Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
Saturday Night is Jason Reitman’s dramatization of the behind-the-scenes chaos that led up to the first broadcast of NBC’s Saturday Night, better known these days as Saturday Night Live, on October 11, 1975. Gabriel LaBelle from The Fabelmans stars as Lorne Michaels, whose minor irritation over SNL episode director Dave Wilson (played by Robert Wuhl) referring to the sketches as “skits” is my favorite part of Columbia Pictures’s most recent trailer. (Sketches are what SNL and I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson do. Skits are what kids do at summer camp. My soul dies a little when I hear people refer to sketches as “skits.”)
The Saturday Night cast also includes Succession alum Nicholas Braun. He juggles the roles of Andy Kaufman, one of the series premiere’s special guest performers, and Jim Henson, who created (but only rarely wrote) a poorly received series of sketches starring a bunch of Muppets from the Land of Gortch, a forgotten part of SNL that didn’t last past the first season. Cory Michael Smith—the Riddler on Gotham—plays Chevy Chase. Ella Hunt from Dickinson portrays Gilda Radner. New Girl alum Lamorne Morris—a recent Emmy winner for his role on Fargo—plays Garrett Morris (no relation), whose signature SNL character, Dominican sportscaster Chico Escuela, didn’t emerge until his fourth and penultimate season on the show.
Will Saturday Night be as good as An Adventure in Space and Time, the 2013 BBC Two TV-movie that celebrated Doctor Who‘s 50th anniversary by reenacting both the behind-the-scenes development of Doctor Who and William Hartnell’s run as the First Doctor? [Chico Escuela voice] I dohno.
IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich gave Saturday Night a C-, and his site’s headline writer called it “Tedious SNL Cosplay.” Slate‘s Sam Adams pointed out that “Radner, who stands with [John] Belushi as the most explosive talent in the original ensemble, barely registers as a presence among the teeming ensemble cast, in a telling of the story that, with the exception of Michaels’ wife, writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), seems much more interested in the contributions of men.” He added that “depicting Henson as an out-of-his-depth doofus being hazed by the cool kids strikes a sour note.” (Muppets fans are currently lashing out against Reitman’s movie.) Meanwhile, Pajiba‘s Lindsay Traves was kinder to Saturday Night and wrote that it’s “an unflattering portrayal of the original cast and crew, but a flattering portrayal of their immense talents.”
Because Saturday Night—on the eve of SNL‘s 50th season, which kicks off this Saturday—comes out tomorrow in New York, L.A., and Toronto (while the rest of North America receives it on October 11), the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Howard Shore’s main title theme from the first four seasons of SNL. Yes, that Howard Shore—the same composer who did the scores for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies and so many Cronenberg flicks. The 1976-79 SNL theme is my favorite thing Shore wrote that’s not “The Riders of Rohan” from The Two Towers.
Shore, who was SNL‘s musical director in the first five seasons, is a favorite of Michaels. The longtime SNL showrunner co-produced Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and Shore wrote its main title theme as well—with some help from Lounge Lizards frontman and Get Shorty composer John Lurie. Today’s header image is from my favorite title sequence during the four seasons that opened with the following version of Shore’s SNL theme: the frequently modified third-season sequence where Radner wears a Yankees cap and bites an apple in front of her name on the Times Square jumbotron.
When I was 11, I wanted to be the first Asian American cast member on SNL.
Nowadays, I’m glad that I never worked at SNL—especially after I’ve read so many articles and oral histories about how stressful and toxic a work environment it is. Andy Samberg, who, together with his Lonely Island collaborators Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, revitalized SNL‘s pre-recorded sketches department from 2005 to 2010, recently admitted that he left SNL in 2012 because its demanding work structure was ruining his mental health.
Bobby Moynihan, who left SNL in 2017, put it best when he said, “It’s a structure built on cocaine, and no one’s doing cocaine anymore.”
