After five decades, the premise could be dull and anachronistic. Instead, it’s as fresh as ever, earning its highest rated season premiere in four years. And while its cast is ever-changing, so much of what makes SNL work comes down to its design. From its logo to its photo bumpers to its unmistakable opening montage of New York City.

For the past few decades, two friends—SNL photographer Mary Ellen Matthews and Pentagram partner Emily Oberman—have influenced the creative direction of so much of what makes SNL feel like SNL. It’s a sensation encapsulated best in the two-minute intro, which transports the viewer from their house in Kansas to glitzy Manhattan. Shot over the course of just a few nights by different directors leading up to each season premiere, the opening credits involve late shoots that often stretch into sunrise, elbowed inside everyone’s workload for the show. But it’s also become the mise en scéne of SNL itself, the anchor that’s bridged half a century of live televised comedy into one cohesive vibe.

“The brief is always the same: It’s the city you love, the party you wish you were at, and the cast you wish you were hanging out with. That’s it,” says Oberman. “And Lorne Michaels’s directive is always, whenever we redo the open, it should feel completely new and completely the same at the same time.”

“Our big idea was Saturday-Night-Live! You just say it as one word like Don Pardo did the voiceover,” says Oberman. Along with the logo work, Oberman began working on the intro titles. “One thing that Jim said to us that has always stuck with me was the show should be funny; the titles should not.”

“The titles had always been shot like it was very downtown, gritty, scrappy,” she continues. “But Saturday Night Live had been around for almost 25 years at that point, and wasn’t that scrappy little thing. It was the biggest late night sketch comedy show of all time. So we wanted to make it cool, like Blue Note jazz, which is why the logo looked like this.”

Since then, Oberman has reimagined the logo four more times (SNL now even has its own typeface called Bass-o-matic) and contributed to the typography of the opener for 30 years now. But that’s only a slice of how Oberman has impacted the visual design of the show.

How credits evolved over 50 seasons

Over the course of season one of NBC’s Saturday Night (the original name for SNL), you can watch the show slowly home in on the skeleton of the contemporary opener. From episode one, creatives set the tone as photographer Edie Baskin’s hand-painted photos of New York nightlife montaged atop a still-familiar, sax-rich theme song by Howard Shore. The biggest difference was that the first week listed the cast in one pile on a single screen. By mid-season, the names were read out over two. And finally, toward the end, the cast was given a full hero treatment as each member was listed with their photo, one at a time.

That straightforward approach to listing the talent is in line with a core purpose of the SNL opener. “It’s a place for the cast to be presented,” says Matthews. “I don’t know how else you would do it.”

But while the season 1 cast had only nine people, it has since ballooned to 17 members.

There’s a lot more to get through, which is a reason the opener has doubled in length while also accelerating its pace of presentation. The cuts are faster, and so is the music—which has increased by around 100 beats per minute over five decades.

“It’s a very long intro, and [we] try to make it speak to an audience who’s used to flipping through TikTok,” says Mike Diva, who directs shorts on SNL. “You look at old SNL sketches from even 10 or 15, years ago. And it’s like, everything moved so much slower. People had so much patience, and man, now all of our patience has worn thin.”

All that time is well-used, buying time for the cast and crew to set up behind the scenes. But the viewer is distracted in an ever-modernized media spectacle. Every two or so years since SNL’s debut, the opener is reshot with a shift in tone. By 1996, the scrappy live sketch show had a high-style, ritzy NYC makeover. Around the same time (1999), SNL photographer Mary Ellen Matthews took over for Baskin following six years of working as her assistant, ushering in the show’s modern artistic viewpoint.

In 2010, Matthews asked a simple question that would flip the SNL intro upside-down: What the heck was the cast actually doing in the opener?

“The music’s fast-paced, and you really can’t just have somebody sitting there having a drink anymore, because It’s like the music and that action don’t go together,” she says. So Matthews asked the cast, “What is your New York life like?” That led to Fred Armisen poking through records in the West Village and Jason Sudekis playing basketball in Washington Square.

“Cecily Strong wanted to have her dog in a couple of the opens. And her dog is adorable, so she got to have her dog in them,” recalls Oberman. “And those are conversations that Mary Ellen handles and deals with. I don’t meet with the cast members.”

Since then, openers have had a touch more vibe of “actually doing stuff in NYC,” but they’re updated every few years with a new creative brief born from a brainstorm between Matthews and Oberman. Between 2020 and 2022, for instance, the cast was captured making their way back into the studio during the pandemic. Each member’s name was written by hand in a time when celebrities Zooming from home had introduced a new era of authenticity in entertainment. Then in 2022, they captured the entire cast inside the Chelsea Hotel (look closely and you can appreciate the logistical nightmare that is having multiple cast members together in a single shot—given that each member of the cast is juggling their own hectic schedule to kick off the season).

In 2018, Matthews and Oberman brainstormed a mashup between French New Wave cinema, a 1960s film movement known for its charming black-and-white surrealism, and New York New Wave, a 1980s art movement mixing media as it is today. They cut inspiration footage together to pitch the idea, and executed what is the most beautiful of the SNL intros to date.

Sometime around 2 a.m., Kate McKinnon was standing inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She’s glammed out to the max despite the late hours, looking more like an A-lister than a “not quite ready for prime time player.” And that single frame was so stunning to producer Steve Higgins that Oberman was given more creative license, and the SNL team approved something it never had before: graphics that, instead of ducking and weaving around the cast, were placed right over someone’s face.

“Lorne really wanted to do something big and different and modern was his thing, because he kept saying, ‘This isn’t a nostalgia play, this cast the future of the show . . . this open should be spectacular,” recalls Oberman. “Mary Ellen and I were sort of charged with, what will this be? But Mike [Diva] had this vision.”

Diva films most of the big pre-taped segments you see on SNL—like Gladiator 2: The Musical and HBO Mario Kart—and has been working alongside Matthews and Oberman on the openers since the Chelsea Hotel shoot in 2022.

“I thought about it a lot over the summer,” says Diva. “I came up with this idea of playing around with people’s perception of what they have come to know as the format of the SNL intros, while simultaneously wanting to celebrate how the sausage is made. Until I started working here almost four years ago, I didn’t fully appreciate how, at the very last minute, these sets are coming together, and there’s people flying in chairs and tables and stuff, truly, five seconds before the camera goes on and we see the set. It’s magic.”

What Diva produced is the most ambitious opener SNL has ever run, somehow assembled in a mere five days. Yes, it has all of the tropes we’ve come to expect in an SNL opener. But it also mixes cast members spending time in real locations—Michael Che eating at a restaurant, Chloe Fineman dancing on a subway,  Marcello Hernandez leaping down a fire escape—and then breaks your brain by seamlessly cutting between the real world and a set lovingly reproduced in studio 8H.

“It’s a magic trick, but the show is a magic trick,” says Matthews. So that it was a close comparison to what actually happens.”

Other pieces of the shoot take SNL’s love for New York to new heights. The crew pulled a double decker bus into Times Square for Ego Nwodim’s party scene. Much of the visual energy comes from Diva’s inspiration—“Michel Gondry meets Wong Kar-wai”—and his use of a new DJI Ronin camera, which has a lens that detaches from the main body, allowing him to take us inside a cab with Mikey Day and right up to the bus window with Sarah Sherman.

“You would never know,” he laughs.