SNL turns 50! How Lorne Michaels made comedy cool again
SNL turns 50! How Lorne Michaels made comedy cool again | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on February 19, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: 50 years ago, a Canadian comedian named Lorne Michaels kicked off the first season of what would rapidly become a cultural institution. That show is SNL, aka Saturday Night Live, a mainstay of late-night entertainment. It's also the longest-running, most Emmy-nominated, and highest-rated weekly late-night show in television history. How has Michaels done it? Ten years ago, Susan Morrison, articles editor at The New Yorker, rolled up her sleeves to find out. Susan is the author of the newly released title 'Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,' the definitive biography of SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels, and joins The Excerpt to share her insights.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Chevy Chase:
Live from New York, it's Saturday Night.
Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, February 19th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. 50 years ago, a Canadian comedian named Lorne Michaels kicked off the first season of what would rapidly become a cultural institution. That show, of course, is SNL or Saturday Night Live, a mainstay of late-night entertainment. The show's well-earned reputation for poking fun at politicians and celebrities while pushing cultural boundaries has allowed it to stay relevant to varying degrees to multiple generations of Americans.
Eddie Murphy:
I just want to live in a house like yours, my friend.
Maybe when there's nobody home, I'll break in.
Dana Taylor:
It's also the longest-running most Emmy-nominated and highest-rated weekly late-night show in television history. How has Michaels done it? 10 years ago, Susan Morrison, articles editor at The New Yorker, rolled up her sleeves to find out. Susan is the author of the newly released title, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, the definitive biography of SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels and joins us now to share her insights. Thanks for joining me on The Excerpt, Susan.
Susan Morrison:
Thank you for having me. It's fun to talk about Lorne.
Dana Taylor:
Lorne Michaels is famous for keeping to himself. When you first decided to write this biography, you resolved to do it even if he didn't give you direct access, which was likely, and then suddenly he opened his doors to you. Were you surprised and what do you think convinced him to let you in?
Susan Morrison:
Well, when I was thinking about writing this book, it was just after the 40th anniversary of the show and I realized that no one has had a bigger effect on what Americans think is funny than Lorne Michaels. It's an enormous influence on the culture. I knew Lorne a bit because I had worked for him briefly in the '80s when he was doing his one spectacular public flop, which was a comedy hour in prime time called The New Show. And then I went to see him in his office, and as I said, we knew each other. We had seen each other every few years since the '80s. So when I showed up there and I said, "Listen, I'm going to write this book about you. I don't need anything from you because you know I'm conversant in your world, but if you wanted to participate and talk to me, it would be a richer, better book and your legacy deserves this kind of a thing."
SNL turns 50! How Lorne Michaels made comedy cool again.
In the decades since its creation, SNL has become a cultural institution for American comedy.
And he looked stricken at first because, as you say, he's a very private man and for 40 years he had pretty much stayed behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz. And he said he'd think about it. And then within a couple of days we were sitting having a drink and he was just unspooling his many, many stories. He's a great talker, which is the best thing that you can have as a journalist. And I have a couple of theories as to why he decided to throw in with me. One is that after the 40th, he was really starting to be aware of his legacy. There were a lot of important people from the show's early days who had died, who were not there. There was no Gilda Radner, no Phil Hartman, no Chris Farley, and I think he sensed that the situation could even be worse by the time of the 50th. He was realizing the time was marching on.
He also knew me a bit. He respected me as a journalist for The New Yorker, which is a magazine he reads and likes, and I think he thought if a biography was going to be inflicted upon him, better it be written by me than some entertainment biz hustler who was going to turn it around in a year. I don't think either one of us realized that it would take me 10 years, but it did because I have a rather absorbing day job.
Dana Taylor:
You wrote that when Lorne Michaels originally envisioned the show, he told NBC executives that he wanted to do a show that looked as if quote "a bunch of kids sneaked into a studio after all the adults went home" unquote. What did he share with you about his initial vision for the show?
