The Secret to Longevity, According to Saturday Night Live

The Atlantic

14-02-2025

As Saturday Night Live nears its official 50th anniversary, the pageantry and buildup around the big event has reminded me of something fairly unfunny: a royal jubilee. It's fascinating to consider how an anarchic weekly comedy show has developed the backstage air of a British royal drama, between the often-hagiographic retrospectives, the many 'best of' lists appraising its hallowed cast and most revered sketches, and the constant speculation over who might succeed its 80-year-old creator, Lorne Michaels, as executive producer. But what occurred to me as I took in two recent examinations of SNL history—the four-part Peacock miniseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, and the music-focused special Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music —was that the show's five-decades-deep lore is as important to its long-running success as the comedy itself.
Full credit to these undertakings; each one is an incredibly meticulous, self-reflective work that avoids an easy, by-the-numbers approach. Documentaries recounting the show's famous moments and scandals have littered the airwaves over the years, and the book Live From New York already offers an authoritative history. But these new looks back delve into SNL 's greater legend in ways both whimsical and sometimes genuinely surprising, even for a devotee. Somehow, they mine new territory on what is possibly the most over-discussed TV series in American culture.
The common theme for all of these works? Just how impressive it is that the show gets made, week after week, year in and year out, despite the seeming impossibility of the enterprise. SNL50 does this by appealing to the highest rank of SNL lovers. The first level of the fandom is the simplest; it entails enjoying new episodes, glomming onto the stars of the current ensemble, and rewatching favorite sketches. The second involves plumbing the history and acknowledging the legendary cast members of yore, such as Phil Hartman, Gilda Radner, and Dana Carvey. But the level after that comprises studying the traditional, Rube Goldbergian process that creates everything behind the scenes. It's a delicate dance of gathering material for a mix of cast members and celebrity guests while incorporating Michaels's remote dispensations of wisdom. This sensitive practice accounts for the peaks and valleys of perceived quality that SNL has experienced throughout its tenure.
SNL50 cleverly lays out that cycle in its four distinct installments, which dig into a particular niche of how SNL has ticked along for half a century. The first, 'Five Minutes,' is about the auditions; it's particularly enamored with the show's mythos, as any dedicated viewer (or aspiring cast member) might be with this peek behind the curtain. It takes advantage of an incredible archive of audition footage from cast members young and old, as well as some recognizable figures who inexplicably didn't make the final cut—Stephen Colbert, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Coolidge. There are lovely, nostalgic moments in which current cast members watch their shaky, nervous first steps, but I was struck by how little 'Five Minutes' actually explains why the people who make it through get picked.
The lack of definitive reasoning is where I felt the sphinxlike figure of Michaels looming. The placid Canadian has run SNL for 45 of its 50 years (he took a five-season break in the '80s). He's seen his reputation shift several times over the eras, from revolutionary shit-stirrer to staid comedy gatekeeper to the grandfatherly charmer he is today. But he's also, somehow, kept himself and his machinations a little opaque; he's largely absent from the various new documentaries. 'Five Minutes' puts the spotlight on other crucial, less heralded names in the SNL production system over the years, such as the former longtime producers Marci Klein and Lindsay Shookus. But when discussing what makes for a good audition, many of their answers boiled down to something ineffable: It's either an obvious yes, or it isn't.
That's the tricky balance these new anniversary specials have struck: going behind the scenes without fully puncturing the mystique. SNL50 's third chapter, 'Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room,' assumes a fly-on-the-wall position to reveal a single episode's genesis. It portrays the ideation and writing process for the actor Ayo Edebiri's debut hosting gig in February 2024. Any deep fan knows some of the stressful basics here, but it's fun to see them play out—writers throwing concepts to the guest while they squat on the carpet in Michaels's cavernous office; Tuesday's maddening, all-night scripting rush; and then the miraculous alchemy that somehow turns their grab bag of notions into full-fledged pieces for TV, some rewritten just before airing.
Edebiri's appearance was, in my memory, a perfectly ordinary edition of SNL —a couple of good sketches, others more forgettable, with the actress an energetic and game emcee. Watching the herculean, possessed frenzy of making it was much more entrancing, like producing it seems to be. It was hard not to get swept up in the mythmaking on display: The institution's survival seems to hinge on the staff's belief in its fabled scrappiness, compelling it to keep doing an absurd amount of work. Sure, the chaos seems like a bizarre way to put together a live TV show, but can you come up with a better method?
The most fascinating section of SNL50 is 'Season 11: The Weird Year,' which lays bare how easily the flow can be disrupted. It focuses on what's regarded as one of the oddest and worst runs in SNL history, so bizarre that Madonna opened Season 12 by reading a statement purportedly from NBC: 'It was all a dream—a horrible, horrible dream.' Somewhat tellingly, it's the only entry of the miniseries with much on-screen involvement from Michaels himself. He recounts returning to SNL in 1985 after a half-decade hiatus and deciding to completely overhaul the cast with young, buzzy talent; he brought on actors such as Robert Downey Jr., Randy Quaid, and Joan Cusack, along with the cast's first openly gay performer, Terry Sweeney, and the first Black woman to star, Danitra Vance.
A few of the new hires worked: Michaels retained Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn, and Dennis Miller for Season 12, which was otherwise a total teardown. But overall, what's interesting about Season 11 is how the producer deviated from his established formula—of drawing unknown talent from the stand-up circuit and the country's best improv and sketch groups—to go bigger and bolder, only to be left with a cast that lacked chemistry and was tougher to mold. Once more, I realized that the miniseries is, inadvertently or not, arguing for the cloistered way Michaels and company operate. It's a noble and in-depth examination of one of the series' biggest failures, which saw Michaels fire two cast members halfway through and the writers undermine the season on-screen before it had even ended. Yet for all the dysfunction it lays bare, 'The Weird Year' also makes a stealthy case for what keeps SNL otherwise stable.
The remaining installment further breaks down the show's humor, as opposed to just its creation, by fleshing out in wonderful detail the famous ' More Cowbell ' sketch—in which Will Ferrell and the guest host Christopher Walken crack up their castmates during an absurd recording session of Blue Öyster Cult's '(Don't Fear) the Reaper.' Meanwhile, 50 Years of SNL Music is a gorgeously edited repository of SNL 's music history. Interviewees discuss major moments in-depth, such as Sinead O'Connor's shocking protest of the Catholic Church, Ashlee Simpson's lip-synching, and the punk band Fear bringing a group of moshers onstage. Better still, the co-directors Questlove and Oz Rodriguez also illuminate how the musical guests have broken ground. Avant-garde musicians appeared early on, including Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, along with the first rap group to perform on national TV (Funky 4 + 1, in 1981). Even segments as seemingly divorced from the comedy as the musical acts can become part of the lore—just as a one-off routine can have an hour-long backstory.
There's an underlying triumphalism to all this watchable, well-done anniversary media. They're a procession of clips, interviews, and behind-the-scenes tidbits that assure the viewer that SNL is not going anywhere. Yes, the auditions are hell, the schedule is exasperating, and sometimes whole episodes don't connect. But I'm reminded of Winston Churchill's oft-mangled quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. SNL is a beautiful, if strangely shaped, comedic edifice. But after 50 years, it's still standing.
*Illustration sources:
Alan Singer / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty; Will Heath / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty; Dana Edelson / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty; Yvonne Hemsey / Getty; Alison Hale / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty.