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As Saturday Night Live marks a landmark season, the NBC sketch comedy show threw it back to 1975.

Celebrating the 49th anniversary of SNL‘s first broadcast, with Season 50 continuing this weekend, the show shared its original opening credit sequence Friday on social media.

“SNL premiered on October 11, 1975!” they wrote on X with the intro clip for what was then titled Saturday Night.

The lineup included George Carlin, Janis Ian, Billy Preston, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, George Coe, Michael O’Donoghue, Valri Bromfield and Andy Kaufman, with a film by Albert Brooks and Jim Henson’s Muppets.

In honor of the anniversary, Jason Reitman‘s Saturday Night premieres Friday in theaters. The film is set on Oct. 11, 1975, as a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers change television forever. Formerly titled SNL 1975, the film tells the true story of what happened...

With Saturday Night opening nationwide, you might be tempted to jump on Peacock and watch the first-ever episode of Saturday Night (not yet with Live in its title). Of course it’s interesting from a historical perspective, but I rewatched the uncut DVD version to see if the actual comedy still held up. With 50 years in the show’s rear-view mirror, here’s the good and bad of that first episode from a 2024 perspective…

Good: George Carlin Stand-Up

Carlin admitted that he refused to appear in sketches, making him the only host in the show’s history to do so. Instead, he did what he did best — four separate stand-up sets interspersed throughout the show. Even though Carlin was jacked up during those monologues — “There’s one place where I can see myself grinding my jaw from the cocaine,” he said years later — you’re still catching an all-time great in his prime.

Jane Curtin, a member of Saturday Night Live‘s inaugural broadcast and season, had one way of coping for the late-night NBC sketch series since-historic first taping — now the subject of Jason Reitman’s well-reviewed Saturday Night.

“I never really paid much attention to the audience,” she told the New York Times in a recent retrospective interview, saying she felt the initial show went by quickly. “I thought, well, anybody that’s watching this must be really stupid. It gave me a lot of angst. So the way I dealt with it was, I was in this bubble, and we had a job to do within the bubble.”

However, the actress and comedian, who was on the show for five seasons, said she enjoyed escaping the bubble once SNL was became more well-known.

“You’d pass by people and they would shake,” she recalled. “They had a physical reaction to you,...

Exclusive: The legendary 1972 Toronto production of the musical Godspell – a staging that launched the careers of Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Paul Shaffer, Andrea Martin and Dave Thomas, among others – will be the subject of a feature length documentary exec produced by Judd Apatow.

“As a bona fide comedy nerd,” said Apatow in a statement, “I’ve long wondered what exactly brought that amazing group of people together to produce not just a fantastic theatrical event, but what came after: Second City Toronto, Sctv, and of course Saturday Night Live – not to mention a host of movies and TV from Splash to The Three Amigos to Schitt’s Creek and Only Murders in the Building. None of that would have happened in the way that it did without the Toronto Godspell.”

The film will be produced, directed and co-written (with Jane Mendelsohn) by Nick Davis, whose most recent film,...

I never worked on a TV show where a male writer declared it “rape day” or groped me or watched porn in the writers room, some of the actions attributed to Eric Weinberg. This was, as one female writer was quoted, “The worst of the worst.” This is the big stuff.

But in my nearly 20 years as a sitcom writer, I experienced plenty of medium to small stuff. Everything from a showrunner’s hanging women’s underpants on his lamp, to being told women aren’t funny, to being asked if my contribution to a script was making the coffee, to innumerable jokes about my breasts. Each time I’d laugh and blow it off. Yes, it wore me down. But I wanted to work. And it had happened on every show.

Except one. On that show, nothing like that happened. Ever.

When Michael Elias contacted me recently about the passing of Rich Eustis,...

Ed Harris has popped up a few times in my Catalog From the Beyond’s coverage, which isn’t surprising considering he’s one of my favorite character actors of all time. He brings an intensity that always seems like he’s on the brink of a meltdown in any movie he’s in, from a vengeful gangster in A History of Violence to an obsessed LARPer in George Romero’s Knightriders. The dude even dances like a nut in Creepshow. As it turns out, this simmering rage is the perfect fit for the lead in another Stephen King property, 1993’s Needful Things.

Based on King’s 1991 novel, Needful Things features Harris as Castle Rock sheriff Alan Pangborn, who’s settled into what he thinks will be a quiet life after leaving the Pittsburgh police force. As the movie opens, things are looking up, as he proposed to local diner owner Polly Chalmers.

Santa Monica — Michael Keaton is having the time of his life. Cruising along an awards circuit that has brought him plenty of kudos for his performance in Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" and probably more opportunities to talk about himself than he'd prefer, he seems consistently high on life and not at all phased by the grind. He's not someone who has really sought out this kind of attention and acclaim, often retreating to his ranch in Montana away from the Hollywood fray, but now that he's feeling the love? Let's just say I doubt anyone's having as much fun with all of this than he is. On the eve of this year's Oscar nominations announcement, I met Keaton for coffee and a light lunch at one of his favorite Santa Monica spots to chew on as much of his career and the awards...

Don Pardo, the legendary Saturday Night Live announcer, who announced the start of the NBC sketch show for more than three decades, has died. He was 96.

'SNL's Don Pardo Dies

Pardo died on Monday night, according to NBC spokesman Rich Licata, who did not give a cause of death. However, it’s possible that a broken hip the announcer suffered last year could have been a factor.

Saturday Night Live was Pardo’s longest-running announcing gig, beginning in October of 1975 and continuing till his death. For the first ever NBC’s Saturday Night show, Pardo announced from backstage: "NBC's Saturday Night. Starring George Carlin. With Janis Ian and Billy Preston. A film by Albert Brooks. Jim Henson's Muppets. The Not for Ready Prime Time Players. And comedians Valri Bromfield, Andy Kaufman. Ladies and gentleman, George Carlin!"

With the exception of Saturday Night Live’s seventh season, Pardo was the voice of SNL.

Saturday Night Live, “George Carlin/Billy Preston, Janis Ian”

Written by Lorne Michaels, Michael O’Donoghue, Anne Beatts, Tom Davis, Al Franken, Marilyn Suzanne Miller, Herb Sargent, Tom Schiller, Rosie Schuster, Alan Zweibel

Directed by Dave Wilson

Aired on October 11, 1975 on NBC

Possibly (and very arguably) the most influential television show of all time, Saturday Night Live (SNL for short) is American comedy (albeit with a bit of Canadian help) exemplified: irreverent, absurdist, made for short attention spans, and continually being both panned and lauded by critics. Whether you still lock your door in fear of Land Shark, turned the show off in 1980 and never looked back, or are in need more cowbell, you know the magic that is SNL. Like a boy band or Santa Claus, we each have our favorites and picture a certain cast as the “real” SNL. For example, there are people who swear by the...