The Sad, Strange Non-Legacy of Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

It’s fascinating to me that two shows launched more or less at the same time, and with tremendous hoopla, with more or less the same premise—behind the scenes at a Saturday Night Live-like sketch show—and one became one of the most beloved and influential television shows of the past thirty years and the other became one of the biggest and most embarrassing flops in all of television.

I’m speaking of course about 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. That’s a show I love because it’s great and a show that I am obsessed with because it’s terrible in a way that I find endlessly fascinating.

30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip were weird mirror images of one another. One took itself VERY seriously, in a way that was, paradoxically, unintentionally hilarious while the other didn’t take itself seriously at all and was intentionally hilarious.

Decades before Saturday Night Live inspired both Tina Fey’s great triumph and Aaron Sorkin’s epic folly another oddball pair of weirdly simpatico, yet strangely antithetical shows were launched with distractingly identical titles if slightly different vibes.

I’m speaking, of course, about Lorne Michaels’ live sketch comedy show NBC’s Saturday Night and ABC’s Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell.

Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell is today fuzzily remembered for being a Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip-level failure featuring one of the biggest names in the history of sports broadcasting in a new role he was wildly unprepared for as well as its relationship with one of the most successful, long-running and influential shows of all time.

Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell debuted a few weeks before what was then known as NBC’s Saturday Night because the name Saturday Night Live was already taken.

The show’s cast of hungry funny people were called The Prime Time Players and included such figures of note/future Saturday Night Live alum as Christopher Guest, Brian-Doyle Murray and Bill Murray.

That’s right: a year before he replaced Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live Bill Murray was on a failed variety show hosted by a loudmouth sports commentator alongside his brother and and one of the most beloved comedy filmmakers of all time.

Needless to say, Murray’s journey from Prime Time Player to Not Ready For Prime Time Player represented a career-making big step up.

Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell had all sorts of resources NBC’s Saturday Night did not, including a household name in the title and at the show’s core. What it did not have, unfortunately, was a clear vision or a host who was at all adept at comedy or variety shenanigans.

Cosell’s ill-fated, misconceived attempt to extend his brand beyond the world of sports stumbled and sputtered and was ultimately cancelled after just eighteen episodes. It did not last even a single season.

The show’s failure meant that the name Saturday Night Live was no longer in use. NBC’s Saturday Night wasn’t a name so much as it was a channel, a day and a time. NBC’s Saturday Night became Saturday Night Live but its cast remained the Not Ready for Prime Time Players even as the show outlasted its competitor by, oh, I dunno, A HALF CENTURY.

Saturday Night Live has been on the air for forty-nine times as long as Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell and doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon.

Despite its several claims to fame/notoriety Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell has never been released on home video.

Youtube only has a promo clip or two. Even the mighty Internet Archive has nothing.

As someone obsessed with failure, bad ideas and the television program Saturday Night Live I would love to write about Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell for My World of Flops but that would be impossible given its complete unavailability.