‘Saturday Night’ Is an ‘SNL’ Love-Fest, But Also Makes a Case for Why the Show Should Finally End
Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s movie about the frantic behind-the-scenes rush to mount the first ever episode of Saturday Night Live, just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. It received a “rapturous response” from audiences, further stoking rumors that it could be a potential Oscar contender, and presumably inspiring hundreds of aspiring screenwriters to begin work on scripts about the early days of MadTV.
Saturday Night is very much a “print the legend” type of movie, crammed full of infamous SNL anecdotes, often at the expense of the facts. Although, as Reitman admitted during the film’s introduction, there wasn’t always an objective truth to draw from. After interviewing “every living person we could find who was in the building on October 11, 1975, from Lorne (Michaels) to NBC pages,” Reitman and his writing partner Gil Kenan discovered that all of the stories “contradicted each other.”
This version of the SNL creation story turns Michaels into an idealistic crusader who’s been intentionally set-up to fail by NBC. The network, it seems, greenlit Michaels’ show purely to screw with Johnny Carson.
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None of this is true, of course. In reality, SNL made it to the air because it was actively championed by NBC’s president at the time Herbert Schlosser. Seemingly this contrivance was Reitman’s way of creating tension out of a story that we all know the outcome of. And it allowed him to turn Michaels into a Rudy-esque underdog, whose success defied the duplicitous machinations of his corporate overlords.
At first glance, the mythologizing of Saturday Night may seem like a glorified commercial for the SNL brand, conveniently timed to tee-up NBC’s 50th anniversary celebration. But beneath the surface, Saturday Night also subtly makes the case that Saturday Night Live may have run its course at this point.
A big reason why I came away with this almost contradictory interpretation is that Saturday Night rarely finds the Michaels character arguing that Saturday Night (Live) should be on TV because it’s good — or even funny. Instead, his main selling point is that his show will be different from what’s come before. The word “revolutionary” is used a lot. SNL, Michaels brags, will be a show for the first generation of viewers who grew up watching television.
Regardless of how one feels about the quality of SNL today, it’s certainly no longer revolutionary. It may have begun as a counter-cultural provocation, but now it exists within a well-established formula. Its decades on the air have made it a comfortably familiar staple of network television. Whatever unpredictable creative alchemy is being celebrated in Saturday Night, it’s clearly long since dissipated.
Which isn’t to say that SNL is bad now necessarily, but the Lorne Michaels of the movie is undeniably fighting against what SNL represents today. He’s very concerned with forging a new era of TV comedy, and leaving behind the older generation’s dated programming.
The movie even gives us a scene that could be interpreted as Michaels glimpsing his own future. Midway through the film, Michaels briefly intrudes on the set of a tacky NBC variety show in which Milton Berle is awkwardly shuffling around a stage with a bevy of chorus girls. He spies an elderly producer, slumped in a chair, who’s apathetically overseeing the cheesy program. At this point, Michaels seems to have a brief existential crisis, as if haunted by the idea that he too will one day become a passive executive locked into a tired formula.
But the Michaels of today isn’t running around backstage, embracing chaos in the name of artistic progress — he’s sipping white wine in his chic office because he’s been doing this show for longer than many of us have been alive.
Instead of watching Milton Berle grope dancers, old Lorne’s signing off on Elon Musk doing shitty Wario sketches. And say what you will about The Lawrence Welk Show, at least none of its episodes reached the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the time SNL hosted a network-mandated Donald Trump campaign stop.
Similarly, an unknown Chevy Chase (played by Cory Michael Smith) has a hostile run-in with Berle (J.K. Simmons) and is treated like shit by Uncle Milty, in almost exactly the same manner that Chase would go on to treat so many other young comedians, even future SNL cast members. Again, the movie seems to be slyly reminding us that all of these young upstarts will one day join the establishment, and become part of the very thing they made their careers by rebelling against.
Even if Michaels were to hand the reins of SNL down one day, his successor would be locked into the show’s existing formula. SNL is an institution now, but Saturday Night illustrates this show was at its best when it was all about disrupting institutions.
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