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Live from New York… it’s Sunday night?
Saturday Night Live is celebrating the big 5-0 in 2025, and NBC is marking the occasion with a weekend-long celebration culminating in a three-hour special that’s airing on February 16 from 8-11 p.m. ET. Flip ahead in the calendar, and you’ll see that’s a Sunday, not a Saturday.
But don’t worry: Lorne Michaels’ late-night institution isn’t getting a 50th-anniversary rebrand. Consider this a repeat of a programming strategy that worked so well the last time SNL celebrated a major anniversary—the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, which aired on February 15, 2015.
“We just decided that 10 years later, we’ll do the 50th anniversary on that same Sunday,” Jeff Bader, NBCUniversal Entertainment’s president of program planning strategy, tells ADWEEK during a conversation previewing the network’s 2024-25 fall and midseason schedule. “It also affords us the opportunity to have four hours of primetime versus the three hours we’d have on a Saturday. It’s still Saturday Night Live no matter what.”
Even if the special airs on a Sunday, expect it to be a ratings monster filled with cameos from five decades’ worth of Not Ready for Primetime Players. There’s also an expectation that we may finally hear who will be taking over for Michaels should he decide to exit Studio 8H after the show’s 50th season. But Bader tamps down on any succession speculation ahead of the special. “It’s just the celebration of the 50 years of SNL on NBC and there’s nothing to say about Lorne or any of those plans.”
But before February—and TV upfront week—comes NBC’s fall lineup, which features three new series alongside returning hits like Night Court and Dick Wolf’s various installments in the Chicago and Law & Order franchises. According to Steve Kern, NBC Entertainment’s senior vice president of program planning and scheduling, “stability” is the narrative of the 2024-2025 season.
“We have returning shows on every night of the week, including football on Saturday and Sunday,” Kern notes. “And we’re using our stable schedule to launch new shows, while also fortifying shows coming back for their second seasons. That’s how it’s been for many years for NBC: We try to use our hit shows to launch new shows.”
Not for nothing, but the upcoming trio of new fall shows feature on-camera and behind-the-scenes talent who have a successful history with the network, starting with the Zachary Quinto-led medical drama, Brilliant Minds. Quinto scored his breakout role nearly two decades ago as the brain-eating villain Sylar on NBC’s comic book-inspired series, Heroes. He’s still fascinated by gray matter on Brilliant Minds, which casts him as Oliver Wolf, a dedicated neurosurgeon modeled after real-life physician, Oliver Sacks.
