Perhaps Saturday Night Live was ready for primetime after all. The venerable NBC sketch show has earned more Emmys than any TV project, but that wasn’t the path its team could foresee when it launched 50 years ago.

Creator Lorne Michaels’ series debuted as Saturday Night on Oct. 11, 1975, and its rocky start was the subject of last year’s Sony movie of the same name from director Jason Reitman. Featuring a cast of fledging performers who became household names — John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd and the list goes on — the show gradually built its reputation. Attention-grabbing highlights of the first season included Land Shark, commercial parodies like Bass-O-Matic and host Richard Pryor’s word association with Chase. “There were no promos to let anybody know what t

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