page_title: Saturday Night Live
section_title: Broadcast
hierarchical_section_title: Saturday Night Live / Broadcast
caption_attribution_description: The SNL stage, 15 minutes before the action starts.
context_page_description: Saturday Night Live is an American late-night live television sketch comedy and variety show created by Lorne Michaels and developed by Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title NBC's Saturday Night. The show's comedy sketches, which often parody contemporary culture and politics, are performed by a large and varying cast of repertory and newer cast members. Each episode is hosted by a celebrity guest, who usually delivers the opening monologue and performs in sketches with the cast as with featured performances by a musical guest. An episode normally begins with a cold open sketch that ends with someone breaking character and proclaiming, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!", properly beginning the show.
  In 1980, Michaels left the series to explore other opportunities. He was replaced by Jean Doumanian, who was replaced by Ebersol after a season of bad reviews. Ebersol ran the show until 1985. Since Michaels' return, he has held the job of show-runner. Many SNL cast members have found national stardom while appearing on the show, and achieved success in film and television, both in front of and behind the camera.
context_section_description: The show begins at 11:29:30 p.m. Eastern Time, and is scheduled for a 92-minute timeslot ending at 1:02 a.m.
  For most of SNL's history, it aired live only to NBC stations in the Eastern and Central Time Zones, with all others receiving a recorded broadcast at the normal start time of late-night network programming (11:30 p.m. Pacific and 10:30 p.m. in other time zones). Since 2017, the show is broadcast live across the contiguous United States. Because the show airs outside of the safe harbor outside of Eastern and Central Time, a brief broadcast delay is installed to meet Federal Communications Commission regulations of primetime programming.
  Outside of the contiguous United States, the show also airs live on the three NBC stations in Alaska at 7:30 p.m. local. Two NBC stations still broadcast SNL on tape-delay: KHNL in Honolulu delays it one hour to 7:30 p.m.; and KUAM-TV in Guam, where the live broadcast occurs at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, delays it to 11 p.m.
  Since the first opening in 1975 with Michael O'Donoghue, Chevy Chase, and John Belushi, the show has normally begun with a cold open sketch which ends with one or more cast members breaking character and proclaiming "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!", segueing into the opening credits which start immediately after. From May 1985–April 1991, Saturday Night Live was occasionally preempted for Saturday Night's Main Event.
  In February 2013, NBC began airing shortened hour-long repeats on Saturday evenings at 10 p.m. Eastern Time during the regular season; the episodes scheduled were sometimes rebroadcasts of the previous week's episode if it was a first-run broadcast. Since the 2014–15 season, the show's 40th anniversary, the prime time rebroadcasts have been a selection of episodes from throughout the show's run under the title SNL Vintage.
  NBC and Broadway Video both hold the underlying rights to the show, while the copyright to every episode lies either with NBC or Universal Television. From 1990 until 2004, and again since 2015, Comedy Central and its predecessor Ha! re-aired reruns of the series, after which E! Entertainment Television signed a deal to carry reruns. Abbreviated thirty- and sixty-minute versions of the first five seasons aired as The Best of Saturday Night Live in syndication beginning in the 1980s, and later on Nick at Nite in 1988. In September 2010, reruns of most episodes made from 1998 onward began airing on VH1. Starting in February 2016, VH1 and Comedy Central's sister channel Logo began airing reruns of the show on Sunday nights, launching its broadcast as counterprogramming for Super Bowl 50 and branding it the "Live From New York, It's Satur-Gay Night!" marathon. The reruns are mostly from 2006 onward.
  On March 16, 2017, NBC announced that it would air the final four episodes of the 42nd season live in all mainland U.S. time zones for the first time in its history. NBC executive Robert Greenblatt explained that the show's significant viewership had made it part of the "national conversation", and thus they felt it would be appropriate for the entire country to be "in on the joke at the same time." NBC announced on September 19, 2017, that all the 43rd season's episodes will air live coast-to-coast in the U.S.
caption: SNL's main stage, during rehearsal, 2008
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