Scarlett Johansson! A squeal escapes from my mouth as “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” etched itself to life on my apartment’s TV. Texts with my family flood in as the program ensues. “Saturday Night Live” writers once again continued their legacy to provide something for everyone. 

Even with a star-studded celebration of the show’s half-century on the air, there’s another “SNL” headline creating the most Longhorn buzz: Lorne Michaels’ recent donation of the show’s historic collection to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. 

“We finalized the gift agreement back in October 2023, and the collection shipped to us soon after that,” said Stephen Enniss, the Ransom Center’s director. “We've been cataloguing it ever since, and we've been hard at work preparing the collection to be opened and exhibited.”

This is not UT’s first encounter with “SNL.” The show has been home to many radio-television-film alumni, including Andrew Dismukes, a Houston-born comedian who joined the long-running show in 2017. 

The center said it received more than 700 boxes of audiovisual material to sort through.

“‘Saturday Night Live’ (is) groundbreaking both as works of entertainment and for its cultural commentary,” Jenny Romero, the center’s curator of film, said in an email. “We are adding an important voice into conversation with so many of the other remarkable collections at the Ransom Center.”

The question is, why the Forty Acres? The center gave no indication that the inquiry came from UT’s side, Michaels has not publicly offered an explanation, and the collection is not being bought — it’s being gifted.

“That's a question for (Michaels) to answer,” Enniss chuckled. “We're one of the leading humanities research centers in the country, and increasingly in film and television, we're finding more and more creative figures approaching us. Part of it, too, has to do with the university's very strong radio-television-film program.”

Enniss and Romero talked of major plans to develop the collection into a resource for Moody students. From Sept. 20 through March 15, 2026, the collection will be featured in an exhibition, “Live From New York! The Making of Lorne Michaels.” The exhibition will become part of class lectures as a UT-exclusive learning resource. 

“The collection presents a wealth of possibilities for teaching and research,” Romero said. “We work hard to connect our holdings with courses being taught and to offer students the chance to engage directly with our collections, and this collection will help us continue that work.”

The archive consists of production materials, memoranda, casting decisions for each episode of the show, heavily annotated scripts, photographs and more. There are also plans to include other materials related to the visionary showrunner’s career, including artifacts from his teenage years in theatrical productions and other film and television projects he produced, such as “30 Rock” and Broadway’s “Mean Girls.” 

Syssa Burks, a radio-television-film freshman, emphasized the donation’s significance to her program.

“It's a very relevant contribution that a lot of people can connect with,” Burks said. “I love that it's giving ‘SNL’ a pedestal in a way that appreciates it for more than just being a TV show. It can serve as a holy grail. These are people who had dreams to be in the entertainment industry and were able to create something that made an impact on so many people. (It’s) a little memento saying, you can also do that.”

A partnership with such a foundational piece of media history showcases the university’s prominence and opens up new opportunities for Moody students to engage with television history firsthand.

“Lorne Michaels could have chosen any number of institutions to offer this extraordinary resource to,” Enniss said. “We took it as a real validation of the good work that the Ransom Center does and our reputation for excellence nationwide and internationally.”