SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night Review

The Scattershot Documentary Series SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night Can’t Focus on Its Real Target

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Saturday Night Live has always loved to celebrate itself, but that’s about to hit overdrive with its 50th anniversary this year. First up is SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, a series of four random hourlong documentaries that comes out on Peacock tomorrow, with each one looking at the show through a different narrow lens. As with all projects like this, the quality level varies with each installment, but they’re all unified by one major thought: ain’t SNL great?

You wouldn’t expect less from a series that exists to commemorate an anniversary, but it’s a little glaring in the second episode, “Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room.” The SNL formula that’s been in place for decades seems custom-built to crush the show’s writers, who churn through ridiculous hours every week producing sketches that most likely won’t ever make air. This episode goes behind the scenes of last year’s Ayo Edibiri-hosted episode, following how it was created over the course of six days, with a focus on the hands-on, script-to-screen role the show’s unheralded writers play in getting their work on TV. We see current writers—including Celeste Yim, Jimmy Fowlie, Asha Ward, Ceara O’Sullivan, the Please Don’t Destroy guys, and more—pitch ideas on Monday, write them during all-night sessions on Tuesday, return to the studio mere hours later to sit in on a cast table read, rewrite sketches multiple times between Wednesday and Saturday, and also act as de facto producers for their sketches that make the cut for Saturday’s dress rehearsal. Writers work directly with the crew who make the sets and costumes to realize their vision, give notes to the cast members and hosts performing their sketches, discuss blocking with the stage director and camera crew, and basically co-produce and co-direct their own sketches, while also regularly rewriting them. (Former writer Harper Steele shares her theory that this experience is why so many SNL writers have gone on to direct movies and TV.) And then a lot of those sketches get cut between dress rehearsal and the live show. It seems like a staggeringly inefficient way to make a TV show, and also one that unnecessarily taxes the writers. At one point Fowlie calls it the best job he’s ever had while also noting his mental health has never been worse.

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“Written By” is the best of the four because it’s the most in-depth glimpse we’ve ever gotten at how this show is created. It’s also baffling, because despite writers past and present complaining about the extreme toll those Tuesday all-nighters take on them, at no point does anybody seriously question why this is how the show is made. Former writers seem to view it as a badge of honor and something that unifies them all across generations, instead of the shared trauma it sounds like. Tina Fey says the whole system is “built for competition,” which she considers a good thing. At no point does anybody explain why they think this is a good way to make a TV show; it’s a system that was created back in the ‘70s by a bunch of chemically stimulated twentysomethings, and somehow it’s still in place today. It’s impossible to watch “Written By” and not be struck by how unhealthy this seems, but the episode just kind of grazes by the topic.

This system, and the notorious Tuesday all-nighters, is well-covered turf for SNL zealots. The hardest of the hardcore won’t learn much new from it or the first episode, “Five Minutes,” which talks to various cast members about the show’s audition process, with copious clips of those auditions, many of which are already available on YouTube. The stories of getting asked at the last minute to drop everything and fly to New York, of performing in an almost-empty studio in front of a completely silent Lorne Michaels and other producers, and of basically never knowing where they stand with Michaels or the show at any given moment are well-known. And although the idea of looking closely at how one single sketch came together is a solid one for a documentary, “More Cowbell” offers a cursory glimpse at the origins of 2000’s ever-popular Blue Oyster Cult sketch, without really trying to understand why it’s become so culturally omnipresent.

There’s a good shot that kind of fan will jump straight to the series’ fourth episode, just like I did, which covers a topic that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention during the show’s history of regular ongoing self-hagiography: the catastrophic 11th season, which aired from 1985 to 1986, and marked Lorne Michaels’ return to the show after a five-year absence. It is, as the episode’s title calls it, “The Weird Year”—a universally hated season that resulted in SNL’s (quickly retracted) cancellation.

