The Greatest Music Show You’ve Never Heard Of
Saturday Night Live might have had the laughs, but its short-lived offshoot Sunday Night (aka Night Music) may have been the greatest music TV show ever made.
There’s always something to admire about a well-considered touring bill, where the bands on the lineup fit together so well that it makes you want to drop everything and go. (Case in point: Father John Misty and Jason Isbell, two serious musicians who have reputations for being very funny, are co-headlining a summer tour together.)
It’s not easy to put this kind of lineup together in a non-Coachella-style environment, and it’s even harder to have such lineups appear every single week. Not just one great musician. Four or five. But a TV show, long forgotten about by modern music fans, managed to perfect this model, and it deserves a place in the modern discussion.
Here’s the story of Sunday Night, a Saturday Night Live spinoff that put music legends on the stage week after week after week.
1988
The year that Sunday Night, originally envisioned as a musical counterpart to NBC’s SNL, debuted on the network. The show was designed to bring together a whole bunch of disparate musicians, many of whom were big…
