Editor’s Note: Bill Carter has been writing about late-night television throughout his career as a media reporter. One of his very first stories as a professional TV critic coincided with the 1975 premiere of Saturday Night Live, and it may well have set him on that late-night path. With the show set to kick off its milestone 50th season this weekend, we asked him to share the story of his first SNL.
In early October 1975, I had just returned from Europe, where I’d been vacationing with a college friend, to learn that I had been hired as the TV critic/reporter for the Baltimore Sun.
For a few months before the trip I had been providing The Sun with pieces here and there about TV, trying to take advantage of the departure of their previous TV critic; and yes, I was hoping to land the permanent job.
So of course I was enthused and eager. TV in those days did not offer much for me to be enthused about, and I hadn’t seen a lot of it while at college. But one thing I had heard about was a new NBC late-night show about to premiere on Saturday nights, and I was looking forward to watching and reviewing its first entry on October 11.
The show had received only a smattering of advance publicity, and it was getting confused with a much more hyped new primetime hour on ABC called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. But I had more expectations than most viewers because a couple of years earlier I had seen an Off-Broadway sketch comedy show from National Lampoon called Lemmings, and I noticed that two of the cast members from that show had landed as cast members of this new NBC effort.
I settled into my new apartment, in what looked like a dilapidated haunted mansion, and turned on my TV set, a portable black-and-white model with an 8-inch screen that I had brought with me from college. I sat up close.
The late news ended on Channel 11, WBAL in Baltimore, and I got out a notebook and pen.
But the intriguing new program did not come on. WBAL was one of a bunch of NBC affiliate stations that had no interest in giving up their late Saturday schedule of old movies and sitcoms and handing it over to a new show that, on paper, sounded like an amateur hour performed by a cast of subversives.
This was a dilemma for me, because you can’t review what you didn’t see. Fortunately there was an alternative—a lousy one to be sure, in those pre-cable days.
The NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. was just close enough in range to Baltimore that with aggressive and endless adjusting of the attached antenna—along with some strategically placed aluminum foil and occasional human contact to act as a lightning rod—I was able to discern the snowy image of what looked and sounded like an Eastern European young man taking English lessons from a scholarly looking fellow in a plum-colored suit.
The pedagogue began by insisting the student repeat the phrase: “I would like… to feed your fingertips… to the wolverines.”
Look it up. It was funny.
And it ended with a stage hand shouting into his mic: “Live from New York…” You know the rest.
This was indeed my introduction to Saturday Night Live. The very first episode, hosted by the great comic George Carlin and performed mostly by The Not Ready for Prime Time Players. That group did include those two guys I had seen in Lemmings, Chevy Chase (who was the first cast member to bellow the “Live from New York” line) and John Belushi, the victim of “The Wolverines” pronunciation test.
And it was electric from the very first moment. (Even through black-and-white static.)
And now Jason Reitman has made a movie about that first episode, the backstory of how it happened, who was involved, and what it took to ignite a cultural phenomenon that has lasted half a century.
It’s a worthy idea. As SNL enters its 50th season, I realize I have seen the vast majority of its episodes: the great and not-great-at-all, the groundbreaking, the Earth-shaking, the mischief-making, the half-baking. Pretty much all of it.
And I still take a micro-smidgeon credit for all that success. Sort of.
The issue of the Baltimore station declining to carry the most exciting new TV show in years and forcing the good Baby Boomers of Baltimore to watch it through a blizzard (if at all) inspired me to utter a cris de coeur in the pages of The Sun, directed at the station management.
NBC noticed. And, more importantly, so did Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and forever pater familias. SNL did not start as a gangbusters ratings hit. Having a city that was then in the top 20 media markets registering a zero every week in the ratings was not helpful.
I can’t say for certain that my print campaign to bring SNL to the good people of Baltimore was the only reason WBAL soon gave in and cleared the show. Pressure from the network might have played some role.
But I know my efforts were appreciated, because my later request for an interview with the man himself, Michaels, was granted. Which probably would not have happened based solely on what was then my weeks’ worth of professional writing experience.
Reporters from every form of media were avid for access to the new buzzed-about show, and I got it. I was ushered into 30 Rock, allowed to hang about during a week with cast members wandering around and rehearsals going on (though I admittedly have no memory of which episode this was).
When I was led down the hall in 30 Rock toward Lorne’s office I was passed by Danny Aykroyd and Belushi (who already carried himself like Dick Butkus about to hit somebody for no reason at all).
I didn’t attempt a drive-by interview.
Like every other human 50 years ago, Lorne Michaels was quite a different presence then. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, his usual outfit for that time, relaxed but candid. He was sitting behind a desk that looked like it dated to the NBC radio era. I recognized him, of course, because he did appear/perform on the show occasionally, most memorably in that first year offering The Beatles $3,000 to reunite on the show. (He wore a jacket and dress shirt for that moment.)
I won’t say he and I hit it off in any special way during that first interview, but he surely knew about the effort to get SNL cleared in Baltimore. It came up years later when I interviewed him again—one of many times—for The New York Times.
None of that really has much to do with why I have watched as many editions of SNL as I have. That has to do with what may be a familiar emotion for many people. I sort of grew up with SNL. It introduced me to great comic talents as well as a wide range of musical artists I would otherwise likely never have discovered or appreciated.
To have seen it from the very beginning feels like it comes with a certificate of ownership. I was happy from the start to feed my fingertips to the wolverines. I still am.
