SCTV was created as an offshoot of Toronto's Second City stage troupe after producer Andrew Alexander bought the Canadian rights to The Second City for one dollar in 1974 and later gathered the cast to brainstorm a TV format.

The show has no 'created by' credit because attendees at the original brainstorming meeting disagreed on who actually came up with the concept of presenting programming from 'the world's smallest TV station', with either Del Close or Sheldon Patinkin credited by different accounts.

Rick Moranis, then known as a Canadian radio personality, was the only main cast member who did not come from the ranks of The Second City improv troupe.

For a time during the first season, John Candy was simultaneously a regular cast member on three different Canadian TV series airing on three different networks: SCTV, The David Steinberg Show, and Coming Up Rosie.

SCTV moved production twice: after Toronto's Global station dropped the show due to high costs, it relocated to Edmonton's CITV/Allarcom studios for season three, then returned to Toronto in January 1982 for the remainder of its run.

NBC picked up SCTV in 1981 mainly as a stopgap because producer Dick Ebersol had to return to Saturday Night Live to save it from cancellation, leaving NBC with an emergency programming gap that SCTV filled as what was meant to be a temporary two-year fix.

The famous Bob and Doug McKenzie 'Great White North' sketch was originally created by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as a sardonic, throwaway response to the CBC's demand for two minutes of mandatory 'identifiably Canadian content' per episode, since American broadcasts ran two minutes shorter than Canadian ones.

The laugh track heard in early SCTV episodes was not artificial; it was recorded from real audience reactions during live performances at the Second City theatre.

During Joe Flaherty's 1982 Emmy acceptance speech for the episode 'Moral Majority', presenter Milton Berle kept interrupting sarcastically, prompting Flaherty to retort 'Sorry, Uncle Miltie...go to sleep,' a moment SCTV later parodied in a sketch where Flaherty beats up a Berle lookalike.

The Shmenge Brothers polka act, played by John Candy and Eugene Levy, was based on real Edmonton-based polka cable show host Gaby Haas and became popular enough to spawn the HBO special The Last Polka, itself a parody of Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz.