I'm Going for a Million Bucks" the same night. In 1976, the original Saturday Night Live, as the network was then known, broadcast for the first time. It aired five shows of a new musical variety show, originally starring Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor, hosted by Martin Scorsese and produced by Lorne Michaels, creator of the show. The show debuted on February 11, 1976, and marked the beginning of what has become an unbroken tradition of televised variety shows in the United States that culminated in Saturday Night Live 's fortieth season, which premiered on September 25, 1976. This tradition began in 1972, when Johnny Carson created The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson as the successor to his own The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar , and culminated in the fall of 2006 when The Tonight Show ended its twenty-six-year run on NBC. The inaugural episode of Saturday Night Live was seen by about 25 million viewers, despite poor reviews in advance of its debut. Carson has said that Chevy Chase should not have been fired because he was popular with the audience, and because the show was expected to fail. In spite of its poor reviews, the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live set a record for the highest ratings of any show at that time, with an estimated audience of 38.5 million people, and a 29.7 rating in the Nielsen ratings. The network's highest rated show to that date, however, was The Carol Burnett Show, which only had a 14.5 rating. By comparison, the final episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which aired on January 30, 1977, and had a 23.1 rating, remains the highest rated program in the history of NBC television. The popularity of Saturday Night Live in 1976 led NBC to commission a weekly prime time program on Fridays at 11:00 PM, initially starring Don Knotts and Joyce DeWitt, and then Bill Murray and Jean Doumanian from 1977 to 1980. Saturday Night Live has been credited with making its creators into American cultural icons. In 1997, Chase told the magazine TV Guide, "You never see anything I do that's as outrageous as the people I did with 'Saturday Night Live.'" The show has also been credited with bringing a sense of social awareness to a younger generation who, ironically, were growing up in an age of relative prosperity. In 1977, Saturday Night Live moved from NBC's Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center to its own studio space at 1411 Broadway in New York City, where it remained for the next thirty-seven years, moving to a new building at 30 Rockefeller Center in 1994. In 1981, the show began hosting a week of prime time comedy programs known as Saturday Night Live in Space, created by SNL writer-producer Lorne Michaels to promote Saturday Night Live 's new studio space at 30 Rockefeller Center. The show consisted of two parts, the first hosted by SNL recurring characters Buck Henry and Phil Hartman and the second hosted by Chevy Chase. Also in 1981, during a Saturday Night Live season 20 episode titled "Weekend Update", news anchor Brian Doyle was the first to report on the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. It was a tribute to the thirty-fifth anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy. On October 13, 1985, Lorne Michaels was interviewed by Don Udell of The Detroit News, while attending a football game. Udell and Michaels talked about SNL and Michaels remarked, "Our ratings, our budget is less than half that of Dick Clark's American Bandstand." This quote is often mistakenly attributed to Udell, who would later serve as the executive producer of American Bandstand . SNL was competing for TV ratings against American Bandstand in the early 1980s, during what the industry called the "Must See TV" era. Saturday Night Live in Space ran for eleven weeks on NBC. The program ended on December 22, 1981, and it included three "mini-episodes", which featured hosts Jim Belushi, John Candy, Chevy Chase and a spoof of The Mary Tyler Moore Show that featured Rob Reiner as a reporter for Today, a spoof of Oprah Winfrey's talk show, a spoof of Wimbledon that featured Chase as Lorne Michaels as tennis player John McEnroe, and a spoof of Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show called The Merv Griffin Show with Billy Crystal as guest host and with hostess Carrie Fisher as Marilyn Monroe. SNL'''s final episode on Saturday Night Live was on May 18, 1990. A special edition of SNL aired that night in place of the normal Saturday Night Live episode. On September 29, 1995, SNL aired its 3000th show. In 1995, Saturday Night Live also began making occasional summer and winter "SNL Alumni Weekends" or "SNL Presents." These episodes were hosted by a variety of former cast members, including Molly Shannon, Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Will Ferrell, Rachel Dratch, Darrell Hammond, Horatio Sanz, Ana Gasteyer and Will Forte. A Christmas special hosted by Jimmy Fallon was also filmed. Saturday Night Live 40 (1976–1989) Saturday Night Live 40 opened on Saturday night, September 25, 1976. A few weeks after the premiere of SNL 40, Johnny Carson, host of The Tonight Show for thirty years, announced that he would retire at the end of the 1976–77 season. When the forty-year anniversary of SNL came around in 1989, it had not been on the air in four years. Lorne Michaels, its producer and creator, was also in the middle of a nine-year battle with NBC to extend the show's time slot. It was not until 1985 that Michaels was given a new time slot for SNL on NBC. Two major factors were behind Carson's retirement and, indirectly, the delay of Saturday Night Live. The first factor was that in 1980, Johnny Carson told Playboy magazine that he was tired of reading every joke he would make on SNL on the show, which had already gone over budget, costing $2,000,000 a year at that time. The second factor was that NBC had ordered Saturday Night Live to leave the air after its 1980–81 season because the audience for late-night entertainment on TV had fallen to its lowest level in ten years, and ratings for Saturday Night Live were the worst among its late-night competitors. NBC had also experienced huge losses because of its purchase of National Football League football television rights, which required the network to hire all the available personnel and production staff from CBS for SNL. (NBC would buy the rights back in 1995, at which time the staff became solely NBC personnel.) This forced Saturday Night Live to spend almost its entire budget on a weekly broadcast. In 1981, the show moved to SNL in Space, a series of TV specials that aired Saturday nights from August 10 to September 6, 1981. SNL in Space was hosted by Jim Belushi, John Candy, Chevy Chase and Brian Doyle and included three spoofs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show , a spoof of Wimbledon tennis hosted by Dick Clark, and a spoof of Merv Griffin's The Merv Griffin Show with Carrie Fisher as Marilyn Monroe. To commemorate its 30th anniversary on October 11, 1986, a special was aired as part of NBC's 30th anniversary celebration. It featured host William Shatner, musical performances by Pat Benatar and the Bangles, and sketches from past episodes. In addition to this, some of the show's most famous characters also appeared including Bill Murray's Mr. Mike, Joe Piscopo's Father Guido Sarducci, Chris Farley's Steve Urkel, and John Goodman's Samurai Warrior, who is considered to be the first African-American character on Saturday Night Live. In 1991, Saturday Night Live 40 ran for twenty-six weeks. Saturday Night Live 41 (1990–1991) Saturday Night Live 41 opened on Saturday night, October 11, 1990, with host Bill Murray. Three months later, on March 31, 1991, SNL 41 finished its initial run after twenty-six episodes. The week before the premiere of SNL 41, NBC received numerous complaints from viewers regarding The Tonight Show and the sexual content contained in the comedy routine performed by host David Letterman on that night's program. After several such complaints were received, NBC decided to cancel the program. This prompted a huge public outcry among both viewers and celebrities, including many of Letterman's past guests. However, NBC held the view that the problems of Saturday Night Live were not as bad as those faced by The Tonight Show. So, to prevent a complete withdrawal of Saturday Night Live from the NBC programming lineup, NBC decided to fill the last five Saturday Night Live shows with additional comic sketches performed by past and present SNL performers, all of whom had been performing Saturday Night Live material in the various SNL 40 specials hosted by past SNL stars. All told, over three hundred performers took part in Saturday Night Live 41. Among the many returning SNL cast members were Charles Rocket, A. Whitney Brown, Tim Kazurinsky, David Spade, Molly Shannon, Adam Sandler, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn, Chris Rock and Joe Piscopo. A few newcomers to the series also participated in the