From SNL: The Decade The Not Ready For Primetime Players Went Primetime

By trade, it’s my job to write about college football. By passion, it’s my job to obsessively recount my favorite moments, quotes and sketches from Saturday Night Live. And weirdly enough, I think the best parts of SNL and the best parts of major college football are essentially the same thing.

Your average college football player has two goals: win college football games and make the NFL. In a perfect world, you can achieve both goals at the same time without having to put one over the other. But ultimately, the college football players we remember are either defined by being “great college football players who never made it in the pros” or “great college football players who made it in the pros.”

I think of SNL the same way. Obviously, the goal of being on SNL is to be a great cast member on Saturday Night Live. To be the next John Belushi or Eddie Murphy or Will Ferrell or Kristen Wiig. But what do Belushi and Murphy and Ferrell and Wiig all have in common? They weren’t great SNL cast members. They were great SNL cast members who made it big in the pros.

Much like college football, SNL is a breeding ground for bigger and more fruitful pursuits. It’s possible to be remembered as a great college football player or a great SNL cast member without making it in the big-time. Just ask Tim Tebow or Dana Carvey. But the truly revered? The transcendent ones? They’re the players who turned success on the prove-yourself stage into success as superstars.

For most of the 40-plus year history of SNL, that meant going from Studio 8H to the silver screen. Whether you were Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Murphy, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley or Ferrell, the route to fame from being an SNL standout was through movies. Or you could be Chris Rock and be the most successful stand-up comedian in the planet. 

But what about television? Isn’t going from SNL to a sitcom a natural transition? SNL is a TV show, so stars should be able to transfer their talents to TV, right? Here’s the thing: Prior to 2009, that didn’t really happen. Like, ever. Especially not for people who were considered “stars” on SNL.

Let’s go chronologically, starting with the first cast of Not Ready for Primetime Players and making our way to 2009. Here’s a comprehensive list of SNL performers that went on to have a starring or recurring role in at least 50 episodes of a sitcom after they were on SNL:

• Jane Curtin (Kate & Allie, 122 episodes; 3rd Rock from the Sun, 137 episodes)
• Garrett Morris (Martin, 55 episodes; The Jamie Foxx Show, 100 episodes)
• Matthew Laurance* (Duet, 54 episodes)
• Laurie Metcalf* (Roseanne, 228 episodes)
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, 178 episodes; The New Adventures of Old Christine, 88 episodes)
• Jim Belushi (According to Jim, 182 episodes)
• Damon Wayans* (My Wife and Kids, 123 episodes)
• Phil Hartman (NewsRadio, 75 episodes)
• Kevin Nealon (Weeds, 99 episodes)
• David Spade (Just Shoot Me, 149 episodes)
• Norm Macdonald (Norm, 54 episodes)
• Tracy Morgan (30 Rock, 138 episodes)
• Tina Fey (30 Rock, 138 episodes)

That’s not a bad list of sitcoms. I’ll admit I’ve never heard of Duet and probably don’t care to follow up on what the hell it is. But other than that, it’s a pretty solid grouping of shows. Still, we sort of need to eliminate some shows from the group.

Laurie Metcalf only appeared on one episode of SNL and wasn’t asked back. So we probably shouldn’t count her starring role on Roseanne. The same pretty much goes for Damon Wayans, who lasted 11 episodes on SNL. 

Even if you leave those actors in, it’s hard to say they got their shows because of what they did on SNL. With three or four pretty notable exceptions, it’s hard to call any of these people “SNL stars.” If you use the 2015 Rolling Stone ranking of every SNL cast member ever, the median ranking of a player on this list is 59th. The average ranking is 71st, and that’s with two performers who ranked in the top 10!

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that before Tina Fey, SNL stars didn’t aspire to be TV stars. With all the respect in the world belonging to Curtin and Louis-Dreyfus, they were never the stars of the show when they were on SNL. Spade and Nealon were always the straight man for their funnier friends, Norm was never appreciated in his time and Hartman was too important as the glue guy to ever be the star.

