‘S.N.L.’ Celebrates 50 Years With Star-Studded Prime-Time Special

After a half-century of comedy and music (and what at times felt like an equal amount of buildup and hype), how do you at last kick off a prime-time 50th anniversary special for “Saturday Night Live”? Calmly and serenely, it turns out.

The long-awaited “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” opened on Sunday with the musicians Paul Simon (an “S.N.L.” stalwart through the decades) and Sabrina Carpenter (who was its musical guest in May 2024) sharing the stage at the show’s familiar home base at Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

They exchanged a simple joke, setting a theme that would recur for the rest of the night: Time passes, whether you like it or not. Simon said they were about to play a song that he had performed on the show with George Harrison in 1976. “I was not born then,” Carpenter said, “and neither were my parents.”

And who else could perform the opening monologue on this occasion but Steve Martin, a 16-time host whose own rising star in the 1970s imparted some needed credibility and momentum to “S.N.L.” when it was just starting out.