From episode one, he was juxtaposing New York export culture (TV shows and commercials) with New York local culture (particularly off-Broadway revues). For one of the world’s biggest media companies, Michaels simulated a small, funky, fringe-theater experience. Broadway theater set designer Eugene Lee divided the huge Studio 8H into a series of intimate, textured living rooms and offices; they looked like places where Gleason and Carney could have cavorted. Bob Pook’s cute sketch title cards and Edie Baskin’s hand-colored cast photos furthere the notion that this was no Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. This would be a different type of TV, a show viewers could trust to speak their language, even when that language became a stream of catch phrases.

This affect spread to the musical guests. In the show’s launch, they were almost always mellow singer-songwriters and aging R&B legends. Michaels clearly didn’t know what to do with ABBA (who were cast over his dead body by network bosses) and Elvis Costello. He preferred nice music by people with genuine Sixties-generation cred.

Even the Muppets’ ongoing “Dregs and Vestiges” skits were really about the decline of the previous decade’s dreams. Ugly monster characters exchanged shticks about sex, drugs, and decay, on a planet whose good years were long past.

This was the setting, the picture frame for SNL’s comedy, a brand of comedy that was simultaneously brutal and gentle, experimental and commercial.

In time, of course, the commercial side would become ascendant. When Michaels returned to the show in 1986 after six seasons away, he re-created it as an “Industry” show, one where celebrities would be worshipped even as they were mocked.