Fifty years ago this month, Saturday Night Live did something it hasn’t done since: it aired new episodes in the heart of summer. On July 24 and July 31, 1976, the show broadcast the final two installments of its first season—the only original SNL episodes ever to air in July.
This wasn’t a fledgling show struggling to find an audience. Nine months in, SNL—or NBC’s Saturday Night, as it was then known—had already become a genuine phenomenon—with catchphrases loose in the culture, Chevy Chase nearly out the door to movie stardom, and the the host role suddenly something people angled for rather than a favor to be granted.
It was a rocket ship. And the rocket ship was, improbably, still firing in late July.
A big part of it is arithmetic. Season 1 was twenty-four episodes long—still an SNL record, half a century later.
As for why it would never happen again, it can’t have helped that the two shows stranded out there in the heat turned out to be a pair of the most notorious the series would ever air.
The first, on July 24, was hosted by Louise Lasser—then at the white-hot center of the culture as the star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and just a couple months removed from a high-profile drug arrest—in what remains one of the strangest 90 minutes the show has ever put on.
As was widely recounted upon her death at age 87 earlier this month, Lasser re-created a Mary Hartman-style nervous breakdown for her monologue—locking herself in her dressing room until Chevy Chase, as the Land Shark, coaxed her out with the promise of a Time cover.
The opening was staged, but the episode around it only made it harder to tell where the bit ended and Lasser’s own frazzled state began. She appeared sparingly, often seeming detached from the rest of the cast; one later sketch found her alone again, wandering through another monologue that blurred the same line, while elsewhere she turned up in an Ingmar Bergman parody and an extended bit opposite a dog.
Behind the scenes, the week was reportedly just as strange. Staffers later described Lasser as fragile and difficult, with head writer Michael O’Donoghue calling her “clinically berserk” and writer Neil Levy claiming she had been crawling around the show’s offices looking for pot.
Lasser always maintained that what viewers saw was deliberate—that she was channeling the same dazed instability that made her soap-opera housewife famous. But the confusion stuck, eventually feeding the legend that she was the first person ever banned from SNL, which she also disputed. Fifty years later, the night remains almost impossible to classify—and that’s exactly why it endures.
The finale, a week later, tipped the other way. Kris Kristofferson pulled double duty as host and musical guest and reportedly turned up for dress rehearsal so drunk that Lorne Michaels summoned staffers to get the biggest pot of coffee they could find into him before airtime.
Viewers and critics later noted Kristofferson stumbling through sketches and slurring his words, particularly during his opening monologue. The result was a loose, bleary, easygoing summer send-off—not a disaster on the Lasser scale, but hardly the triumphant note you’d choose to end a revolutionary first year on.
The calendar reset almost immediately. Season 2 came back September 18, barely seven weeks after Kristofferson said goodnight, and this time it wrapped in May.
From then on the shape held: premiere in the fall, sign off by late spring, go dark for the summer like everyone else. The rocket ship had found its orbit.
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