• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, February 17, 2025

As “Saturday Night Live” marks its 50th anniversary this year, a question lingers in the air: How did this happen?

First of all, best wishes and congratulations to all involved -- in the present day and over the last 50 years starting on October 11, 1975.

Half a century is an incredible achievement. It is a milestone that very few TV shows ever reach. One reason is that the world and its tastes change over the course of 50 years.

The genius of “SNL” might lie in the way it changed and evolved over the years, seeming to adapt at just the right pace as cultural trends and tastes evolved too.

Except for a couple of seasons long, long ago, the whole operation has been overseen by Lorne Michaels, 80, who might also be a genius. 

Or at the very least, he is very capable at this job. Perhaps it is the one he was born to have.

I don’t know if anyone has ever calculated how much money “SNL” has earned or thrown off over the years. Maybe it is impossible to calculate.

Cumulative ad revenue is the first category one thinks of, and the number must be huge. 

But what about all the other moneymaking opportunities and profit centers that sprang from the show? It is as if “Saturday Night Live” created its own economy. Can anyone possibly tally up all the money made by everything descended from it?

Think about it: Dozens of movie and TV stars, dozens of movies and TV shows (many with “Lorne Michaels” tucked somewhere into their end credits), scores of top writers and future showrunners, and many others who moved up in Hollywood and made millions for themselves and everybody else who went into business with them. 

To repeat the question from the start of this TV Blog? How did this happen?

I remember there was once this TV critic who wrote often about the show’s shortcomings in the now-distant past. “Saturday Night Dead” was the not-too-creative headline at least once, and possibly more than once.

At various times in the show’s long history, other critics piled on too. The current cast was not good enough, the writing sucked, the sketches were lame. 

Some of the criticism was very specific. They asked: What’s the deal with all the talk-show spoofs? They wondered: Why does the show take so much time off during the regular season? They concluded: With all that time off, they don’t work hard enough, which is why the show stinks!

The best evidence that the criticism didn’t amount to much is the fact that “SNL” is still here. 

Much of the work is silly. Some of it comes across as slapdash. But by now, these are the show’s hallmarks. If “SNL” was polished, no one would recognize it.

When “SNL” was born in the 1970s (long before anyone referred to it as “SNL”), it adopted a tone of voice reflecting the counterculture comedy that immediately preceded it. Does anybody else remember “The Groove Tube”?

Young people took ownership of the show almost immediately. I suspect that is still largely the case today, even if the show and the world it mirrors are completely different than the era that gave “SNL” life.

The 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s and ’10s are dead, but “Saturday Night Live” is still very much alive. 

Photo courtesy of NBC: Kenan Thompson as Milo the dog from “Saturday Night Live” last month.