Ready for Prime Time — Saturday Night

I think we can all agree that Saturday Night Live is one of the most important programs in television history. Regardless of whether or not you enjoy the show or the rotating cast — I basically only watch “Weekend Update” these days, but I grew up during the 90s and early 00s Golden Era — the crowning achievement of Lorne Michaels’ career has left an indelible mark on American culture. Not only did it prove that there was still a place for sketch comedy on network TV, but it also showed that there was still a purpose for live content outside of your local news. Now in its 50th season, what was once considered a huge gamble for NBC is now certified Americana and the ultimate proving ground for new comedic talent. Beginning as a forum for untested writers and performers, it now is seen as the gateway to stardom for dozens of A-list stars.

But like many watershed moments in our history, it almost didn’t happen. Putting together a 90-minute live broadcast of comedy sketches, joke news, short films, musical performances, and commercial parodies, all anchored by a celebrity host that was meant to change each week was a herculean task that could have — and by the laws of averages probably should have — fallen apart at any number of points.

So how did it all come together? Well, if you want to know the true nuts and bolts of it, there are several books out there that detail the barely controlled chaos of it all. The film Saturday Night, inspired by many of the stories contained in those volumes, surely does have a fair amount of truth in it, but that’s not really the intent. Director Jason Reitman, teaming up once again with Gil Kenan on the script (the pair also co-wrote Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, with Kenan handling the directing duties), is much more concerned with the rich comic potential from that very chaos than a direct telling of how SNL ultimately came to be. And from that perspective, this project succeeds on a lot of fronts, giving us an entertaining, if exaggerated and far too neatly choreographed, farce about the genesis of TV’s premier variety show.

Taking place over the course of the 90 minutes before the first episode (and appropriately getting its nationwide release today on the 49th anniversary of that fateful evening), Saturday Night is all about the act of trying to capture lightning in a bottle, while also treating that lightning like an excitable cat running amok. There are so many disparate personalities and pitfalls vying for the attention of Michaels (played impeccably by Gabrielle LaBelle from The Fabelmans) in the tense run-up to the debut that it’s kind of amazing that he can even keep his mind from exploding. He’s got a cast of unknowns trying to find their place in a show that has no real identity, he’s got guest stars angling for more screen time, a stage crew on the brink of walking out due to the working conditions, a rundown that’s twice as long as he has time for, network executives breathing down his neck and circling like vultures just waiting for him to fail, an incomplete set, and a control room desperate to get at least some rehearsal in before the signal goes out.

It’s utterly insane, and yet, if you’ve ever worked in this business, it’s all too familiar. I’ve been in television for nearly 20 years now, and while I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by stalwart professionals at pretty much every level of production, and I’ve worked in highly controlled and routine environments, some of these issues still crop up from time to time. I’ve seen talent threaten to leave over creative differences. I’ve experienced my fair share of technical difficulties that took hours to solve. I’ve seen execs argue with union crew about what they will and won’t do because of contract stipulations. In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, the shows I worked on implemented strict testing and vaccine requirements before you could even come on the set, and one time I was tapped to potentially take over for our electronics operator even though I wasn’t trained on his equipment (I observed a bit and worked with him on proofing game material, so I knew the base program he used, but none of the other apparatuses of his station) and I’m not in his union, just because his test came back inconclusive on the first try (thankfully he was cleared on the second attempt, but that still ate 45 additional minutes and everyone was insistent that we still record the first episode on schedule). On certain projects, particularly my time in sports news, it was a matter of course to see some kind of snafu and just have the crew collectively throw up their hands and say, “Live TV!” because sometimes this shit just happens.

So from an inside baseball context, I was already predisposed to enjoy what the movie offered. It reminded me a lot of Sports Night, the late 90s sitcom produced by Aaron Sorkin that showed the funny and maddening ins and outs of a SportsCenter-esque live show, a motif Sorkin then carried on a decade-plus later with The Newsroom. There are several scenes in Saturday Night that echo those other shows, particularly the walk-and-talk moments and the almost hyperactive pace of the dialogue. However, the script itself goes for more base level laughs rather than heady material, and with the exception of a showdown between Head Writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey from Casual) and network censor Joan Carbunkle (Catherine Curtin from Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things), there aren’t really any “Sorkin moments” where one party has to prove themselves smarter — and therefore more valuable — than everyone else. In fact, part of LaBelle’s charm as Michaels is that he simply listens to other people, takes in the information given to him, occasionally answers back in a professional or quippy manner, and then moves on to the next thing. He’s not concerned with power moves and semantics, only with getting the show off the ground. If there’s a flaw in the character that the real Lorne Michaels might object to, it’s the fact that the film version is kind of naive about how network influence and leverage works.

This laser focus on Michaels’ part is a huge piece of what gives the picture a consistent energy to carry the audience through this hour and a half (which almost unfolds in real time), aided by some really terrific camera work courtesy of cinematographer Eric Steelberg, a frequent collaborator with Reitman. In this labyrinthine recreation of Studio 8H, Steelberg has to keep the camera in constant motion, making sure we can follow all the action as Michaels et al duck, bob, and weave through all the various nooks and crannies of the set, dressing rooms, writers rooms, and various production bays. It does a lot of heavy lifting, shouldering not just a good share of the narrative and thematic load, but also making up for the shortcomings of the editing, which is still competent, but sometimes a bit off, particularly in how Michaels miraculously shows up wherever he’s needed at the end of a scene he’s not involved in.

