‘Saturday Night Live’ Run Sheets…Dress, Air And Map

With tonight bringing SNL Season 39 to a close, we’re celebrating with all today’s posts focusing on this great American treasure and the world’s only remaining live, variety style network show.

We’ve all heard the stories about the sketches that are cut between the dress rehearsal and live air at ‘Saturday Night Live’, and here you’ll see the real thing. Below is the pink dress rehearsal rundown and the green air rundown sheets from the April 12th show with guest host Seth Rogen.

As you see, sketches get cut and this affects the shows run time and the best place to make adjustments is in the length of ‘Weekend Update’. The dress rehearsal typically runs from 8 till 10 and is a half hour longer than the air version. The best audience received sketches tend to make the cut, but not always as the clock has a say in this too.

In a way, ‘Weekend Update’ is a shock absorber in the context of time. It is typically written long and if only one or two sketches are cut, most of the adjustment can be made in whittling down the Update script between dress and air. When you see long Updates, you can bet three or more sketches were cut.

This is an oversimplification as there are many moving parts to the show and sketches can be edited or extended between dress and air, and even while the show is live. On show nights, between about 8:15 and 12:45, the writers and Q card areas are absolutely the busiest places on earth.

On the right is a set map of this show. I think (at least for Season 39) this is the regular placement of the set locations showing us there are nine stage areas in 8H in addition to the Homebase area. Only Homebase, stage 2 and 3A are actual raised stages with all others being on the studio floor. On this week, we see a tenth area marked ‘Mob Bar’ in front of 4B.

Notice the homebase stage is shown with the “tongue” sticking out. The tongue is a retractable platform that hides under the house band’s stage and is about ten feet long and electrically operated. The tongue is out for the show’s open and close with the guest host monologue and goodby, and stowed for most of the show, except for ‘Weekend Update’ which is done on the tongue.

I’ve heard that Jay Leno like the tongue so much when he guest hosted that he had one built into his ‘Tonight’ show set soon after.
Congratulations to the cast, crew, writers and staff at SNL! Long live ‘Saturday Night Live’! More to come.

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