This is the year where the cast simply made no sense. It included a pretty recognizable actor who had already been nominated for an Oscar in the form of Randy Quaid, back when he was still likable. It included future Oscar nominee Joan Cusack, who wasn’t famous yet but had already popped up in small roles in a handful of teen-oriented comedies. It included the only SNL cast member to ever go on and win an Oscar, 20-year-old Robert Downey Jr., not yet famous but recognizable to anybody who had seen Weird Science in the theater just a couple of months before the season began. And it inexplicably included Anthony Michael Hall, the 17-year-old co-star of Weird Science (and Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club), who played the original Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Vacation, and who, at the time, was one of the biggest teen stars in Hollywood. (Hall is still the youngest cast member in the show’s history.) None of them were comedians or had sketch experience, and they never quite gelled with the experienced comics on the cast, which included Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn and Dennis Miller in their first seasons, as well as the show’s first openly gay cast member, Terry Sweeney, who was promoted from the writing staff, and the first Black woman to join the cast, Danitra Vance (who was also gay, but not openly at the time). Also on hand was future comedy superstar Damon Wayans, who the show barely did anything with, and who infamously got fired after “going rogue” during a sketch live on air.

“The Weird Year” quickly presents the existential stakes for this season. NBC almost cut the show back to a monthly special with Billy Crystal as a regular host, but Michaels was given another shot at the helm, with veteran writers Al Franken and Tom Davis as head writers. New interviews with Franken and interviews from 2005 with Michaels and Davis (who died in 2012) show that they realized the stakes, that SNL was dead if it didn’t pull this season off, and ultimately that’s what happened—very briefly. Terrible early episodes were met with vicious reviews, and the entire season was surrounded by bad vibes from the start. Despite a few bright spots—Lovitz, Dunn, and Miller; the debut of Tom Hanks as host; a late-season episode “directed” by Francis Ford Coppola that represents the most experimental and formula-breaking episode in the show’s history—the season was a disaster and NBC cancelled it after it wrapped. In an interview from 2005 superstar agent Bernie Brillstein says he personally talked NBC head Brandon Tartikoff into un-cancelling the show, giving Michaels one more one more shot. Only Lovitz, Dunn and Miller were retained, and the next season added Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, and Dana Carvey, kicking off the show’s late ‘80s renaissance.

“The Weird Year” uses copious interviews with people who worked on that season, including cast members (Sweeney, Wayans, Dunn, Lovitz, and Hall), writers (Franken, A. Whitney Brown, a 2005 interview with Davis), and hosts (Hanks, John Lithgow, Griffin Dunne), delivering a broad, relatively deep look into this infamous catastrophe. It’s hard not to side with Wayans when he explains why he did what he did, and throughout you’ll see more signs of the institutional flaws that define SNL as much as its recurring sketches. And it earnestly tries to give Danitra Vance, one of the most unfairly treated cast members in the show’s history, her due. It’s missing something crucial at its center, though: Lorne Michaels himself. He does discuss it in interview clips filmed in 2005, but he doesn’t say anything deep or illuminating, basically just restating the facts of the situation.

That gets to the heart of the problem with SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, as well as the show’s frequent attempts to write its own legacy: the guy at the center, the one who created it and has lorded over it for almost its entire history, gives nothing away. Michaels clearly has no interest in talking deeply about the show or his career, and so a documentary like “The Weird Year” has to awkwardly feel its way around its topic like somebody groping through a darkened room. The insights from the cast members and writers sum up the complicated feelings backstage that year, but the person who knows the most about the inner workings of that season somehow has nothing to say. “The Weird Year” is the only one of these four documentaries with any interview footage from Michaels, and it’s all 20 years old and barely touches on the subject at hand.

Whether it’s a calculated attempt to create an air of mystery, some fundamental part of his nature, or a management technique to keep his employees on their toes, this aloofness is, by all accounts, Lorne Michaels’ most defining trait. Writers and comedians who’ve worked with him for decades still describe him as essentially unknowable. Perhaps he doesn’t want to take the spotlight away from the people who make the show, but given everything that makes it onto TV is approved by Michaels and thus filtered through his sensibilities, and given that he’s been the executive in charge for 45 of its 50 seasons, nobody knows more and could share more insight about Saturday Night Live than him. Without Michaels attempting even a cursory discussion about the show, it makes documentaries like these feel weightless and unfinished. They’re all, in part, about a topic that refuses to be covered: Lorne Michaels, whose identity, whether intentionally or not, is also that of the show itself.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

The Scattershot Documentary Series SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night Can’t Focus on Its Real Target