Susan Morrison:
Well, Lorne had been working in Hollywood for almost 10 years, bouncing around between very bland, middle-of-the-road, almost plasticky variety shows. So Lorne realized that when he was working for shows hosted by people like Perry Como and Phyllis Diller, that television at that time was stuck in a real backwater. He was always the youngest guy on the writing staff. Most of the people there were in their 50s and 60s. They had begun in radio, which was close to vaudeville, and he noticed that the rest of the culture, the movies, there were huge groundbreaking movies being put out by everyone from Scorsese to Robert Altman to Terrence Malick and music. It was rock and roll. It was David Bowie and The Stones, but somehow television was stuck a generation behind. It was stuck in the '50s.
So his rather groundbreaking idea was to take this old format and bring it up to date by letting it be written and performed by people of his generation, what he called the TV generation. They were the first generation to have grown up with television all around them. Aside from it being programmed and acted by the kids after the grownups went home, the content would be different. TV would be a big target of their satire. They made fun of game shows and news shows and sitcoms and soap operas. And also the thing that distinguished what Lorne wanted to do is he wanted to put the stuff of his people's real lives on television. He wanted there to be sketches about your pot dealer and complicated sex and drugs, rock and rolls relationships, and the fact that everyone got mugged in New York City every other day in the '70s. It was a really a far cry from what you were seeing on the Donnie and Marie show.
Dana Taylor:
The original cast of SNL was full of comedic actors who went on to become huge stars, including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Jane Curtin. Later on, there was Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, and Maya Rudolph among many, many others. The list of superstars who made their names on the show is huge. How did and how does Michaels' adjust to the ongoing defection of talent?
Susan Morrison:
Well, Lorne likes to say that he's the world expert in what happens to people when they get famous. It's happened to him so many times. But what's interesting about the fact that he has turned out to be such a star maker and the show has produced so many stars is that in the beginning, that was the farthest thing from his intention. He hired people who were complete unknowns. They had never been on television. He didn't want anybody who had been on television. He was more interested in hiring people who had a little bit of theater experience. He always said that he had one foot in the theater. And he envisioned this troupe of the not ready for prime time players as always being background characters.
So toward the middle of the first season of the show, Chevy Chase became a breakout star. He was on the cover of New York Magazine, and I think the headline was, "I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not. Chevy Chase is the heir apparent to Johnny Carson." This really threw Lorne. He had no idea that a star would emerge from his show. And in fact, it threatened his show. Once Chevy was getting movie offers and on the phone with the coast all the time, it really disrupted the ecology of the show. Everybody was like, "Wait a minute. He's the star. What am I? Chopped liver?" And it introduced an element of competition into the family feeling of the show. A couple of years later, Belushi left after Animal House. Then Dan Aykroyd left because he wanted to make the Blues Brothers movie.
And he started to recognize that that was going to be the permanent state of this show, that over all the decades people would come, they would be green and grateful, and then they would develop and the phrase he uses a lot is, "They would build a bridge strong enough that they could walk across it and move on to the next thing." He realized that like New York City, which is the show's home, SNL exists to be in a permanent state of flux. Buildings will come down, new buildings will go up in the same way the cast has to remake itself again and again like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Dana Taylor:
I'm picturing the SNL studio surrounded by scaffolding, which is what I think of when I think of New York City.
Susan Morrison:
Exactly.
Dana Taylor:
In the book, you chronicle how each week's show comes together beginning with Monday and ending with a 90-minute, somewhat magic window of time between the dress rehearsal and the live show when it all comes together. Tell me about that.
Susan Morrison:
It's so fascinating to be actually at the show every day of the week because each day has its own particular set of tasks and imperatives. And Monday starts, it's very mellow. Everyone is just getting to know the host, trying to make the host feel, "It's going to be fine. This is going to be scary. Everybody has your back." But day by day, the tension ratchets up. It's almost like The Hunger Games, if you think about it. On Wednesday, they read four hours worth of comedy sketches, but everybody in the room knows that by Saturday Night, they're only going to be seven or eight left. And what's interesting about watching Lorne is that he is very attentive to everybody else's opinion all during the week. He listens to what everybody says, what everyone's opinion is. In fact, I've seen him have a little sheet of paper at a meeting and gently tick off people's names as they've spoken because he wants to hear from everybody.
