(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Mon 4 August 2025 16:15, UK
Anyone who knows anything about Tom Hanks is aware he’s one of Hollywood’s most notable Beatles superfans, so he wouldn’t compare a TV show to his favourite band without meaning every word.
It’s one of the loftiest claims that can be made, especially when it’s coming from someone who grew up idolising the Fab Four, used them as the inspiration for his feature-length directorial debut, and never misses an opportunity to celebrate the legacy John, Paul, George, and Ringo left behind.
Even though he had a brief spell as a child when The Beatles were dislodged by The Dave Clark Five as his band of choice, which is understandable when the group went head-to-head with Liverpudlians in the popularity stakes and even had them beat for a hot minute, he quickly overcame that wobble.
Few, if any, bands have impacted the music industry or the cultural consciousness quite like the mop-topped phenoms who reinvented almost everything when they exploded onto the scene in the 1960s. Enough has been written about The Beatles and their transformative effect, but has anything in music, film, television, or any other form of entertainment even come close?
According to Hanks, only one. While it’s easy to assume his opinion has been swayed by personal bias, considering he’s fronted ten times and has been a member of the illustrious ‘Five-Timers Club’ for 35 years, he’s unflappable in his belief that Saturday Night Live was the next best thing.
“It was the cultural phenomenon of the age,” he said in Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “It was truly as big as The Beatles. It was this huge riotous thing, and it was on every week, and everybody gathered together on Saturday nights to watch it.”
The two-time Academy Award winner was only a teenager when SNL aired its first episode on October 11th, 1975, but even as an acting newcomer, he knew it was a big deal. “Everybody from the theatre that I was working at in Cleveland was in the living room of this rented house watching a ten-inch black-and-white television with a coat hanger for an antenna,” he reminisced.
From the very first episode, it became a can’t-miss event. “That’s just what you did every week,” Hanks explained. “Got together and had something to eat and sat around waiting for Saturday Night Live to come on.” It wasn’t quite The Beatles making their game-changing appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t far off.
Even though it’s been running for 50 years and shows no signs of ceding from the spotlight, it feels like a stretch to make a like-for-like comparison between The Beatles and Saturday Night Live. Then again, not everyone grew up obsessed with the former and eagerly anticipated the latest episode of the latter before being welcomed into the inner circle as one of the show’s favourite sons, so Hanks has at least got more authority than most on the subject.
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