On Jan. 24, 1978, Russian spy satellite Kosmos 954 crashed into Canada’s Northwest Territories. Powered by a nuclear reactor, the satellite scattered radioactive debris over a 370-mile path through the frozen Canadian earth. On Jan. 28, 1978, Saturday Night Live writers Michael O’Donoghue and Tom Davis turned this potential nuclear disaster into one of the weirdest and most format-breaking sketches in SNL’s young history. Indeed, the typically bizarre content essentially mutated SNL’s actual shape, spilling over through the entire second half of that night’s episode and resulting in the anarchic-minded writers’ essentially ripping the popular late-night show into pieces, right...