And what happens on Saturday, it's almost like Superman coming out of a phone booth, that all changes after dress rehearsal. Lorne is the decider. He is in charge. He has sat through the dress rehearsal in a little foxhole, a dim space under the audience bleachers where he watches the dress rehearsal on a monitor, and he takes it all in. It's like he has 10 eyes and 15 ears and barks changes and commands and orders, and "That lighting cue is off. You cut to the door. That wig is starring in the sketch. The sweater is too dowdy. She's too loud here." And assistants are writing it all down. And all of that is then brought in front of the whole cast and everybody, it's the most intense... You feel like you're at a NASA liftoff. It's an emergency room. And that is his secret sauce. That's his superpower that he can stand there between 10:30 and 11:30 and really remake the show. I think it's that adrenaline and the fact that it's live that makes it different from anything else that you see on television. There are no second chances.
Dana Taylor:
The show is known for what you've called its blistering political satire, and both Republicans and Democrats have seen themselves lampooned on a regular basis. How does Michaels think about the show's impact on how Americans see politics?
Susan Morrison:
Well, he's always felt that what the show's obligation was was to speak truth to power and to needle whoever it is who's in office. The first season, Dan Aykroyd did a hilarious Jimmy Carter impersonation, and probably the most well-known sketch featuring him was Carter in his call-in radio show talking a caller down from a bad acid trip, which is so incredibly funny. Of course, they did Bill Clinton, they did Obama. Sometimes I think he feels pressure from outsiders and sometimes even from his young cast members for the show to really function as an arm of the Democratic party. But that's not what he's doing. He's going for where the laughs are. If Bill Clinton is funny, I'm thinking of Daryl Hammond as Clinton making a secret service jog past and into a McDonald's, then that's where he is going to go.
It's a challenge now that we're living in a time when I think almost all of his young staff feel like we're in a cataclysmic moment where our system of government could turn into a monarchy. And there's a real pressure from within the show to really hammer on Donald Trump, and they certainly have hammered on him. A lot of different performers have played him ably. He will always tell whoever's playing Trump to give him a spark of charm. And that's not because he wants to rehabilitate Trump in anyone's eyes. He doesn't want people to see Trump as a better leader because God knows, we all know that is not what he is, but it's about show business, which is what the show is at the core.
Lorne knows that, and every person who's ever written a James Bond movie knows that you want to make the villain engaging in some way. You want to give him a little bit of oily charm. Think of Blofeld in Goldfinger or think of Alan Rickman in the Die Hard movies. If you just make them purely repellent. I mean, we see Donald Trump on the news enough. If you make them just purely repellent, people are going to want to turn off the television. You have to make it entertainment, and one of the things he likes to say is that "idiots play, assholes don't." And what he means is that they play to the crowd. They engage the audience.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but he never forgets the fact that what he's doing is an entertainment show. It's comedy. He distinguishes what he does from what he thinks, I think, the Daily Show does, or say Samantha Bee, when she had her show. And those people were funny and they certainly put funny stuff on the air, but you get the sense as a viewer that the main mover was politics.
Dana Taylor:
Susan's book, Lorne is on bookshelves now. Susan, thanks for being on The Excerpt.
