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Saturday Night Live (SNL) is an American late-night live sketch comedy variety show created by Lorne Michaels and developed by Michaels and Dick Ebersol that airs on NBC. 

The show’s premiere was hosted by George Carlin on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title NBC’s Saturday Night. The show’s comedy sketches, which often parody contemporary American culture and politics, are performed by a large and varying cast of repertory and newer cast members. 

2010s

The cast continued to evolve significantly into the 2010s as several longtime cast members such as Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig left the series. The 2013–2014 season saw the hiring of seven new cast members in a significant overhaul, including Beck Bennett, Kyle Mooney, and Sasheer Zamata. Longtime head writer and cast member Seth Meyers also exited midway through that season, and was replaced by fellow writer Colin Jost in the Weekend Update segment. 

The show frequently parodied Donald Trump in and around his first presidency; an ongoing impression by actor Alec Baldwin led to a significant increase in ratings and a “shot of relevance” for the show, according to Vanity Fair. Trump disliked Baldwin’s impression, tweeting in 2019 that the Federal Election Commission or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should look into stopping SNL from “knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side.'” In 2021, sources close to the Trump White House told The Daily Beast that in 2019, Trump repeatedly asked his advisers and lawyers to stop negative portrayals of him on SNL and other shows, such as Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

2020s

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SNL’s 2019–2020 season was indefinitely halted on March 16, 2020. The season was later resumed in April with three remotely produced episodes labelled Saturday Night Live at Home, and the show returned to Studio 8H in October 2020. In January 2024, Variety said that “speculation [had] been rampant for years” that Michaels would retire from the series after its fiftieth season, premiering in 2024. Michaels told Entertainment Tonight that month that former head writer and cast member Tina Fey could “easily” be his successor, were he to step down, but said he had not made a decision yet at that point. 

Michaels has worked with Fey several times since her SNL tenure ended, including on 30 Rock. Michaels earlier said in 2021 that the show’s fiftieth anniversary would be “a really good time to leave”.Kenan Thompson, the show’s longest-serving cast member, speculated in 2022 that SNL may come to an end altogether after its fiftieth season, saying that it could make financial sense for NBC. However, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in September 2024, Michaels denied that he was retiring at the end of the season. 

A three-hour prime-time live broadcast to celebrate the series’ fiftieth anniversary was aired on February 16, 2025.

 

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