‘Saturday Night Live’ Exists Because Johnny Carson Wanted More Time Off

This past weekend, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night (aka Birdman, But SNL) premiered at the Telluride film festival, and has been mostly earning praise from critics, including some rumblings of possible Oscar contention. Although at least one review wasn’t so kind, calling it “109 minutes of tedious SNL cosplay.”

While much of the movie is being heralded for its apparent authenticity, as Vulture’s review revealed, there are a few moments that seem out of step with the historical record, including a scene in which Lorne Michaels receives a threatening phone call from Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who calls the SNL producer a “benchwarmer” and “a stalking horse.” 

Rolling Stone also noted in their review that the movie version of Michaels only landed the 11:30 p.m. Saturday night time slot “because NBC was beefing with Johnny Carson, and this was supposed to be the network’s way of gaining leverage in their negotiations with him.” 

Which is weird considering that Saturday Night Live only exists because of Carson. Specifically, because of Carson’s desire for more vacation time.

Before SNL, NBC affiliates aired Tonight Show reruns, The Best of Carson, on either Saturday or Sunday nights. But in 1974, Carson “told NBC to yank them altogether.” Why? Because he wanted to be able to air reruns on weeknights, which would “give himself more time off.” So the idea that Carson would directly threaten Michaels for honing in on his late-night territory seems a little odd.

That isn’t to say that there wasn’t any territorial friction between Carson and SNL. Before the first episode aired, a nervous Michaels and then-director of weekend late-night programming Dick Ebersol were summoned to meet Carson in Burbank, where the host laid out his concerns about potential “similarities” between the two shows. But Michaels and Ebersol assured Carson that their program was strictly a variety show, with no interview segments. They also hammered out a plan that would ensure that Saturday Night Live’s hosts wouldn’t overlap with Carson’s Tonight Show guests.

“Nobody could be booked on the show for a month before a Tonight Show appearance, and we couldn’t have them for a week or two weeks after,” Ebersol recalled, while also confessing that he and Michaels were “scared to death the whole time.”

Despite the agreement, once SNL was up and running, Carson “derided” the show’s “mean and tasteless” humor, claiming that it was full of “drug jokes and cruelty” in an interview with the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. He also famously quipped that breakout star Chevy Chase couldn’t “ad-lib a fart at a bean-eating contest.”

To his credit, Michaels attempted to keep the peace by inviting Carson to host SNL on an annual basis, which Carson always refused. But SNL still lobbed a few choice barbs back at Carson following the public put-down, including a Weekend Update joke about Carson considering doing his show live, which ended with Jane Curtin noting that he’d been “doing the show dead for the past 15 years.” 

And SNL did get the ultimate payback by inadvertently driving Carson to retire in the early ‘90s.

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