Susan Morrison:
Thank you very much. This was fun.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
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The New Faith-Based Hollywood
BUFFALO, New York — In the middle of April, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Mario Lopez of Saved By the Bell fame is shivering outside on set, periodically bundled in a down jacket. Crew members and Los Angeles-based actors mill about in winter gear. Behind them sit a close-to-frozen pond, barren trees and a row of identical light blue homes. Lopez is the star of A Christmas Spark, an upcoming film about a middle-aged lawyer who returns home around the holidays to become a firefighter — and, spoiler alert, finds love along the way. It sounds, looks and feels just like a Hallmark movie. But peek behind the cameras, and A Christmas Spark is part of a new media boom, funded largely by conservative donors, that's reshaping entertainment in the Trump era. It's produced by Great American Media, a company focused on family friendly, faith-based content and led by Bill Abbott, the former CEO of the parent company of the Hallmark Channel who left amid a nasty political split during Donald Trump's first administration. Despite the stars and the sets, we're far from a major studio production. And for GAM, that's on purpose. Most Hollywood studios and streaming services are dealing with turbulent financial waters and concerns about looming tariffs. But in an era in which Americans are interested in living their politics in the companies they support and the media they consume, outfits like Great American Media — which consists of a streaming service, multiple cable networks and produces much of its own content — are growing. GAM is part of an expanding network of faith-based production companies and streaming services that are finding success in an increasingly polarized country. They're both slowly building dedicated audiences and have cashed in with big hits, like the Angel Studios movie Sound of Freedom, which made $250 million on a less than $15-million budget. These companies insist they aren't partisan, seeking only to create a brand associated with family and amorphous American values that parents can feel comfortable watching at home. But GAM and like-minded companies are able to succeed where secular alternatives struggle by using a sense of conservative aggrievement with Hollywood to their benefit. Bad review in a mainstream publication? It's the liberal media, even more reason to support their offerings. Themes like same-sex marriage or pre-marital sex offend you? Try faith-based media. For decades, many of the same concepts could be applied to Hallmark or Lifetime films. While not overtly political, they espoused generally culturally conservative values and a moral tradition that appealed to conservative viewers, with an emphasis on small-town living and heterosexual love stories. But as Hallmark has begun making some content about gay couples and hasn't committed to promoting unambiguously religious themes, a swath of its fans have gone looking for something else that more directly conforms with their politics and their values. That's where many of them find GAM and a growing slate of faith-based or avowedly conservative production companies. Longtime president of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo, for example, helped to bankroll Wonder Project, the Texas-based studio that produced House of David, the wildly popular retelling of the biblical shepherd's story that found a home on Amazon's Prime Video. Leo received a $1.6-billion gift that he's using with the express purpose of making culture more conservative. 'You're only going to accomplish so much in shifting American cultural and social life through politics and public policy if you're not dealing with the cultural institutions that are at the choke point of American opinion, American sentiment, American thinking,' Leo tells POLITICO Magazine. 'So entertainment, of course, is a really important part of trying to rebalance the culture.' GAM leaders don't state their ambitions as quite as directly political. But they also believe there's money and cultural influence in serving people who are tired of what they're getting from Hollywood. 'We're focused on meeting the needs of an unmet audience,' Abbott wrote in an email to POLITICO Magazine. 'Our viewers are multigenerational and value content that reflects faith, family, and country.' Abbott, a spry, 63-year-old Long Islander by birth, has been working in family entertainment since 1988. He worked at big networks like CBS and Fox before he joined the Crown Media Family Networks in 2000 and was named CEO of Crown Media — the parent company that operates Hallmark programming — in 2009. He oversaw the launch of the Hallmark Movie Channel, got Hallmark into the scripted series game, and presided over decades of sustained success for the brand. Everything looked rosy before a tumultuous breakup during President Donald Trump's first term spurred by a White House Christmas event, an ad for a wedding registry website and a public outcry. 'In 2017, you could see the change in the chairman and the management at the parent company and the family to become much more woke,' Abbott said in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when asked why he left Hallmark. 