Fifty years ago, in September 1975, Saturday Night Live debuted on network television. Not the Lorne Michaels version, originally called NBC’s Saturday Night, which would premiere the following month, but rather the Howard Cosell one, a short-lived variety show that’s since disappeared into oblivion. It deserves to be remembered, however, if only as one of the worst shows in TV history.
According to series writer Robert Lipsyte, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell was so unbearable that viewers not only turned off their own televisions but went next door to switch off their neighbors’ too. Executive producer Roone Arledge ordered all 18 episodes burned, in hopes that any memory of the series would drift away with the remaining ashes. If not for producer Rupert Hitzig having trademarked the name Saturday Night Live, and selling it to NBC for S.N.L.’s second season, Arledge might have succeeded in erasing all remnants. (Side note: S.N.L.’s cold open had to use “Live from New York it’s Saturday Night” because of Cosell’s show that was still running and Hitzig’s trademark.)
The show had seemingly everything going for it. “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell was created to revive the Ed Sullivan Show style of variety television,” says Billy Crystal, who appeared multiple times on the show. Producers had hired new talent like Bill Murray and Christopher Guest as recurring Primetime Players (the impetus for naming SNL’s performers the Not Ready for Primetime Players). Veteran comedian Alan King served as the show’s “comedy consultant.”
Musicians like Johnny Cash and The Eagles gave concert performances via live feeds while guests stars including Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, and Rodney Dangerfield appeared onstage.
“I shared a dressing room with Rodney,” remembers Crystal. “He took off his pants to change into his Rodney suit and he wasn’t wearing underwear. ‘O.K., now you’ve seen them,’ he said. ‘Have a good show.’”
Add to that the host—arguably the most recognizable and impersonated voice in broadcasting—and Arledge, the man behind Monday Night Football and the Olympics. What could go wrong?
Turns out, almost everything.
“It’s impossible to describe how excited and enthusiastic I was,” Cosell recalled in his autobiography. His friend Lipsyte agrees. “It had always been a dream of his to have a variety show,” he said. “The general feeling was, quite justifiably as it turned out, that he would be terrible at it.”
From the start, Cosell undermined himself by abandoning his trademark brutal honesty. “He wanted to be accepted by the entertainment community, and that meant nothing negative,” says Hitzig.
No one knew what to do with this watered-down Cosell. Singing with Ali and Barbara Walters certainly wasn’t the answer. “How many people are interested in seeing Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali do a duet?” asked comedian Gabe Kaplan.
The show’s writers tried comedy, based on simple premises such as Cosell eating breakfast with his parents, the gag being that everyone impersonated his theatrical timbre and deliberate enunciations. It went nowhere.
Even when playing to one of his strengths, interviews, things went south, like when he asked 9-year-old actor Mason Reese his thoughts about the chosen profession of another guest on that week’s show, Evel Knievel.
“I said, very matter-of-fact, because I was young and didn’t really have a filter at the time, ‘Well, Howard, I think it’s kind of stupid. Every time he does a jump, he risks his life,’” Reese recalls. The audience laughed. Knievel didn’t. When Reese went backstage, Knievel grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and slammed him into a wall. “Don’t ever fucking embarrass me like that in public ever again,” he hissed, according to Reese.
“The first rehearsal, I remember being greeted by Rupert and Alan and being led to where Howard was in the front row,” says Crystal. “He was eating a bagel and yelling at Roone about how the hell was he going to interview Shamu the Killer Whale in a remote from Sea World? ‘He’s a fucking whale!’”
Cosell favored adding segments of real news amid the comedy and musical acts (Arledge did not). One time, while on air, he got word about a teachers’ strike ending and suggested to Kaplan that they reveal the story during their canned banter. The comedian, at the time starring as a teacher in the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, wouldn’t bite. “I said, ‘Howard, I’m not a real teacher,’” Kaplan recalls.
Live performances onstage proved a mixed bag, such as when magician Harry Blackstone Jr. tried to make an elephant disappear. “He [the elephant] took a big shit,” says Hitzig. “It was a catastrophe.”
Guest stars performed outside their wheelhouse, causing Johnny Carson to quip that no other show would have tennis star Jimmy Connors singing and Frank Sinatra not. “Connors said, ‘My real desire is to be a singer. I can’t play tennis all my life,’” Hitzig says.
Arledge, a master at sports production, where you follow the action, proved a disaster in entertainment, where you must stage it. “I respected and admired Roone’s mind,” Hitzig says. “But day-to-day living with Roone as a producer on this show was not pleasant.”
“When you do Monday Night Football, the set is built,” director Don Mischer said in a Television Academy interview. “The script is written. The lighting is done. All you’re doing is covering what is happening on the field. On this show, we’re starting with a blank stage every Saturday night.”
Arledge created chaos by disassociating himself from the day-to-day. Sometimes he’d book talent for the tightly timed show in the eleventh hour, based on something his kids told him, or an article he’d just read. He also put the kibosh on clever comedic sketches with Murray and Guest that went over his head. “Hardly a week went by that he didn’t severely criticize their stuff and replace them with a juggler or animal act,” Cosell later recalled.
Arledge eventually gave up. Cosell, however, believed he could right the ship. His plan? Contact his friend John Lennon and re-unite the Beatles—a feat his ego deemed plausible, but in reality proved absurd. As an alternative, Hitzig pitched a split screen that would electronically regroup the band. Much like the show, it never came together.
Marc Freeman is a Seattle-based journalist and the author of Modern Family: The Untold Oral History of One of Television’s Groundbreaking Sitcoms