The New Yorker Radio Hour
How “Saturday Night Live” Reinvented Television, Fifty Years Ago
24 Jan 2025
“Saturday Night Live” turns fifty this year. Profiling its executive producer, Lorne Michaels, the New Yorker editor Susan Morrison sheds light on one of the most important people in show business. Morrison spent years talking to Michaels for her new book, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” and she includes recordings of those interviews in a conversation with David Remnick. “Lorne was a real student of what I call sort of the hinges between eras,” Morrison says. To keep the show current, Michaels “paid attention to replenishing the casts in a sort of seamless way, so that it would never seem like an old guy trying to do an entertainment for young people.” Plus, one of the show’s most notable alumni, Tina Fey—rumored to be a possible successor to Michaels, who is now eighty—reads an excerpt from the magazine’s review of the show’s first season, back in 1975.
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From the online spectacle around Leo XIV's election to our favorite on-screen cardinals. This week on Critics at Large, we're talking all things Pope.
The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
This is probably as good a time as any to say a few words about an appealing new comedy program called Saturday Night, which is broadcast at 1130 each Saturday night by NBC and is definitely not to be confused with Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which comes on earlier in the evening on ABC.
In 1975, the New Yorker reviewed a new television show that aimed pretty deliberately to redefine comedy, and it came to be called Saturday Night Live.
Starring the not-ready-for-prime-time player, Dan Aykroyd.
The cast was a bunch of unknowns. Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, John Belushi. But it became such an institution, you can barely think of a comedian in the last half century who didn't go through SNL as a writer or as a performer. Here's Tina Fey, reading from the review by Michael Arlen, the New Yorker's television critic at the time, published just after the show's debut.
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