'And DEI driven, very DEI driven. They were in DEI before it was cool to be in DEI.' According to Abbott, in 2017 the Trump White House chose Hallmark to host a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. After the network hosted the show, he says he was told by his bosses at the Hallmark Channel's parent company, that 'you're either for humanity or you're against it,' chastising him for agreeing to host the event. Hallmark did not respond to requests for comment. Then, in 2020, Abbott departed the company after a December 2019 ad for wedding website that depicted a same-sex couple exchanging vows and kissing. After the conservative group One Million Moms objected to the ad, Abbott and his team pulled the ad from its programming — a move that prompted swift backlash. #BoycottHallmark trended on X, then Twitter, and public figures including Ellen DeGeneres called out Abbott directly. The company ultimately reversed course and reinstated the ad, and Abbott stepped down a little over a month after the fallout and the intense backlash to pulling the ad inside and outside the company. 'We made a decision to not take one commercial and that blew up everything on the planet,' Abbott said in April on the podcast of Moms for America, an organization that recently presented Trump with the 'Man of the Century' award at a gala held at Mar-a-Lago. He noted Hallmark was careful about the ads they took in general, not running ads for political campaigns, alcohol or drugs or feminine hygiene products. In his email, Abbott wrote, 'I am very proud of what we built at Hallmark, but their priority became creating content to align with political and social counterculture rather than staying focused on celebrating tradition and delivering what viewers wanted. My goal has always been to serve the audience with uplifting entertainment that creates trust.' So Abbott pivoted into the world of faith-based media. As Abbott tells it, actor Jon Voight — now Trump's Special Ambassador to Hollywood, who starred in the Hallmark film J.L. Family Ranch in 2016 — introduced Abbott to Tom Hicks, a Texas-based private equity investor who runs Hicks Equity Partners. In 2020, Hicks Equity Partners looked to raise $200 million for conservative alternatives to Fox News and explored buying Newsmax, as they sought to put their political imprimatur on American media. (Hicks' son, Thomas Hicks Jr., is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee and a national finance co-chair for Trump's 2016 campaign.) The Newsmax acquisition never came to fruition, but Hicks Equity Partners helped Abbott get Great American Media off the ground, aiding in his acquisition of the cable network Great American Country in 2021 from Discovery which was subsequently rebranded to Great American Family. Their original programming airs on both linear cable and streaming. According to Great American Media, Hicks Equity Partners has been joined in their initial investment by several other sources, including Deason Capital (a Dallas-based family office run by conservative activist and donor Doug Deason) and Sony. Hicks Equity Partners did not respond to a request for comment. 'Right now, we're going through a period where religious conservatives are increasingly assertive and very energetic in funding and expanding their own cultural space,' said Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. While it rejects an explicitly political label, Great American Media receives much of its funding from sources that also fund politically conservative organizations and candidates. They and other similar production companies believe they can power their growth through servicing a large swath of viewers who sound a lot like how Republican candidates describe their voters. 'We have people in our culture who very much want all aspects of their life to be consistent with family-centered values,' Leo says. 'When they're in the marketplace, or when they're in the political world, or when they're simply doing what people do in life to engage in leisure and entertainment, they look for that kind of family-values centered thinking and approach to life.' In the world of faith-based television and movie content, business is booming. Sound of Freedom, a 2023 thriller distributed by the faith-based network Angel Studios about child trafficking that critics called a vehicle for promoting conspiracy theories, minted over $184 million in North America. That made it one of the most successful independent movies ever. His Only Son, another 2023 Angel Studios film, made over $13 million on a $250,000 budget. The Chosen, an ongoing television series about Jesus by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, claims to have crowdfunded almost $100 million and reached a quarter of a billion people via streaming. Crowdfunding is a popular tool for faith-based production companies that use their audience's enthusiasm — often around a particular political point — to raise cash. Since 2022, The Daily Wire, a conservative media company co-founded by commentator Ben Shapiro, has also produced multiple successful television shows and films and has become a big player in this space. House of David was a huge crossover hit for Wonder Studios, and a starting point for Leo's mission to get more traditional studios and streaming platforms to promote these types of stories. 