The Impact: How Saturday Night’s Main Event Led To Seinfeld (Yes That Seinfeld)

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BY Thomas Hall – ON May 3, 2024

IMG Credit: WWE

When worlds collide. WWE has spent decades attempting to move further into the mainstream of entertainment, yielding mixed results. One of the company’s bigger successes was Saturday Night’s Main Event, which was a television staple of the 1980s. Now we are hearing about how the show wound up helping to bring about one of the biggest television shows of all time.

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Comedian Jerry Seinfeld was recently a guest on the Rich Eisen Show and revealed that an NBC executive named Rich Ludwin used funds from Saturday Night’s Main Event to help fund the filming of the sitcom Seinfeld. The money was enough to make four additional episodes of the show, which would eventually be picked up by NBC. Saturday Night’s Main Event ran once a quarter on NBC beginning in 1985 and ran on the network until 1991. Seinfeld debuted in 1989 and ran until 1998.

The show has its history. Check out some Saturday Night’s Main Event:

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Opinion: This is the kind of thing that might not make a big difference as both series are long since over, but it is quite the interesting bit of trivia. There is something interesting about the fact that one of the biggest television series of all time might not have happened without a quarterly wrestling special. Saturday Night’s Main Event might not be as famous as Seinfeld, but it certainly had an impact and apparently it is bigger than it seemed.