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Inside the comedy pressure cooker: How ‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night' exposed the madness behind the magic of ‘Saturday Night Live'
Ever wonder what makes Saturday Night Live tick? Spoiler alert: It's equal parts comedy genius, caffeine-fueled chaos, and late-night existential crises, all wrapped in a relentless weekly deadline that refuses to budge.
SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, Peacock's four-part docuseries, honors the iconic show's enduring legacy with more than 60 contributors — including SNL alumni — sharing insights and stories that span decades of television history.
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Spotlighting the show's most memorable elements, executive producer Morgan Neville crafted four distinct installments: "Five Minutes," exploring the audition process that has launched countless careers; "More Cowbell," a deep dive into the fan-favorite sketch and its cultural resonance; "Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room," an intimate look at the high-pressure process of sketch creation; and "Season 11: The Weird Year," a retrospective on one of the most pivotal (and widely regarded as worst) seasons in SNL history.
Neville, along with Marshall Curry, director of the third episode, spoke to Gold Derby about their experience creating SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night and the unique challenges of documenting one of television's most beloved institutions.
Gold Derby: Morgan, what inspired the story for each of the four separate episodes of this series? How did you narrow it down from so many potential topics?
Morgan Neville: Well, I'm a comedy nerd, and I have watched everything about Saturday Night Live and read all the books. When I met with Lorne [Michaels], he essentially said, "What do you think we should do?" I proposed this idea of telling specific stories that feel like meals unto themselves rather than a chronological history or clip show. I brainstormed around 12 ideas, but ultimately writing and auditioning stood out, along with "Cowbell," which is very specific, and Season 11 — the worst season ever. Each episode has its own time horizon: "Cowbell" is three and a half minutes long, writing is a week, Season 11 is a season, and auditioning is the entire history of the show. That variety gave us a lot of interesting filmmaking opportunities.
Marshall, how did you come to direct the episode about the writers room? Was this an idea you were drawn to from the beginning?
Marshall Curry: Morgan called me and said, "Would you ever..." — and usually I produce and generate my own ideas, so I didn't expect this to be my cup of tea. But then he said it was Saturday Night Live, and specifically an episode about writing, which sounded like a good fit. The topic was hugely appealing to me, as was working with Morgan, who has such a bespoke auteur way of directing projects. I pitched the idea of embedding for an entire week — from Sunday, as the process begins, to Saturday night, when the show airs live — and also pulling in classic stories from Tina Fey, Al Franken, and others who provide us with color and anecdotes from their eras.
The depiction of the writers' process — especially Tuesday night, which bleeds into Wednesday morning — makes it seem like absolute hell, yet they love it. What surprised you most about this experience?
Curry: I agree — it's almost contradictory. One writer told us, "This is the greatest job I could ever imagine having. And also my mental health is the worst that it's ever been in my life." And as soon as he said it, I was like, "That is going to be in the movie." And I think probably half of the reviews of our piece have cited that as kind of encapsulating the current writers' experience.
Neville: It's such an interesting place to film too, because the show's a pressure cooker to begin with, with funny, smart, occasionally neurotic people – every one of whom has an agent. So it's just not a normal environment for anything. So everything is heightened from the first moment you walk in the door.
What was it like for them to have you there filming? Did they seem comfortable with it?
Curry: We sort of gravitated towards a few who felt the most comfortable with having us around. It is a tough process because writing humor is scary in a lot of ways. You're trying to figure out what's appropriate and what's actually funny versus embarrassing and stupid. And those are the kinds of things that you want to be able to experiment with in a tight writers' room with your close friends and allies, and not something that you want necessarily broadcast to the world. So I think there were a couple of moments where I think they wanted to have conversations without us around.
I remember at one point arriving in one of the writers' rooms, and what we did is we would put our microphones inside the pencil canisters so that we could hear what everybody was saying. We didn't want to have a boom that was kind of moving around and distracting people. We really wanted to try to be as inconspicuous as possible. And we arrived in this room and I could see that they knew where we had put the microphones. It wasn't a secret, but when we arrived there, the table just had this spilled pile of pencils and our microphones had the batteries taken out of them because they obviously had wanted to have a conversation about something that they didn't want to have recorded. But it was pretty remarkable. We were told that the access that we had was unprecedented, and you can kind of feel it, I think.
The Monday pitch meeting seemed like an almost absurd ritual—the writers admit it's essentially 'bullsh-tting' just to make the host feel comfortable. Were you both surprised by that?"
Neville: The whole point of the Monday night meeting is just to get the host to feel like you're not alone in this. There are a lot of people here who are trying to be funny, but not necessarily trying to pitch you the sketch. In fact, most writers don't want to pitch the joke of a sketch because they want it to kill at read-through on Wednesday. So they don't want to give the punchline away in a pitch meeting on Monday night. It's kind of just this charade where everybody kind of just makes each other laugh and moves on.
The series also revisits SNL's infamous Season 11, widely regarded as its worst ever. Was it difficult to convince cast members like Damon Wayans and Anthony Michael Hall to participate?
Neville: By far the hardest casting of any of these episodes. Some, like Damon and Anthony, were initially hesitant, but we reassured them that we weren't just making a hit piece. In fact, Season 11's failure was pivotal — it helped the show figure out its DNA. Without that failure, SNL wouldn't have survived. That cast included some incredible comedians; it just wasn't the right recipe that year. I love exploring failures because that's where the wisdom comes from.
What did each of you take away from making this docuseries?
Neville: I kind of like this idea that as much as my instinct is to be precious, there's something about letting go — that they have to be on camera at 11:30 on Saturday night. The kind of freedom that comes with not being precious — I think sometimes creatively is really a relief. At one point when we were working on these, we said, "Should we be editing in the middle of the night, just to put ourselves in the head space of how they're writing the show, to get punchy, and to have your subconscious come out more?" We were trying to channel that, I think, in the filmmaking, and that was a fun and new way of working.
Curry: For me, it was just being able to peek behind the curtain and see where this comedy comes from. As filmmakers, I think we have a slightly different way of seeing films than civilians do that watch things. And I'm sure Morgan's the same, but when you watch something, we're thinking about how it was constructed and how they picked the shots and how this was edited. And it was just kind of a thrill for me to see people who look at comedy in that same way.
Another thing that was interesting to me — I had imagined that it would just be hilarious all the time. And instead, there were a lot of periods where people were pitching jokes. It was kind of like, "Ooh, that's not good, that's not good, that's not good. That's good." And you realize how much mechanics and craft there are behind the thing that presents to you as inspiration and pure art.
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