'I don't see this as being in competition with big Hollywood. I see this as being an opportunity for big Hollywood to make targeted investments that make them money at a time when it's hard to make money in producing movies,' says Leo. Great American Family, meanwhile, grew its viewership by 20 percent between the fourth quarters of 2023 and 2024, making it one of the few networks achieving that sort of rapid growth, according to internal documents from GAM shared with POLITICO Magazine and Nielsen ratings. (Others include conservative media networks Fox News and Newsmax.) Over the same timespan, Hallmark's audience shrunk by 9 percent and Lifetime's by 13 percent, according to Nielsen ratings. Hallmark and Lifetime still maintain larger audiences in total than Great American Family, though. On the business side, many faith-based production companies follow a similar proposition to a channel like Hallmark: build out a slate of movies and TV shows that follow a tried and true formula of simple love stories and moral lessons. 'The reason the model works is because you keep budgets down. These are not genre films. These are not films that require an awful lot in terms of location. Often they're reusing actors,' says Adam Nayman, a Toronto-based film critic and professor at the University of Toronto. 'You kind of build up your own star system where these people are not stars, but they become recognizable to your audience.' GAM's streaming service is currently advertising 'Summer Romcoms' like Sweet Maple Romance, 'Military Heroes' like Peace River: God, Country & The Cowboy Way, and 'Stories of Faith' like Disciples in the Moonlight. The company also launched a specific childrens' hub on their streaming service this week. They are trying to build a catalog of films that fit together in one neat, Christian package. 'Sometimes you'll say, 'I love that show, but I don't know where it is — is this on Max? Is this on Netflix?'' said Kristen Roberts, Great American Media's chief revenue officer and executive vice president of programming, in a recent interview at GAM's New York offices. 'We want to be the complete opposite of that. We want people to say, 'I watch Pure Flix, I watch Great American Family,'' referencing two arms of GAM. The goal, she said, is for viewers to say, ''I watch that service' more than 'I watch that particular show.'' Faith-based networks also have the benefit of being able to position themselves in direct opposition with what they argue is a liberal agenda in Hollywood. The community of faith-based filmmakers can set themselves up as the antidote to cultural products that they see as inappropriate for children and adults alike. 'When you look at White Lotus and you look at situations where they're creating storylines that have incest in them and they're being applauded by the entertainment community, that's an intentional way of taking aberrant behavior and trying to normalize it,' Abbott said on the Moms for America podcast. 'We see it all the time in entertainment — every day. You can turn on almost any movie, any network, go to any movie, and I know it's a very intentional strategy.' The success of faith-based media companies is in large part a reaction to the kind of frustrations that Abbott elucidates. The industry is buoyed by the very thing that it rails against — and it's the response that drives some of the success. 'They've really not ever tried to pretend that they're for everyone,' says Nayman. 'Instead, they say, 'isn't this what you've been missing.' And if you're the one getting that message, and you're the one being reached by that advertisement, then your grievance is being stoked, even if it's underneath the guise of a warm hug.' 'You're assuming that people are fed up with anything that resembles something mainstream or something secular,' Nayman adds. 'And I think they really, really take advantage of a polarized moment.' There's tension between faith-based content and the rest of the media landscape. The faith-based films and television shows — when they're reviewed at all — are regularly panned by critics. Sound of Freedom, the film from this universe that was recently reviewed by the most mainstream critics, has a Metacritic score of 36 out of 100. 'It's bizarre, unsettling and yet — in the filmmaking equivalent of turning wine to water — bracingly dull to boot,' read a review in The Telegraph. 'The quality is a really big issue,' Leo acknowledges. He argues conservatives need to invest in incubating talent that can make family-values movies and shows that are more slick, better produced and appeal to a wider audience. The art in this space often has no real aspirations towards acclaim as it's connoted by an Oscar or Emmy. In fact, in some ways they've created a parallel industry, with their own critics and markers of success. The Movieguide Awards, which are held every year and which largely honor films and television that Movieguide — a service that brands itself as 'movie reviews for Christians' — believes connects with their values. In 2025, winners included the movie Reagan, actor Candace Cameron Bure for A Christmas Less Traveled and Americans With No Address, a documentary about the country's homelessness crisis narrated by actor William Baldwin. Movieguide rates Hollywood films and gives them a 'family content' rating. In the company's annual 'Report to Hollywood,' they argue that films with strong Christian values perform better at the box office. Their formula relies on the often strong performance of children's films and doesn't include every mainstream hit; both Barbie and Oppenheimer had low 'family content' ratings, for example. 