Then 30 Rock happened. Of all the lasting legacies of 30 Rock, of which there should be millions, I think its most important legacy might be the bridge it crafted from SNL to the sitcom world. Because since 2009, right around when 30 Rock was hitting its creative and critical peak, nearly every SNL cast member who left the show chose to go the sitcom route instead of the movie route. And in more cases than not, it’s worked.

First, there are the obvious ones. Amy Poehler to Parks and Recreation starting in 2009. Andy Samberg to Brooklyn Nine-Nine starting in 2013. Will Forte to The Last Man on Earth starting in 2015. Bill Hader to Barry starting in 2018. Maya Rudolph (who had already starred in Up All Night) and Fred Armisen (who already did sitcom-adjacent work in Portlandia and Documentary Now) teaming up for Forever. That’s the better part of a generation of SNL all taking the sitcom route.

Now let’s expand the list. We’re not restricting ourselves to one generation of SNL stars or to starring roles on sitcoms. Just major or recurring roles of note from former SNL cast members after 2009:

• Chevy Chase (Community)
• Mark McKinney (Superstore)
• Ana Gasteyer and Chris Parnell (Suburgatory)
• Chris Kattan (The Middle)
• Horatio Sanz (Great News)
• Michaela Watkins (Trophy Wife and Casual)
• Casey Wilson (Happy Endings)
• Abby Elliott (Odd Mom Out)
• Taran Killam (Single Parents)

We can also include failed attempts to cash in on the SNL-to-sitcom pipeline from Jason Sudeikis (Son of Zorn), Bobby Moynihan (Me, Myself and I) Jay Pharoah (White Famous) and Nasim Pedrad (Mulaney, also recurring on New Girl), not to mention Tim Robinson’s magnificent show Detroiters or A.P. Bio, which was created by SNL alum Mike O’Brien.

To put this in perspective, let’s look at the cast of SNL from the 09-10 season at the start of this decade. Of the 12 full-time or featured cast members from that season, the only four names not mentioned in either of the lists above are: Seth Meyers, Kenan Thompson, Kristen Wiig and Jenny Slate. Seth has his own TV show that isn’t a sitcom. Kenan is still on SNL, and famously had his own sitcom before SNL. Wiig is an international movie star. And Slate stars on Big Mouth, is a cameo machine in everything from Parks and Rec to Brooklyn Nine-Nine and from Girls to Lady Dynamite. And frankly I should’ve included Slate in the list above because she starred in the short-lived FX sitcom Married.

These aren’t just good sitcoms. These are some of the best sitcoms of our time. And in all fairness, I left two more shows out because they would’ve appeared on the pre-09 list and the post-09 list. I left out 2 Broke Girls, which starred Garrett Morris. Which is fine. No one would’ve complained if I didn’t bring up 2 Broke Girls. But I also left out Veep! The most decorated sitcom of the decade! A third Julia Louis-Dreyfus starring vehicle to just add to SNL’s ridiculous dominance of the sitcom landscape in the 2010s.

At the last 10 Emmy Awards, 18 of the 66 shows nominated for Best Comedy either starred or were created by an SNL alum. There were also 18 times an SNL alum was nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy and four times an SNL alum was nominated for Best Actor in Comedy. Not to mention the times Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Andy Samberg and Colin Jost and Michael Che, you know, hosted the Emmys. 

Call it yet another side effect of peak TV. More networks and streaming platforms mean more opportunities for creators to tell their stories. It’s hard to imagine shows like Barry or Forever or even The Last Man on Earth being greenlit 15 years ago. 

But let’s also chalk it up to a perfect marriage. As Fey showed with 30 Rock, and everyone from Poehler and Samberg to Wilson and Watkins have shown since, the transition from character acting on SNL to character development in sitcoms isn’t a hard bridge to cross, even on the more-censored world of network sitcoms. Heck, if Chevy Chase could do it for about five seasons, I’m going to venture a guess that just about anyone can deal with the limitations of television.

The endgame of working at SNL will always be to be a star. No one shows up at SNL wanting to be a pretty good role player. Everyone wants to achieve the level of superstar fame that Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers and Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell have. But as we head into 2020, the best way to do that might be through sitcoms.