The Incredible History Of WWE Saturday Night's Main Event

In WWE’s golden era, Saturday Night's Main Event was appointment television for young fans that didn't know the meaning of "early to bed, early to rise" when the show went on the air at 11:30 pm ET.  The exploits of Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, and others on national TV defined that period just as much as those hot ticket pay-per-views did. In a time long before Raw, SmackDown, Nitro, and Dynamite, diehard wrestling fans knew that the big fights were on Saturday nights.

The Beginning

It was the Spring of 1985, and a seasoned TV executive was looking for a new challenge. Dick Ebersol had up until now been the executive producer and showrunner for NBC's Saturday Night Live for the previous four seasons. In the period between Lorne Michaels' stewardship of the program, Ebersol oversaw a cast that included young talents such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jim Belushi, and Joe Piscopo, established names like Martin Short, Billy Crystal, and Christopher Guest, and a genuine transcendent star in Eddie Murphy.

Ebersol's calling in life appeared to be developing late-night television. He helped formulate SNL all the way back in 1975 alongside Michaels, and he became NBC's Vice President of Late Night Programming at the age of 28. While overseeing SNL in the early 1980s, Ebersol founded the independent company No Sleep Productions, from which he produced the popular Friday Night Videos in 1983 as a network counter to the increasingly popular MTV phenomenon. By 1985, however, Ebersol wanted to spend more time with his young family, and sought to lighten his workload. He left his high-demand position at SNL after that season, but not before two specific show hosts crossed his path.

On March 30, 1985, with barely half a day until the first ever WrestleMania emanated from Madison Square Garden, WWE Champion Hulk Hogan joined tag team partner Mr T in co-hosting the late-night institution.

Ebersol had been enamoured by WWE (then WWF), especially after it churned out two highly-rated MTV specials. The Brawl to End it All in 1984 and The War to Settle the Score in 1985 had done ungodly high ratings, and the NBC executive took notice. Couple that with his personal affinity for the sketch comedy and mock talk show stylings of Tuesday Night Titans, and Ebersol believed bringing The Rock n Wrestling Connection to network television would make for a winning tag team.

Ebersol approached Vince McMahon with an idea to bring WWE to NBC. Seeing as McMahon was continuing onward with his national expansion, it probably didn't take much convincing for McMahon to sign on. The only roadblock to getting WWF onto the network came at the very top. Young NBC President Brandon Tartikoff was a friend of Ebersol's and trusted his instincts, but wasn't so certain about late-night pro wrestling. His biggest concern was that advertisers had been guaranteed a minimum rating for that time slot, and wasn't sure that the SNL and WWF audiences had enough overlap to keep the number at the necessary level. If the show flopped, NBC could lose millions.

To assuage Tartikoff, Ebersol assured him that he could get Cyndi Lauper - who was still riding high in between She's So Unusual and True Colors - to make an appearance. With Lauper on board, Tartikoff gave the go-ahead for a pilot episode, to air on Saturday, May 11, in SNL's usual time slot of 11:30 pm to 1 am. 

The taping for what would become the first-ever Saturday Night's Main Event was scheduled for Friday, May 10, from Long Island's Nassau Coliseum. That left 24 hours to get the footage ready for broadcast, but in Ebersol's eyes, other work needed to be done long before then.

Ebersol was not particularly awestruck by WWF's rudimentary production values of the time, and found WrestleMania in March to be "downright primitive". He wanted WWF to implement higher production standards for their broadcasts.

As was written in Sex, Lies, & Headlocks: "There would be no more showing up at an arena with a single truck carrying a ring and some lights. Ebersol wanted four cameras at ringside with boom mikes to catch the grunts and groans that usually went unheard. He wanted state of the art lighting rigs. He wanted concert quality sound."

On the wrestling end, McMahon booked two championship matches for the premiere: Hulk Hogan (accompanied by Mr. T) defending the WWF Championship against "Cowboy" Bob Orton, and Women's champion Wendi Richter (accompanied by Cyndi Lauper) squaring off with The Fabulous Moolah. Along with babyface turns for both George "The Animal" Steele and "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff through the evening, McMahon was loading the pilot broadcast with as many celebrity rubs and newsworthy developments as possible.

