All 45 season of Saturday Night Live are coming to the Peacock streaming service starting October 1.
When NBCUniversal first announced their Peacock streaming service, they stated that Saturday Night Live would be a compnent of its program offerings. However, when it launched earlier this year, the only Saturday Night Live episodes that were available were from the show’s most recent five seasons and a collection of themed “Best of” featuring the work of a handful of popular cast members from over the show’s decades-long history such as John Belushi, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell.
Of course, those familiar with the history of the show and its availability on streaming services will have cause to wonder at the lack of details in today’s announcement from Peacock.
Outside of the show’s iconic first five seasons and last five seasons or so, the catalog of Saturday Night Live‘s episodes has been often heavily edited in their previous streaming availabilities. Musical performances have been excised along with a number of sketches per episode. Perhaps the most egregiously whittled down episodes are the ones from the seasons that were not produced by Lorne Michaels, the man who created the series, assembled the first cast and oversaw the show for most of it’s four-and-a-half decade run. Music clearances is the reason most pointed to for these edits, though there are some missing sketches where music rights shouldn’t have been a problem.
(All music issues for the show’s first five seasons were cleared when they were issued on DVD in 2006 and 2007.)
These are the edited versions that have previously appeared on Netflix as well as the now shuttered Yahoo Screen and Seeso, NBC’s attempt at a comedy-only streaming service.
This is also how the show is currently available on Hulu, basically leaving SNL‘s entire history between 1980 and 2005 unrepresented.
So will Peacock’s presentation of the series be the same as it has been made available before, with big chucnk’s of the show’s history missing in action? It remains to be seen. But hopefully since Saturday Night Live should mean more as an IP to Peacock than it ever did to Yahoo, Netflix or Hulu, so maybe they’ll spend the money necessary to insure that the show’s entire history is available to peruse. Then again, they couldn’t be bothered to do so for Seeso a few years back.
We’ll find out October 1.