'We have a new generation that's having kids, and they want faith and values, their generation does not want sex and violence.' says Ted Baehr, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Movieguide. He cites this year's Academy Awards Best Picture winner Anora, about a New York sex worker, which made a little over $20 million at the domestic box office. 'In Hollywood [that] is pathetic,' he says. 'It's worthless. And all the Academy Award winners were pathetic.' (The film was generally considered an indie success; it was made on a $6 million budget.) While Hollywood has long been a bastion of liberalism, there wasn't always such a stark divide between mainstream Hollywood and religious fare. But in today's political climate, the gap is widening. According to April 2024 research from Pew, 59 percent of Protestants align with the Republican Party compared to 38 percent who align with Democrats, and among white Evangelical Protestants, 85 percent lean Republican while only 14 percent lean Democrat. Christians of all faiths are more likely to be Republicans, where Jews, Muslims and anyone unaffiliated with a particular religion are more likely to be a Democrat. The large partisan split among white Evangelical Protestants in particular has grown steadily and significantly since the start of the Reagan era. And that gap has been reflected in available entertainment options. In the Facebook group 'Great American Family (GAC) Fan Community', users post every day about how the network is one of the only ones that represents their interests, values and politics. In a recent post, a fan wrote, 'GAC SEEMS TO HAVE SOME GREAT PROGRAMMING COMING UP FOR GOOD FRIDAY INTO EASTER. THANK YOU! I SAW SOME DISTURBING STUFF ON A MOVIE WITH HALLMARK OVER THE WEEKEND. ONLY TUNED IT IN WHEN IT WAS ALMOST OVER AND IT WAS 10 MINUTES OF AGENDA!' Her post was flooded with supportive comments. 'Stopped watching Hallmark movies when they cowered to the masses allowing same sex couples. Don't miss it and LOVE Great American Family!!,' another member of the group replied. Abbott uses and cultivates that sense of cultural alienation to market his content. Along with A Christmas Spark — where after two days on set Lopez's character has moved from a big-city office setup to charming small-town USA — GAM's offerings include the upcoming Home Sweet Christmas Wedding starring Cameron Bure and a slate of released Easter-themed productions including Forty-Seven Days with Jesus. Watching GAM is not only an escape from Hollywood, but also a signifier of your own values or politics. While spending your money or time with a Great American Media product, you're voting for something. It's not about artistic innovation or form, it's about sending a message. 'I think that 'Christian' is used by the media to downplay or to stereotype,' Abbott told Moms for America. 'It's reverse racism or however you want to define it. You get stereotyped and put in this box. And that's what they want to do, they want to put faith in a box and make it go away. And we will never let that happen.' — Tessa Berenson Rogers contributed to this report.
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- USA Today
Patti LuPone controversy: Offensive comments, backlash and apology, explained
Patti LuPone controversy: Offensive comments, backlash and apology, explained Patti LuPone is a Broadway and musical theater legend who's as famous for her performances as her unfiltered opinions about everything from mid-show interruptions to the president. She's appeared in dozens of shows, and among her many accolades are three Tony Awards — two for Best Actress in a Musical (Evita, 1980 and Gypsy, 2008) and one for Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Company, 2022). The 76-year-old actress — who also has had an extensive film and TV career — knows a lot about theater. Probably more than most. But one thing she clearly still needs to learn is that you can still be an outspoken diva without being mean, derogatory or straight-up racist. Leading up to the 2025 Tony Awards on Sunday, LuPone has been in the middle of an ugly controversy seemingly entirely of her own making. In a May 26 New Yorker profile, she made disparaging remarks about six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald — the most nominated and awarded performer in Tony's history — and fellow Tony-winner Kecia Lewis. This sparked tremendous backlash from fans and those in the Broadway community and LuPone ultimately apologized. Here's a breakdown of the Patti LuPone controversy. Who is Patti LuPone? As we mentioned, she's a theater star with three Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Emmy Award nominations. Along with Gypsy, Evita and Company, LuPone has been in productions of Anything Goes, Sweeney Todd, Sunset Boulevard and Les Misérables, among many others. After making her stage debut in the 1970s, she's been part of shows on Broadway and West End. What did Patti LuPone say in her New Yorker profile about Audra McDonald and Kecia Lewis? The New Yorker profile by Michael Schulman about LuPone was long, wide-ranging and in-depth, but we're here to focus on a couple specific parts at the end of the feature. LuPone was in