Here’s What TV Critics Said About SNL’s Now-Legendary First Season

It’s been 49 years since Saturday Night Live aired its very first episode on October 11, 1975 and changed the landscape of television comedy. Back then, Lorne Michaels’ new variety show venture—then called NBC’s Saturday Night (which Jason Reitman’s just-released SNL biopic is named for)—was seen as something of a grand experiment. 

As a beacon of counterculture at the time, the series spoke directly to its young adult audience in a new, edgy way. It was risky, exciting, and, above all, different.

“The people we tend to write for are the people who survived the sixties,” Michaels told The Boston Globe in August 1976. “My original conception was to do a show I would want to watch. I don’t really want to watch, oh… The Carol Burnett Show, where much of the humor is about suburban living or adultery or alcoholism, which are the preoccupations of a different generation.”

Today, SNL is obviously a cultural touchstone—but was the now-iconic show considered a success from the beginning? Well… yes and no. Much like today’s SNL, early episodes of the NBC series received mixed reviews. Here’s what critics had to say about Season 1.

The Good

Several media outlets spoke positively about SNL’s first season, praising its comedy style and commending the show’s willingness to go against the grain. “The spirit of the material is in opposition to conventional show business—especially to the rituals of mass-entertainment television,” Michael J. Arlen wrote for The New Yorker in November 1975. “What is attractive and unusual about the program is that it is an attempt, finally, to provide entertainment on television in a recognizable, human, non-celebrity voice.” 

In January 1976, Cleveland Amory of TV Guide likened the show to a combination of Monty Python and When Things Were Rotten. “It’s part of the strange new virus that has infected TV this season: the idea that if you can’t be good, be collegiate,” he wrote. “But make no mistake—NBC’s Saturday Night is far better than Python and Rotten.”

Los Angeles Times critic Dick Adler mostly praised Saturday Night’s George Carlin-hosted premiere episode, calling it “bright and bouncy” and noting the show’s potential to “become the freshest and most imaginative comedy-variety hour on the air.”

Interestingly though, Adler also advocated for NBC to move the series down to the 9 p.m. time slot. “If NBC is looking for something unusual and attractive to bolster its sagging prime-time lineup, it could do a lot worse than shift its new Saturday Night series down a couple of hours,” he argued. “If this package could light up eyes stunned by the entire network primetime lineup plus the 11 o’clock news, imagine what a smash it would be at 9 p.m.” (Adler proved prescient, albeit 40-plus years early, as SNL does now air live coast-to-coast, which means it’s on at 8:30 p.m. on the West Coast.)

Out of all the OG cast members, Chevy Chase, the show’s first “Weekend Update” host, seemed to capture the most attention from critics.

“Of the regulars, the best is Chevy Chase, who does satiric newscasts,” Amory wrote for TV Guide. “From the first moment we heard him intone, ‘I’m Chevy Chase—and you’re not,’ we were with him through thick and thin—and he can be both. He can also be, in about every third gag, tasteless or close to it; but if you can bear that, you’ll get a lot of laughs as a Chaser.”

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The Bad

In what would become a recurring theme over the years, there were also plenty of critics who weren’t exactly dazzled by SNL at its onset. Variety had a particularly negative take on the premiere: “Irreverence is not enough,” the review began. “If there is no such motto on the walls of the production office of Saturday Night, there should be.” 

While Variety did praise the cast, the publication had little else positive to say. “Many of the ideas seemed funny enough at the beginning. But execution was mostly a tedious failure,” they continued. “Targets for the large resident company of players and writers seemed clear enough at the beginning of each sketch, but their aim was erratic at best.”

Richard Hack of The Hollywood Reporter was also one of the first episode’s harshest critics. “Saturday Night got off to a less-than auspicious start,” he wrote. “The 90-minute show, which replaced reruns of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, was plagued throughout with a lack of exciting guests and innovative writing, helping to keep the debut at a lackluster pace.”

