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By Root 1289 0

and run commercial television networks don’t put a show on the air because they imagine it will break bravely with tradition or set grand new aesthetic standards or stretch the boundaries of the medium — or for any reason whatsoever other than to make money. Saturday Night Live wasn’t created because NBC executives yearned to introduce something new and bold into the television bloodstream or the American mainstream. It came to be because Johnny Carson wanted the network to stop airing reruns of his Tonight Show on weekends. For years, NBC’s affiliated stations had been given the choice of slotting The Best of Carson late on Saturday or Sunday nights, or neither. One fine day in 1974, Carson told NBC to yank them altogether; he wanted to air reruns on weeknights to give himself more time off. NBC brass had the choice of returning the weekend time to local stations — and thereby kissing a chunk of ad revenue good-bye — or trying to fill the time slot with other programming. And so the word went forth from network president Herbert Schlosser: Develop a new late-night show for Saturday.

In 1974, when the decision to annex late Saturday nights was made, nobody knew what was coming. Ideas that circulated among NBC executives included a weekly variety show hosted by impressionist Rich Little, then under contract to the network. Somebody suggested Linda Ronstadt as costar. Even bland Bert Convy, actor and game-show host, was considered. But all those cockeyed notions were trashed when a brilliant and ambitious young writer from Canada born Lorne Lipowitz was named executive producer of the new show. He’d made a name for himself with his work on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and a few Lily Tomlin specials and, before leaving Canada, with a fanciful film about a failure in the annual hockey puck crop. His vision would turn TV on its head, turn TV on itself, and prevail for decades to come, even during a few years in which he himself was in absentia.

The man Herb Schlosser took a chance on, Lorne Michaels — then crossing the Great Divide into thirty — gave NBC much, much more than it had bargained for, probably more than it wanted: an adventurous “live” topical satire series that, had executives and advertisers known of its form and content in advance, might never have seen the light of night.

NBC’s Saturday Night, as it was originally called, would be the television generation’s own television show — its first. Except in superficial ways, it was unlike anything else then on the air, and it would be years before flummoxed rivals would even try to imitate it. From the ground up it was built to be new, unusual, arresting, surprising, and attractive to baby boomers, the largest generation in American history.

In the decades to come, the success of Saturday Night Live sparked a renaissance in topical, satirical, and political humor both on television and off it; launched the careers of innumerable new talents who might otherwise have had little hope of appearing on network TV, including some who’d had little interest in it; hugely expanded the parameters of what was “acceptable” material on the air, bringing it much closer to the realities of everyday American life; and helped bestow upon the comedy elite the hip-mythic status that rock stars had long enjoyed.

And it made a nation laugh — laugh, even when it hurt.

During its earliest weeks on the air, celebrity hosts and musical acts were the essence of the program. As weeks went by, the show’s repertory company of young comedy players, recruited mostly from improvisational troupes in a few major cities, got more time on the air. Even before the original cast left, the show itself had become the star and a new American institution — a kind of keepsake to be handed down from generation to generation, both by the performers who served time in its stock company and by the audience that is perpetually replenished as new legions of viewers come of age.

All that and more because Johnny wanted additional time off. At first skeptical about the new show, he was later openly appalled by some