a 2024 two-woman play The Roommate, for which her co-star Mia Farrow earned a 2025 Tony nomination. The show shared a wall with the theater showing Hell's Kitchen, the Tony-winning Alicia Keys jukebox musical. The New Yorker notes the musical sound was so loud it could be heard through the walls leading LuPone to ask the show to address the noise issue. She then sent thank-you flowers after it was fixed. Kecia Lewis — a star of Hell's Kitchen who won a 2024 Tony Award for her performance — took to Instagram in November 2024 to read an open letter responding to LuPone labeling "a Black show loud in a way that dismisses it" and accusing her of committing microaggressions. "These actions, in my opinion, are bullying," Lewis says in her Instagram video. "They're offensive. They are racially microaggressive. They're rude. They're rooted in privilege, and these actions also lack a sense of community and leadership for someone as yourself who has been in the business as long as you have." From The New Yorker: 'Oh, my God,' LuPone said, balking, when I brought up the incident. 'Here's the problem. She calls herself a veteran? Let's find out how many Broadway shows Kecia Lewis has done, because she doesn't know what the [expletive] she's talking about.' She Googled. 'She's done seven. I've done thirty-one. Don't call yourself a vet, [expletive].' (The correct numbers are actually ten and twenty-eight, but who's counting?) She explained, of the noise problem, 'This is not unusual on Broadway. This happens all the time when walls are shared.' But LuPone didn't stop the insults there. When Schulman pointed out that Audra McDonald responded to Lewis' Instagram video with "supportive emojis", LuPone insulted McDonald and her Tony-nominated portrayal of Rose in Gypsy, the same role LuPone won a Tony for in the 2008 revival. More from The New Yorker: I mentioned that Audra McDonald—the Tony-decorated Broadway star—had given the video supportive emojis. 'Exactly,' LuPone said. 'And I thought, You should know better. That's typical of Audra. She's not a friend'—hard 'D.' The two singers had some long-ago rift, LuPone said, but she didn't want to elaborate. When I asked what she had thought of McDonald's current production of 'Gypsy,' she stared at me, in silence, for fifteen seconds. Then she turned to the window and sighed, 'What a beautiful day.' Did Audra McDonald or Kecia Lewis respond to Patti LuPone? In an interview with CBS Mornings published this week, Gayle King asked McDonald if she was surprised by LuPone's comments about her. McDonald said: "If there's a rift between us, I don't know what it is. That's something you'd have to ask Patti about. I haven't seen her in about 11 years just because we've been busy just with life and stuff, so I don't know what rift she's talking about. So you'd have to ask her." Despite previously responding to LuPone on Instagram in November, it doesn't seem that Lewis has responded publicly to LuPone's recent comments. How did the Broadway community respond to Patti LuPone's comments? Outrage on behalf of McDonald and Lewis was abundant. More than 500 actors from around the industry signed and published an open letter on May 30 condemning LuPone's comments as "degrading and misogynistic" and "a blatant act of racialized disrespect." According to Playbill, the total number of signatures on the letter is more than 700. Before demanding a broad and consistent standard of accountability in the industry, the letter added: "It constitutes bullying. It constitutes harassment. It is emblematic of the microaggressions and abuse that people in this industry have endured for far too long, too often without consequence. "To publicly attack a woman who has contributed to this art form with such excellence, leadership, and grace—and to discredit the legacy of Audra McDonald, the most nominated and awarded performer in Tony Award history—is not simply a personal offense. It is a public affront to the values of collaboration, equity, and mutual respect that our theater community claims to uphold." Others reactions included one from Emmy Award winning actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, a current star on Abbott Elementary who starred in the original Broadway production of Dreamgirls in 1981, for which she was Tony nominated. Speaking to Page Six from the Gotham Television Awards red carpet, Ralph explained why she's not judging LuPone, 'Why not be nice?' before adding: "But was it a moment where, maybe, you wanted to say, 'Zip it, girl. Zip it'? Inner thoughts need not always be outer thoughts." Patti LuPone ultimately apologized for her comments about Audra McDonald and Kecia Lewis LuPone posted her apology on social media. It read, in part: "I am deeply sorry for the words I used during The New Yorker interview, particularly about Kecia Lewis, which were demeaning and disrespectful. I regret my flippant and emotional responses during this interview, which were inappropriate, and I am devastated that my behavior has offended others and has run counter to what we hold dear in this community. I hope to have the chance to speak to Audra and Kecia personally to offer my sincere apologies." Taking responsibility and committing to doing better is a good thing. But after so many performances, accolades and decades in the industry, she should have known how offensive the words coming out of her mouth were.
