Lorne.

Lorne Micheals, Present Day

In the early days of Saturday Night Live it was less apparent how much of an influence Chicago comedy was going to have on the late-night show. But soon “people started coming [to The Second City] to see the next John Belushi and Bill Murray and Gilda Radner” (Thomas 115). Still today, Sarah Akers says about Second City “it’s hard not to feel inspired, you walk in and [Gilda and John] are looking down on you” (Akers). Saturday Night Live was the invention of Lorne Michaels, also from Toronto, who was asked to create a show that would run on NBC during the weekend. He was inspired by Monty Python, thus gaining the early description of SNL as “Monty Python meets 60 Minutes” (Hill and Weingrad 37). Because of Second City “the basic form wasn’t entirely new, but the content was and so were the shows attitude and approach and collective mind-set” (Shales and Miller 1). The apprentice team and comedy duo Al Franken and Tom Davis were hired for their “unsophisticated and college humour” (Hill and Weingrad 58) and eventually hosted a recurring show on SNL and were part of the original writing team. Saturday Night Live, after just one season was “a national sensation both hot and cool, and the first hit any network ever had at eleven-thirty on Saturday Night” (Shales and Miller 95). The first five years of Saturday Night Live featured a cast of whom over half had a connection to Second City. The cast of the original ‘Not Ready for Prime Time Players’ was Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Jane Curtain, Garrett Morris, and Laraine Newman. Four of these comedians came from Second City, and soon Dan Aykroyd cemented himself in the heart of Chicago during the filming of his collaborative movie with John Belushi, The Blues Brothers. Despite the attention that former Second City players received from television and film, cast member Shelley Long remembers: “It’s not like we were really performing for producers. We were performing for Chicago. We were still very committed to doing things that our audience in Chicago would connect with” (Thomas 116). Even as SNL grew to national influence, the roots in Chicago were not forgotten.

Original 'Not Ready for Prime Time Players'