LaBelle can’t maintain this tempo all on his own, however, and that’s where the rest of this large ensemble cast comes in. Lamorne Morris plays Garrett Morris (no relation) as a man trying to understand his place in this show, using his background as a classical and operatic stage actor as a clever way to mask the more obvious question of tokenism, and in that respect he’s given a lot of great moments. Cory Michael Smith, who I’ve been a fan of since he was the Riddler on Gotham, makes an excellent Chevy Chase, not just in appearance and humor, but also from the standpoint of an ambitious up-and-comer eager for the moment when he can make the leap to superstardom. Ella Hunt, who I’ve never seen before, plays Gilda Radner so perfectly that I believed I was watching the real Gilda. Other noteworthy stand-ins include Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Emily Fairn as Larraine Newman, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, and Matt Wood rounding out the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” as John Belushi. Each of them has a really nice scene or two. You also have Matthew Rhys doing a dead-on impression of George Carlin, Jon Batiste playing Billy Preston in an inspired bit of casting, Nicholas Braun from Succession pulling double duty as Andy Kaufman AND Jim Henson (and acquitting himself admirably on both fronts), and the fantastic Rachel Sennott as Michaels’ then-wife and co-producer Rosie Shuster.

Oddly enough, it ends up being the most famous members of this group that give the least impressive performances. Finn Wolfhard plays an NBC page who just stands outside the building handing out free tickets to the show in what basically amounts to a cameo. Willem Dafoe is our main antagonist in the form of NBC exec David Tebet, but he’s little more than a Robert Evans-type Hollywood vampire, kind of like Al Pacino’s character in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. He’s just there to publicly blow smoke up Michaels’ ass while simultaneously keeping his finger on the button to dump to a rerun of The Tonight Show (Tebet famously recruited Johnny Carson to NBC) should anything go awry, which is completely ineffective because we know the show’s going to go off. There’s nothing triumphant about his last-second call to “go live,” because we all understand how this turns out, and deep down, we can also see that his threat is mostly just manufactured tension for its own sake, as common sense would dictate that the show was given the green light long before the camera started rolling on the famous “Wolverines” sketch. Finally, there’s J.K. Simmons playing Milton Berle as a secondary threat — both to take over for Carlin as host and to hit on Chevy’s fiancé Jacqueline (Kaia Gerber) and tell him he’s nothing while literally swinging his dick around — that just feels like Simmons doing a phoned-in impersonation of Uncle Miltie. Now, Berle did eventually host the show, and apparently he was so toxic that Michaels personally banned him for life afterward, but there are so many more organic and environmental obstacles in the way of this program not making it to air that the character just feels like overkill.

On a meta level, one of the more interesting things for me is the source of the film itself. This is a Sony/Columbia production, not an NBC/Universal one, and honestly, it shows. Between Berle, Tebet, and Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol constantly trying to get Michaels to agree to network notes and allow for live product placement during the show, NBC itself does not come off well in this. It’s something of a dilemma from where I sit, because on the one hand, if this were an NBC product, it would be completely sanitized and congratulatory, allowing for none of the humor and nuance that we ended up getting. On the other, since most of the original cast and crew are still alive, you do have to wonder why Reitman did this through Sony, knowing that if he got anything egregiously wrong, there were people who could raise a stink, and meanwhile all of his villains (save Ebersol) are dead and can’t defend themselves. In the end, I think we got the best version of whatever they wanted the story to be, but the TV worker in me is given a bit of pause.

This is especially the case because despite all the crazy tangents and storylines, everything wraps up almost too tidily to be completely satisfying. Again, we all know the show goes off without a hitch and becomes a five-decade juggernaut, but for all the insanity, the speed at which it’s all resolved leaves a bit to be desired, and this version of Lorne Michaels is a bit too wide-eyed to be truly believed. Things come together easily and conveniently in the third act (including the recruitment of Josh Brener as writer Alan Zweibel), which retroactively throws off the pacing. We spend nearly 85 minutes setting up all these problems and showing why this shouldn’t have worked, and then we put a happy bow on it so fast that it feels like an underwhelming SNL sketch that Lorne is trying desperately to dump out of. By no means does it ruin the hilarity and sneaky heart behind everything leading up to it, but it feels like in trying to keep to the 90-minute framework, things just solve themselves far too abruptly.

All that said, this is a really enjoyable bit of revisionist history, especially if you’re a fan of the show or just a media buff like me. Honestly, the biggest letdown for me isn’t even about the movie itself, but in the opportunity that’s going to be missed down the road. We’re into Awards Season now, and after what’s been a disappointing year at the cinema so far, you can expect a lot of the Oscar hopefuls to be backloaded between now and late December. As such, this is a very good film that could easily get lost in the shuffle. Further, if there was one prize that you’d think it’d be a shoe-in for, it would be the new Best Casting category. Unfortunately, that doesn’t start until after next year’s ceremony, so this brilliant ensemble won’t get the recognition it so richly deserves.

Grade: B+

Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Who was your favorite cast member on the show? Just how many drugs was everyone on during this thing? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!

Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on October 12, 2024.