still absolutely works. Chase anchored it with a deadpan confidence that remains completely watchable today, and the format — fake news delivered straight to camera — is as fresh now as it apparently was fifty years ago.
What floored me was how many of the specific gags still appear in today’s version. The reinterpretation of candid photos of politicians and celebrities, the absurdist transitions, the earnest delivery of outlandish stories — it’s all still there. Weekend Update feels like the one part of the show that arrived fully formed and hasn’t needed to change much since. That’s either a testament to how visionary the original format was, or a fun comment on how little the relationship between Americans and their public figures has actually changed. Probably both.
The Hosts: From Madeline Kahn to… Some Others
The guest host format produced some of the most variable television I have ever watched. One week you’d get a transcendent performance from Madeline Kahn — my pick for best host of the season — and the next you’d get a host who seemed to be discovering live television in real time, and whose name recognition has been lost to time.
The music followed a similar pattern. Some performances felt genuinely electric; while some other musical guests seemed almost deliberately designed to test the audience’s patience. When the music worked, it worked brilliantly. When it didn’t, the 90-minute runtime felt very, very long.
One musical footnote that stopped me in my tracks: the original music director for SNL was Howard Shore — yes, that Howard Shore, the Academy Award-winning composer of The Lord of the Rings soundtracks. The same person who would one day score the most epic fantasy films ever made was, in 1975, leading a band on a late-night sketch comedy show. The world is stranger and more connected than we give it credit for!
The Muppets Problem
I’ll say this plainly: Jim Henson’s Muppet segments, set in the Land of Gorch, felt like they were from a completely different show — one I was not watching. The tonal whiplash was real. You’d go from a sharp political sketch to a Muppet puppet looking confused in a fantasy landscape, and the mood just fell out of the room. I understand that the original concept for the show included these segments as a deliberate counterpoint, and that Henson’s aesthetic was intentionally more adult than his children’s work. But, in practice, it didn’t land. Apparently even Henson himself wasn’t thrilled with how they were used. This was one experiment that clearly did not make the cut into the show’s mythology for good reason.
I’ll say the same about the short films by Albert Brooks – they just didn’t work for me, and I found myself checking my watch whenever they were on.
The Recycled Bits
This one genuinely surprised me: several commercial parodies and recurring bits showed up in more than one episode. I don’t know whether this was budget-related, a deliberate repitition strategy, or just the chaos of weekly live production, but it felt strange in a binge-watching context. The show had clearly not yet developed the philosophy — which became core to its identity — that everything had to be new every week. Season 1 SNL was still figuring out its own rules.
Looking for Itself
What Season 1 really communicates, above all else, is a show in genuine search of its identity. The format shifted week to week in ways that went beyond normal experimentation. One episode was essentially a music showcase; the next was all about cast sketches. The inserted short films, the Muppet segments, the live music, the political satire, the absurdist sketches — all of it was being thrown at the wall simultaneously to see what would stick.
In retrospect, this is kind of wonderful. You’re watching the birth of something, and births are messy. The original Not Ready for Prime Time Players were, to their enormous credit, genuinely not ready — and they showed up anyway, every Saturday night, and kept swinging. As someone who has spent my entire career learning from false starts and iterating toward something great, I have tremendous respect for the act of showing up before you’re polished.
The Verdict: Necessary But Not Sufficient
Viewed in isolation, without the benefit of knowing what came next, Season 1 of Saturday Night Live is a peculiar artifact. Parts of it don’t hold up at all. Parts of it hold up remarkably well. Most of it sits somewhere in between — historically interesting, culturally revealing, occasionally very funny, but not obviously the foundation of one of the most culturally significant television franchises in American history.
It took a certain kind of imaginative leap in 1975 to watch this and say: this is it, this is the future of comedy, this will still be on the air in 2026. I’m not sure I could have made that leap. But someone did. And fifty seasons later, here I am, working my way through the archive with renewed appreciation for how hard it is to build something great from scratch — and how those messy, imperfect first seasons are where the real work gets done.
I’m excited to see what Season 2 brings. Bill Murray joins the cast — Chase having departed mid-stream — and, if my understanding of the show’s early arc is right, the material starts to find its groove. That, I think, is the true legacy of Season 1: it wasn’t the destination, it was the ramp. And even the bumpiest ramps can take you somewhere extraordinary.
Did you grow up with SNL as a Saturday night staple? Do you find Season 1 Belushi funnier than I did? Am I wildly wrong about something? Tell me in the comments — I can take it. I played football for years. I know how to absorb a hit.