Unbeknownst to the cast and crew, Brandon Tartikoff, the head of programming for NBC, had brought in Dick Ebersol, the original developer for the show, to observe the production. He sat up in the control room booth watching the taping in despair. After the episode ended, he went right to work and fired most of the original cast and writers.
The announcement for the next week's episode names Robert Guillaume as the host with musical guest Ian Dury and the Blockheads. The episode was canceled when the show was put on brief hiatus due to Jean Doumanian's firing. Guillaume finally got to host in 1983, but Dury never performed on SNL and died of cancer in 2000.
Only for this episode, the news segment is titled Saturday Night Newsline, with two different news segments before the main one. In the first, Dr. Jonathan Lear (played by Mark King ) delivers a science piece, while in the second, Bill Murray delivers the possible winners for the 1981 Academy Awards (which was a homage to the topic he did on Weekend Update when he was a cast member). Charles Rocket does the main news segment solo, without co-anchor Gail Matthius, and Joe Piscopo's Saturday Night Sports is the only other commentary.
Brian Doyle-Murray, one of the very few people from the original show to stay behind for season 6, had begged his brother Bill Murray not to host the show, but because nobody else was available as a replacement, Murray stayed on board.
The cold opening where Bill Murray delivers the newspaper headlines bashing the show's season were actually real: Saturday Night Dead, From Yucchs to Yeck, and Vile from New York. Also, this cold open is a spoof of the scenes from Bill Murray's Meatballs (1979) where he offers the depressed cast pep talk and have them chanting "It Just Doesn't Matter!".