Adding to the big-time feel was the use of contemporary music. 'Obsession' by Animotion was the show's theme song for its first three years while other songs, including Dire Straits' 'The Walk of Life' and A-ha's 'Take on Me' were used in video packages. In later years, Phil Collins's 'Take Me Home' served as the closing theme.

A raucous crowd of 8300 witnessed the premiere edition of Saturday Night's Main Event. Per the norm of the time, the evening was one of babyfaces triumphing over various evils. Once the taping ended, Ebersol and his crew took all of the footage to a studio in Manhattan for editing. Through the overnight hours, the show was pieced together in its broadcast form.

The next day, Vince McMahon arrived at the studio with his wife Linda to see the finished product. As the story goes, McMahon was floored by what he saw. Though 1985 production may be very dated by today's standards, it was far more chic at the time, and in terms of lighting, Saturday Night's Main Event came off mainstream, whereas WrestleMania felt like it took place in a cave.

To quote Sex, Lies, & Headlocks: "It was faster paced and slicker than anything that had ever worn the WWF label. (McMahon) didn't know wrestling could look like that."

As for the audience, the 8.8 TV rating was the highest for that time slot since the SNL era of John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in the late 1970s. An impressed Tartikoff immediately ordered more episodes.

Quick Success

Additional shows began rolling out in the Autumn, airing on Saturdays when SNL was either out of season or in an off-week. Eventually, the show's calendar was settled, with five episodes: one in October, one Thanksgiving weekend, one in early January, one in the weeks leading up to WrestleMania, and a "season finale" in late April or early May. 

Early on, the Saturday Night's Main Event broadcast formula came together, and remained in place with minimal flexibility in the coming years. In this formula, the main event attraction did not go on last, as wrestling convention usually dictated. Instead, the biggest match of the night (i.e. Hogan's match) generally went on close to midnight, making it the second or third match on the broadcast.

In a sense, this followed the formula of Saturday Night Live under Ebersol's watch. Knowing that a good part of the home audience would peter out by one in the morning, Ebersol front-loaded SNL with all of the important stuff, like Eddie Murphy's signature bits, popular characters, a celebrity cameo, and the musical guest's first song (especially if it was a popular chart-topper). Sketches that went on at 12:50 am were usually abstract conceptual pieces that the mainstream viewership wouldn't really care about, which was fine, because that part of the audience had probably already gone to bed.

As such, Saturday Night's Main Event adhered to that template. A hot match kicked things off, and with plenty of energy left in the audience's tank, the super-over Hogan came out next to vanquish the heel du jour. Additionally, by ordering things in this manner, this left plenty of time later in the broadcast to address any controversy or fallout from Hogan's all-important match. 

This was the case when the Hulkster defeated Don Muraco in March 1986 via disqualification, and was violently ambushed afterward by upcoming WrestleMania opponent King Kong Bundy. Portions of the remaining broadcast time were used to update a hospitalised Hogan's condition, a hook for maintaining a strong portion of the home audience in the wee hours.

Similar to SNL, the last match of the night was generally a "who cares" affair. Usually, you would get a low-energy squash like Kamala over Lanny Poffo or Blackjack Mulligan over Jimmy Jack Funk, strictly for the diehards that were still tuned in, in abject defiance of slumber.

Although all of the top stars of the period were featured on Saturday Night's Main Event at one time or another, the undisputed star was Hulk Hogan. As WWF's cash cow, Hogan rarely wrestled on WWF's other television shows, so when Saturday Night's Main Event rolled around, WWF champion Hogan vs. [insert opponent here] was always a big deal, and was the key to the show's success.

Hogan's second title defence on Main Event, coming against Terry Funk in early 1986, set a new show ratings record with a 10.4 rating. Ensuing defences against Muraco, Orndorff, and Hercules all did over a 9.0 rating, and Hogan's battle with Orndorff inside a steel cage in January 1987 set a new high mark with a 10.6 rating.

