From Copeland to Carson to Cosell to Comedy

"Live from New York, it's the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by maestro Arturo Toscanini." If it was the 1930s and you and your family were sitting in front of your radio for an evening of uplifting entertainment, you may have heard something like that coming from your Philco's scratchy speaker. But what does this have to do with Saturday Night Live? Not much, actually, other than the fact that Studio 8H, where SNL has been taped for years, was first built for the long-gone NBC Symphony Orchestra.

In 1974 the former home of Copeland, Mozart, Rossini, and Beethoven sat empty - the network wanted it filled. For almost a decade, NBC ran "Best of Carson" for 90 minutes at 11:30 every Saturday night, but Johnny Carson wanted to save those shows to run during the week when he was on vacation, so he asked the network to pull the plug on the weekend repeats. Carson wasn't a man to say "no" to, so with a 90-minute hole in the schedule, and a vacant studio collecting dust and cobwebs, NBC executives asked producer Dick Ebersol to find something to fill them both with.

Enter Lorne Michaels

Michaels was already a successful comedy writer when Ebersol approached him in 1974 to develop a new show for Saturday night. The Canadian Michaels had already made a name for himself as a talented writer on the hit TV show "Laugh In," a series of acclaimed Lily Tomlin specials, and a grab bag of other TV shows. Michaels immediately signed on with a goal of capturing the comedic zeitgeist of the era by creating the first comedy show that departed from the Milton Berle generation of TV variety shows to capture the sensibilities of the emerging baby boom generation. He knew the show would have to be edgy, topical, and push boundaries. It was to be a reflection of the time and of a generation who grew up in the radical 60s - a TV audience that the networks had yet to reach out to in a meaningful, let alone successful, way.

The ever-intense Michaels set to work forming his team of writers and cast. Many of his writers came from the National Lampoon (Michael O'Donoghue), the West Coast comedy scene (Al Franken and Tom Davis), and from standing in line waiting to see "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (Chevy Chase). For the cast, he raided Chicago's renowned Second City comedy troupe, which also had offshoots in Canada, another rich mine to be explored for fresh faces. The Groundlings in Los Angeles also proved to be fertile recruitment ground.

But even with all this talent, no one was exactly sure what the show was going to be. For that matter, the network had no idea what they were getting either (they assumed the band would be wearing tuxedos like the Tonight Show orchestra). Even the show's title was in doubt. Michaels wanted to call it "Saturday Night Live," but popular sports caster Howard Cosell beat him to the punch with his own Saturday night variety show, "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell," which was set to premiere on ABC with its stock company of "Prime Time Players" - the decision to call the original Saturday Night Live cast "The Not Ready for Prime Time Players" was a joke at Cosell's expense.

The months leading up to SNL's debut were anarchistic at best and chaotic at worst, but that didn't matter; it was exactly the spirit that Michaels was going for: raw, on edge, political, conscious, alive.

"Raw" and "on edge" could also be used to describe the way that top network officials were feeling about whatever it was that Lorne Michaels was cooking up. They feared that too many boundaries were being pushed, that their target demographic wouldn't come home early on Saturday nights to tune in, that it was too dangerous to air a live show of this nature. They would soon be proven wrong.

At 11:30 pm on October 11th, 1975, America got its first taste of what was to become a 30-year long meal that still shows no sign of getting stale.