For as venerable an institution as it’s become, Saturday Night Live owes much of its success to its almost slavish devotion to “the now.” “The show has to look and sound like today,” SNL’s creator and executive producer, Lorne Michaels has said. “You should be able to look at a rerun and tell what was going on in the country in that moment.”
You see it in how the show books its hosts and musical guests, you see it in the makeup of its different casts over the years, and you see it in its production design—the literal look of SNL, particularly its main “home base” set.
In its first season, the show’s home base was designed to look like a then-contemporary underground comedy club, with the host descending a set of uneven steps to deliver their opening monologue. The faux brick-walled set was dressed with a ragtag collection of items befitting such a space, including an upright piano, several tin signs, a carnival-style roulette wheel, and an antique clock.
It was scrappy and rough around the edges, much like the show itself at the time.
Nearly fifty years later, Saturday Night Live is a far more polished affair, with a Grand Central Station-inspired home base that evokes its now center-of-the-universe status. But from then til now, there’s been a constant on the show’s set—an easter egg of sorts, known only to a select few who’ve worked on SNL and/or followed it very closely: that same antique clock from the show’s original home base.
The clock, a Seth Thomas Regulator clock advertising The A.E. Rogers Company (a long-closed jeweler and silversmith in Scranton, PA) dates back to the 1920s. Though details of how it was acquired for SNL have been lost to time, clocks were a common motif in the work of the show’s legendary original production designer Eugene Lee, whose career as a Broadway set designer won him Tony Awards for Candide, Sweeney Todd, and Wicked. (Lee continued to work on SNL until his death at age 83 in 2023.)
It certainly makes sense that the clock would have been chosen to dress the original set. Not only did it match the decor, it served as a reminder—and proof—that the show was, in fact, live.
After figuring prominently in that first home base set, when it came time to create a new home base for the show’s third season, the decision was made to carry over the clock—and from there, a tradition was born.
There have now been at least ten different home base sets, each featuring the clock, though not always in places visible to viewers. In a short documentary about SNL’s production design team that was produced in 1999, Eugene Lee is seen pointing out the clock, obscured behind a window on the show’s then-Brooklyn Bridge-themed home base.
“There was no thinking that the clock would be around for 25 years,” Lee says in the clip as he recounts its history. “It was just, you know, part of the decoration. We’re sentimental, that’s all.”
When it came time to revamp the set in 2003, it was another of the show’s production designers, Joe DeTullio, who came up with the concept and design for what’s become the show’s longest-running home base—the current Grand Central Station-themed set. In a 2019 interview with The Television Academy, DeTullio explained it was a requirement that the clock figure in his design.
“That was definitely something I struggled with at first,” DeTullio says of the clock, which would have seemed out of place on the walls of the Beaux-Arts styled train station. “Then I realized there’s no reason we can’t do a little storefront… No matter what kind of store it is, there’s usually some little props in the window.”
Fellow production designer Keith Raywood, who dressed the Grand Central home base, agreed, planting the clock in what he fashioned as a storefront for a shoe repair shop that one could easily envision being in Grand Central Station.
Though it’s a bit tucked away in the far left rear of the set, the clock—which requires regular winding to keep proper time—is still lovingly maintained by SNL staffers. Speaking with Architectural Digest in a just-released video, production designer Akira “Leo” Yoshimura, who’s been with the show since episode 1, reveals that it’s longtime chief carpenter Joe Reilly who makes sure the clock is wound and set to the right time every Saturday night.
The clock also has ties to the show’s now-more recognizable timepiece that opens and closes each episode. The real-life clock upon which the show’s is based—Grand Central’s iconic info booth-topping globe clock—was constructed in 1913 with the assistance of The Seth Thomas Clock Company, the same manufacturer behind the clock that’s adorned SNL set from the very start.
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