# Saturday Night Live (1975)

> A long-running live sketch comedy and variety show where a rotating repertory cast parodies the week's culture and politics, hosted each week by a celebrity guest.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/1567

## Facts

- Seasons: 52
- Episodes: 1018
- Episode runtime: 67 min
- Status: Returning Series
- Genres: comedy
- Created by: Dick Ebersol, Lorne Michaels
- Network: NBC
- Cast: Michael Che, Marcello Hernández, James Austin Johnson, Ashley Padilla, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson, Chloe Fineman, Mary Gross
- TMDB rating: 8.0/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072562/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: brisk
- Intensity: mild
- Complexity: simple
- Violence: none
- Tone: irreverent, breezy, topical, uneven, comforting

## What critics say

Audiences broadly regard the long-running sketch show as uneven across its decades, with strong peaks in its early and mid-period seasons and a widely felt decline in its later run.

## Synopsis

Saturday Night Live (1975-present) is an American live sketch comedy and variety series created by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol for NBC. Across fifty-two seasons and more than a thousand episodes, a large rotating repertory cast led by Kenan Thompson (Kenan Thompson) and Michael Che (Michael Che) performs parody sketches that skewer the week's politics, celebrities and pop culture. Each episode is built around a celebrity host who delivers an opening monologue and joins the cast in sketches, alongside a musical guest. The engine is simple and relentless: a fresh batch of material must land before a studio audience in real time, with no retakes to save a weak bit. Newer cast members such as Chloe Fineman (Chloe Fineman) and James Austin Johnson (James Austin Johnson) try to earn a place among recurring characters, while the show's quality rises and falls with its writers and talent. The tone is breezy, irreverent and sometimes uneven, a mix of sharp impressions, absurdist bits and deliberately flat jokes. Fans of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and In Living Color will find resonance in its topical bite and variety-show rhythm.

## Shows like Saturday Night Live

- [Nick Cannon Presents: Wild 'N Out (2005)](https://ember.film/tv/2180)
- [Inside Amy Schumer (2013)](https://ember.film/tv/42862)
- [The Ben Stiller Show (1992)](https://ember.film/tv/699)
- [The Whitest Kids U' Know (2007)](https://ember.film/tv/9681)
- [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2014)](https://ember.film/tv/53590)
- [All That (1994)](https://ember.film/tv/3628)
- [MADtv (1995)](https://ember.film/tv/4250)
- [30 Rock (2006)](https://ember.film/tv/4386)
- [I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (2019)](https://ember.film/tv/75310)
- [The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015)](https://ember.film/tv/56552)

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