Two months later, WWE outdid themselves, as Hogan and Andre The Giant stood on opposite sides of the ring in a 20-man battle royal, two weeks before their historic showdown at WrestleMania III. The 11.6 TV rating for that episode is reportedly the highest that NBC has ever done in that time slot.

Hogan may have been the star of the show, but the cultural impact of Saturday Night's Main Event can also be attributed to other important players. The spellbindingly-chauvinistic Macho Man Randy Savage, the unapologetic Rowdy Roddy Piper, the bombastic musings of commentator Jesse "The Body" Ventura, and the entire rogue's gallery of Hulk-opposed baddies made for one of the most colourful casts of stars that has ever been assembled in the history of the sport.

Such was the success of Saturday Night's Main Event that NBC greenlit a live Friday night prime time spinoff to begin in Indianapolis in February of 1988, simply dubbed "The Main Event". And to kick off that show's life span, WWF commissioned an unforgettable encounter.

Ten months had passed since WrestleMania III, where Hogan defied the odds to vanquish Andre The Giant in the veritable match of the century. Andre was granted a rematch for the championship, this time on network TV at 8 pm Eastern time. Judging by the ratings, there may have been a few movie theatres and bars that experienced light business on that particular night. Andre's screwjob victory that ended Hogan's four-year reign as WWF Champion drew a staggering 15.2 Nielsen rating, the equivalent of 33 million viewers. To this day, it is the largest American TV audience for any single wrestling show.

Even with Hogan being dethroned, the show maintained a fairly steady audience with eventual champion Randy Savage on top. That said, much of the Rock 'n' Wrestling flavour had died off come 1988, as was evident in the switching out "Obsession" for the synth-heavy instrumental that many fans recognise today as the definitive show theme.

The cast of stars had turned over considerably, with the likes of Muraco, Orndorff, The Iron Sheik, and Ricky Steamboat fading out in favour of The Big Boss Man, Ted DiBiase, Rick Rude, and The Ultimate Warrior. The broadcast formula remained inflexible from its earlier episodes, however, and Saturday Night's Main Event remained appointment television, understandably so in an era with only four pay-per-views.

By 1989, the Main Event spinoff had become a February tentpole, a Friday night spectacle that set the wheels for the big WrestleMania storyline in motion. When champion Randy Savage turned on supposed friend Hogan in an all-time hate-filled rant on February 3, the next Saturday Night special a month later did a 10.0 rating, comparable to the peak years of the program.

NBC then restructured the calendar to give us more wrestling, adding a July edition of the show to help set the stage for SummerSlam. It was on that first-ever July card that, after more than four years on the air, the Saturday night version of the program had its first-ever title change, as Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard upended Demolition to become World Tag Team Champions.

The End

But even with Hogan back on top, the addition of a Summer special, and a strong 11.1 rating to kick off 1990, Saturday Night's Main Event began a clear decline at the dawn of the 1990s. NBC had scaled back the Saturday night broadcasts from six to four in 1990, though that comes with a bit of an asterisk.

Originally, there was supposed to be a Saturday Night's Main Event that aired two nights after the 1990 Survivor Series, which would've included The Rockers' winning the World Tag Team Titles from The Hart Foundation. However, NBC made the decision to trim the broadcast from 90 minutes to just one hour, and instead air it in prime time one night earlier. On the one hand, this benefited WWF in the sense that the Rockers vs. Hart Foundation match was hopelessly screwed up by a broken ring rope, and excising it from the telecast was now a convenience. On the other, it was a sign that things didn't bode well for the show's future.

The November 1990 special did an 8.6 rating in prime time, which wasn't the most desirable number, but was far better than what followed.

On Friday, February 1, 1991, WWF once more ran a prime-time Main Event special, this one intended to pave the way to WrestleMania 7 in Los Angeles. Tickets for the card were moving extremely slowly, due in part to the heavily criticised angle in which WWF Champion Sgt. Slaughter backed Iraq in the ongoing Gulf War, putting all-American Hogan in position to slay him for the gold at Mania.

