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Saturday Night Live

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Aykroyd, Baldwin, Belushi, Bergen and 16 others
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Saturday Night Live (SNL) is a live US-American late-night television sketch comedy and variety show developed by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC, a terrestrial television network in the United States, on October 11, 1975.

Lorne Michaels had a vision: to bring live late-night comedy/variety to television. NBC was playing reruns of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on Saturday nights, but wanted to feature new programming instead. And so, SNL was born, albeit under the name NBC's Saturday Night, since sportscaster Howard Cosell was already using the name Saturday Night Live for his own prime-time comedy/variety show. Michaels also parodied Cosell's cast, who had been named "The Prime Time Players," by billing his own cast as the "Not Ready For Prime Time Players."

Saturday Night Live is one of the longest-running network television programs in the United States with over 869 episodes broadcast over the span of 44 seasons as of 2019. A number of the show's sketches have been developed into feature films.

Throughout its more than four decades on air, Saturday Night Live has received a number of awards, including 36 Primetime Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, and three Writers Guild of America Awards. In 2000, it was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame. It was ranked tenth on TV Guide's "50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time" list, and in 2007 it was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME." As of 2015, the show had received a total of 156 Emmy nominations, the most by a single series in television history. The live aspect of the show has resulted in several controversies and acts of censorship, with mistakes and intentional acts of sabotage by performers and guests alike.

List of cast members on Wikipedia

Cast members by year of first appearance

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  • Ego Nwodim

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Five-Timers Club

Facetiously dubbed by Tom Hanks in 1990 as "one of the most exclusive clubs in the world," the performers who have either hosted or appeared as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live at least five times are often given special recognition on the show.

List of Five-Timers on Wikipedia
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