In celebrating the honesty and theatrical integrity of The Second City, Bernie Sahlins once said, "It's not television. It does not come from television. It's not film. It does not come from film. It comes from the theater. As long as it holds on to that, it's going to do well" (Patinkin, 53). Sahlins is certainly correct; the beauty of The Second City lies in its theatrical routes. Still, the theater's unique narrative form, montages of scenes only loosely connected, fits perfectly into post-modern America's televisual culture.

In October of 1975, Saturday Night Live premiered on television, with a cast that included Second City alumni Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner. Bill Murray followed a year later and the American media soon began to connect these quality performances on television with the actors' time at The Second City. As a result, the theater in Chicago gained a much larger, and on the whole less intellectual, audience.

Soon, Second City owners Bernie Sahlins and Second City Toronto owner Andrew Alexander (now co-owner of the entire franchise with Len Stuart) began to contemplate a television show of their own. If this new highly successful show was going to continue to rely on their formula and cast from their talent, they thought, why couldn't they make the transition to the new media as well?

In 1976, The Second City revealed its own sketch comedy show, SCTV (Second City Television) on Canada's Global TV Network. SCTV was a fictitious high-frequency TV channel in a made-up town called Melonville, and each episode represented a days programming; in addition, the audience would often see sketches involving the fictional members of the television station "behind the scenes." Harold Ramis recounts, "'We thought, well, we're doing it at a really cheesy Canadian television station-let's be a cheesy television station!' That was the group consensus. We'd do station characters, and then we'd do what had become our stock trade at Second City, which was sketch comedy and parodies" (Patinkin, 119).

The SCTV cast came exclusively from the Second City companies in Toronto and Chicago and included, over the years, names such as: John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis (also head writer), Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, and Martin Short.

Unlike The Second City-and like Saturday Night Live-,SCTV did employ the aid of full-time writers. Throughout the show's history, the writers would work for several weeks and then they would shoot for a few weeks, while doing rewrites on the set.

Sahlins left the project after a year and a half and took the Second City name with him. This posed a major problem for the two remaining owners Alexander and Stuart because they had just sold the show into American syndication with the title "The Second City Television Show." It took quite some time to work through the legal hassle that caused. Global could no longer afford to do the show, so ITV station in Edmonton picked it up, with U.S. syndication by Rhodes at random times in select cities. In 1981, the show went to a ninety minute format and began late-night programming.

The show lasted until 1984, producing 135 episodes in some length or another, receiving thirteen Emmy nominations and winning two for best writing. It featured some of the most bizarre sketches ever put on television and launched the super-star careers of several performers.

While these fortunate few were capitalizing on the success of SCTV, more Second City alumni joined the cast of Saturday Night Live, including Tim Kazurinsky, Brian Doyle-Murray, Jim Belushi, and Martin Short. Since then, The Second City has become a breeding ground for young comedic talent. Some have gone onto SNL: Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Tim Meadows, Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey and countless other performers and writers.

The adaptability of The Second City to other forms of entertainment only makes sense. The conventions and ruptured paradigms that people found so novel when they were introduced at that small cabaret in Chicago are now the norm in popular entertainment. The Second City had pulled from Vaudeville the notion that so many narratives and characters could parade on the stage in one evening. In television, particularly cable television, not only do we see hundreds of stories, characters, and genres, but we make the decision what to watch. In this way, we are our own programmers. The Second City centers around that philosophy, that an audience can go to a theater and tell the performers what to do.

Second City alumni have even taken the art of short-form improvisation to television through the British and American versions of "Whose Line is it Anyway?". Countless former members of the company have moved on to television success, some as performers and many as writers. The list is literally too exhaustive to relay. Just to graze the tip of the iceberg, former players went on to roles on M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, Seinfeld, Third Rock from the Sun, and The Simpsons.

But, The Second City has had a profound effect on areas of American entertainment. Within a year of opening, the theater had earned a respected reputation among those in entertainment. After cutting the first of two unsuccessful records for Mercury, they moved the company to Los Angeles in 1961 for an eight week pre-Broadway try-out. The show found so much success there, that The Second City kept it open when it finally did move to Broadway.

Not only did The Second City take its formula to other cities, but many members of the cast used the training they received in Chicago as a springboard to Broadway. Mike Nichols and Elaine May, both members of The Compass as well as The Second City, took their own sketch show to Broadway and found huge success. "An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May" generated a highly successful record with the same title directed by Arthur Penn.

Since then, Nichols and May have joined countless former Second City players in Hollywood. Nichols had perhaps the most successful directorial debut in the history of American film with his adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966. He also directed The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, Working Girl, The Birdcage, and many others. Nichols wrote the screenplay to Nichols' The Birdcage, and Primary Colors, as well as co-writing Reds and Tootsie.