“Director Dave Wilson handled his technical chores to perfection. So well, in fact (no miscues, dead mikes, or dropped lines in sight) that the live element of the telecast was all but lost as a result,” Hack continued. “Promos for the show stating, ‘It’s live, so anything can happen,’ only served to make the fact that nothing ever did that much more obvious.”

Similarly, The New York Times critic John J. O’Connor wasn’t immediately impressed. While the paper didn’t review SNL’s premiere, O’Connor wrote a lukewarm review about the following week’s episode. “The plan to use the late-night slot for something other than Johnny Carson reruns is certainly laudable,” he wrote. “But it’s not enough for the new Saturday Night concept to be transmitted live. Even an offbeat showcase needs quality, an ingredient conspicuously absent from the dreadfully uneven comedy efforts of the new series.”

Some of the same critics did eventually warm to the show. In another review published more than a month later, on November 30, 1975, O’Connor completely changed his tune, writing that the show was “the most creative and encouraging thing to happen in American TV comedy since Your Show of Shows.”

“In the beginning, several weeks ago, the Saturday Night format didn’t quite work,” he wrote. “In more recent weeks, however, at least 75 percent has proved to be sharply and sometimes wickedly on target. NBC has found itself a source for legitimate pride, a commodity in scarce supply at any network these days.”

The Ugly

There were some elements of early SNL that critics seemed to agree just didn’t work. One of the most universally panned features of the show’s first season was Jim Henson’s recurring “The Land of Gorch” sketches. While Henson and The Muppets had already made their mark on younger viewers on Sesame Street (and would go on to great success in prime time and at the movies), this raunchy iteration of the puppets—who swore, drank booze, and made R-rated jokes—never gelled for reviewers.

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“The Muppets still seem unable to translate their charm and wit from the children’s arena to adult fare,” Jeff Greenfield of New York Magazine wrote on October 27, 1975. Time Magazine referred to The Muppets as “cloying grotesques;” Newsday likened “The Land of Gorch” to a “bad, sexist, adult rerun of The Flintstones.”

Another aspect of SNL that really got on critics’ nerves back in the day? The show’s fake commercials. Several critics were peeved about how well many of the parodies blended in with actual ads; some were even embarrassed to admit that they fell for the show’s tricks.

“One thoroughly tasteless and insensitive routine used geriatric patients to demonstrate the longevity of certain batteries in heart Pacemakers,” O’Connor wrote for NYT. “This was followed by testimonials to product[s] for controlling diarrhea. It took me some time to realize that the second message was indeed a genuine commercial.”

Mason Valley News took major issue with the fake ads, writing in February 1976, “The commercials are tasteless. There is no reason that humor has to be tasteless… I think that what has prompted so much criticism and outrage at the tasteless commercials is that there is no warning. The viewers are suckered into believing that it is real. The first time I watched the show I was suckered into believing one of the commercials was real. I was frightened.”

All in All…

So what was the overall critical consensus on Season 1? In a nutshell: a mixed bag. Almost every major review, even the positive ones, described SNL as “uneven.” 

“What is noteworthy about Saturday Night, and why I commend it, is not the result of any spectacular, star-studded brilliance on its part,” Arlen wrote for The New Yorker. “It is, as the saying goes, an uneven program, with ups and downs and too many commercial breaks. But it is a direct and funny show, which seems to speak out of the real, non-show business world that most people inhabit—and it exists.”

“It is an uneven show, with all of the pitfalls and possibilities of something never tried before,” Greenfield wrote in his review for New York Magazine. “But in intention, outlook, and personnel, NBC’s Saturday Night is surely the sharpest departure from the TV-comedy norm since the debut of Laugh-In.”

A November 1975 review for Newsday seemed to sum it up best: “Saturday Night has some of the funniest things I’ve seen all year and some of the worst things. It’s an incredibly mixed bag.” 

It’s a sentiment that still holds true today, even as the show celebrates its landmark 50th season.

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