I grew up watching SNL.

I grew up watching ILC.

I enjoyed both.

I'm pretty damn confident, though, that SNL smashes ILC in whatever metric you guys cook up (and you guys stay in the kitchen because you know that you're reaching like the Digable Planets).

The initial premise was that ILC had more successful alumni than SNL.

Once that premise was blown out of the water straight up, you guys started adding qualifiers and the like to try to tweak it to your favor. All of that irrelevant shit basically moved things into debating which was the more successful show (in addition to tacking on more irrelevant shit to get things going your way). Regardless, I'm pretty sure that SNL destroys ILC in those regards, too.

As I see it, nothing can really move forward in this discussion until parameters in evaluating either show are defined and set.

If you want "success" to mean box office receipts (which seems a little off to me, considering all the factors that go into what makes a successful movie -- and a movie career, which also happens to ignore success on television -- but it is EXTRA!'s world, after all, and you're living in it) and awards, then by all means go for that.

It seems that alumni should be definied as cast members. Your guys' inclusion of J.Lo (really?), while in the pretty obvious interest of putting some $$$ in the success column for ILC, also brings up the problem of finding a cutoff line in including SNL's writing staff and short filmmakers (should Albert Brooks be included?). I don't know - that's pretty messy. Unless you want to start looking up stats for other Fly Girls and do an audit on the income that Shawn Wayans brought in doing wedding receptions as DJ SW1, you probably need to fall back.

Also, it seems fair to either compare all of the seasons of ILC to either the first five seasons of SNL or the five seasons of SNL that were on the air during the same time period as ILC. You do realize, though, that that's an effort to make things fair for ILC to even have its foot in the door.

(Sidenote: I think it might be valid to consider the weight of SNL's headstart. If you want to knock SNL down a few notches for its headstart, how many points do you subtract from ILC, considering that it probably wouldn't have existed without SNL's precedence.)

Everything else (influence on hip hop?) seems pretty dumb to consider if you guys want to evaluate things in terms of being successful, as narrowly as you've defined success. Plus, all those considerations have this discussion slipping into merely being about people's preferences in relation to which was the better show. We might as well be debating the comparative merits of "The Completely Mad Misadventures of Ed Grimley" against "Waynehead."

That's extra dumb considering that LL and Canibus are both fantastic.