In five decades of Saturday Night Live, the show’s famously punishing weeklong production cycle has settled into a familiar rhythm: new episodes in early November, a break for Thanksgiving, and then a sprint through December leading into the year-end Christmas show. The pattern is so ingrained that it’s easy to assume it’s always been the rule.
But there’s one forgotten exception: the lone episode the show has ever produced during Thanksgiving week.
It happened on November 27, 1976, during the show’s second season, when a 14-year-old Jodie Foster hosted. Watching it today, you’d barely clock that it overlapped with the holiday. There are no Thanksgiving sketches, no holiday cold open, no bit about turkey-week travel. Aside from a pair of Thanksgiving-related jokes on “Weekend Update,” it plays like a typical—and, frankly, below-average—mid-season SNL.
And anyone imagining the cast and crew gathering around a turkey on the floor of Studio 8H will be disappointed. LateNighter asked original SNL cast member Laraine Newman and writer Alan Zweibel if they remembered any kind of shared Thanksgiving meal that week; both said they’d forgotten the show ever produced an episode over the holiday.
Digging into the week reveals that production went dark on Thanksgiving Day. In an interview with Andy Warhol conducted the day after the broadcast, Foster’s mother, Brandy, explained that the holiday wiped out a chunk of the usual prep: “She missed one whole rehearsal and a blocking day.” Foster, unfazed, noted that the interruption was “no problem” because “They always have cue cards no matter what happens.”
The scheduling quirk looks even stranger in context. One of SNL’s most memorable Thanksgiving-adjacent moments aired just one week earlier, when Paul Simon hosted and performed “Still Crazy After All These Years” in a full turkey suit—a bit so iconic it still surfaces in the show’s holiday specials.
After 1976, the show never again attempted a Thanksgiving-week episode. As SNL moved into the late ’70s and early ’80s, its production calendar solidified, the holiday break became standard, and the show eventually built out a roster of actual Thanksgiving sketches.
Nearly 50 years later, the lone outlier is remembered less for its place on the calendar than for Foster becoming the youngest host in SNL history—a distinction she held until Drew Barrymore hosted at age 7 in 1982—and for an unwell Brian Wilson’s widely panned solo performance of “Good Vibrations.”
Still, it stands as a reminder that even SNL’s most entrenched traditions began as experiments, accidents, or—in this case—a Thanksgiving week when Saturday Night Live decided to show up anyway.
Jodie Foster’s November 27, 1976 episode of SNL is available to stream on Peacock. A Saturday Night Live Thanksgiving, the show’s annual holiday clip special, airs on NBC Wednesday, November 26.