For a card that included Slaughter vs. Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and Hogan teaming with Tugboat to face Earthquake and Dino Bravo, the show did a measly 6.7 prime time rating. A part of this could be because earlier that day, a plane crash took place at Los Angeles International Airport and NBC's LA affiliate KNBC remained live with coverage of the incident instead of broadcasting The Main Event. But the rest of the country that got Hogan and friends seemed to be weary enough by WWE’s offering anyway.

On April 27, a more traditional episode of Saturday Night's Main Event was broadcast, and it proved notable because it was the end of the show as we knew it. A month after that broadcast (which did a rather meagre 7.7 in the Nielsen ratings), reports emerged that NBC was washing its hands of WWE, and that the wrestling giant was now looking for a new home for airing infrequent TV specials. The poor ratings of the last two prime-time specials helped seal their fate, as did the negative publicity around the Slaughter turncoat angle.

Dave Meltzer also noted that Tartikoff and Ebersol were no longer able to help WWF in this situation, as Tartikoff left NBC for Paramount, and Ebersol's internal power had declined.

Meltzer also pointed out: "The NBC specials drew the largest viewing audience, particularly among the mainstream fans. Indeed, the erosion of the ratings this season seemed to indicate an erosion in mainstream fans, since they didn't coincide with a similar erosion in the ratings of the weekly shows on cable and in syndication."

In other words, there was still an audience for wrestling, but wrestling wasn't as hip as was once perceived.

Efforts were made to keep the show going on the still-growing FOX Network in 1992. A prime-time broadcast that February netted an 8.2 rating, but a second special that November (the first since Hogan departed WWE following WrestleMania 8) only managed a 6.2 rating, despite an oddly-impassioned pre-show bit done by Al Bundy of Married with Children.

Despite rumours of a March 1993 airing to cash in on what turned out to be a short-lived comeback for Hogan, Saturday Night's Main Event vanished from existence.

The Ruthless Aggression Comeback

Thirteen years later, when WWE returned to the USA Network from Spike, they rekindled their relationship with NBC, as both the network and USA fell under the NBCUniversal banner. With the new deal came two prime-time specials on NBC a year, beginning in 2006. This meant the return of Saturday Night's Main Event.

What became evident was that the quaintness and novelty of the old show had little place amongst Ruthless Aggression. Fans were already used to seeing the top guys wrestle on a weekly basis. You already saw John Cena and Randy Orton and Rey Mysterio every week - it wasn't like Hogan in the 1980s, whose televised matches were rare.

Fans seemed to concur, as the revived broadcast in March 2006 only did a 3.1 rating, despite advertising a guest appearance from Stone Cold Steve Austin. In all, Saturday Night's Main Event ran four more times through August of 2008, and none of the ensuing broadcasts came close to that 3.1 number. In fact, the final episode that aired two weeks before the 2008 SummerSlam did an abysmal 1.4 rating.

Looking Back

It can't be stated enough how important Saturday Night's Main Event was to WWE's total growth. Not only did the series take full advantage of its terrestrial TV home to reach a gigantic mainstream audience, but the necessary upgrades in production aided in its major league feel. It may have only lasted six years in its original form, but the show essentially became the playbook for how to run a TV wrestling operation going forward.

Saturday Night’s Main Event was a special show and no discussion of Golden Era WWF is complete without copious mention of the program that commanded sleep deprivation, and usually got it without much fuss.

Like a lot of products of its own time, though, the concept, and the feeling it once produced, was impossible to duplicate in the Ruthless Aggression era. WWE tried, and it didn't work. What made the show special had already been replicated in distilled fashion through other programs and events.

There was still a certain innocent magic to Saturday Night's Main Event. It's all the primer you need into 1980s WWF and its stars - frenzied, chaotic, sometimes tongue-in-cheek instalments in the WWF as fans once knew it.