Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell on ABC

Despite big-name guests, `Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell' was pretty much dead on arrival, with a cringingly awkward host. It bore no creative similarities whatsoever to `Saturday Night Live' (which premiered a few weeks later), though a pre-`SNL' Bill Murray appeared on Cosell's show. Its `executive in charge of comedy' was Alan King, who many years later said that trying to turn Cosell into a variety-show host was one tough proposition: `He made Ed Sullivan look like Buster Keaton.'