As Moynihan pointed out to Tom Scharpling, Kenan Thompson is built for SNL because his history in sketch comedy goes all the way back to his days as a Nickelodeon star. Another comedian who’s built for it is Bowen Yang, who, in 2019, became SNL‘s first Asian American cast member (outside of Fred Armisen, who mistakenly thought he was a quarter Japanese and didn’t find out until later in life that he’s actually a quarter Korean, and anti-vaxxer dickbag Rob Schneider, a MAGAt who’s part-Pinoy, so since I’m Pinoy, I consider pro-Trump Filipino celebrities to be the worst). Yang and Sarah Sherman, two of the funniest regulars during SNL‘s current era, are a couple of reasons why I still watch a little bit of SNL via sketches I pick and choose on YouTube—sometimes based on the praises and pans in SNL episode reviews—instead of sitting through the 90-minute slog each week.
I haven’t watched a full SNL episode since the 2017 episode where Aziz Ansari made history as SNL‘s first Indian American guest host, and I’ve chosen to watch new SNL sketches via YouTube because so many SNL episodes are padded with interminable live-on-the-air sketches that fizzle out with a flat ending and give off the feel of “This was written in a hurry on Saturday morning.” For instance, the 1979 superhero party sketch with Bill Murray as Superman, guest host Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, Dan Aykroyd as the Flash, Morris as Ant-Man, and John Belushi as the Hulk is considered by SNL nerds to be a classic, but it’s five minutes too long (it’s a 10-minute sketch, whereas Key & Peele‘s fake home video footage of a young Barack Obama at a college party is the greatest party sketch because it’s only two minutes long), and it has only one great joke: the smell of a bathroom after the Hulk finishes using it. (Director Peyton Reed was such a fan of the sketch that he gave Morris a cameo in the first Ant-Man flick, where he played a cabbie who was startled by the sound of Scott Lang falling on top of his car.)
Nathan Rabin and all the other writers who review every SNL episode must be gluttons for punishment. I don’t know where they get the patience to watch every 90-minute episode. I’ve sometimes noticed that Thompson mouths other performers’ lines during live-on-the-air sketches. That’s what I mean when I say, “This was written in a hurry on Saturday morning.”
But when I was 11, I thought SNL was the best sketch comedy show. That immediately changed when Nick at Nite slotted SCTV at 10:30pm right after its nightly reruns of The Best of Saturday Night, Orion Pictures‘s half-hour repackaging of ’70s SNL episodes—SCTV is far more rewatchable than SNL, although, like pre-2019 SNL, its worst sketches are any of the ones where white folks pretended to be Asian—and then In Living Color suddenly arrived with an Afrocentric point of view and blew SNL out of the water. And then from 2012 to 2015, Key & Peele appeared to be inspired by the Lonely Island’s often expensive-looking digital shorts on SNL, and it chose to shoot all of its sketches on film and often on location. I found that show to be more consistently funny than SNL.
SNL is atrocious as fuck whenever the guest host is a person with no comic timing, no sense of humor, or no self-deprecation. (I blame Michaels and SNL for helping to normalize 45, who has no comic timing, no sense of humor, and no self-deprecation. His 2015 stint as an SNL guest host, which I never watched, famously made then-SNL regular Taran Killam super uncomfortable.) Greg Proops once said on his podcast that SNL is too “high school” for his tastes. As someone who tends to like the pre-recorded sketches and Yang and Sherman’s Weekend Update bits a lot more than the other elements of SNL, those are the best two words I’ve seen someone come up with for the worst parts of SNL. Even Jane Curtin—one of SNL‘s original Not Ready for Prime Time Players (and one of my favorite of the many comedic actors The Good Fight recruited to play Illinois judges)—said to Entertainment Weekly in 2023 that she didn’t laugh at any of the ’70s SNL sketches she rewatched with her daughter and her family because “That’s what happens with live TV, and with topical TV. It gets dated after a while.” Before I quit watching SNL on a regular basis, I had to wade through—whether it was The Best of Saturday Night or new SNL—a lot of crap to get to the gold.
My favorite golden moments involved Aykroyd, Radner (perhaps my favorite Radner moment is her ad-libbed reaction to Candice Bergen accidentally forgetting the name of Radner’s character in the Right to Extreme Stupidity League sketch), Laraine Newman, Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Jack Handey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Tim Meadows, and frequent guest hosts like Steve Martin and Tom Hanks. My favorite SNL guest host who guest-hosted only twice is In Living Color alum David Alan Grier, whose funniest SNL sketch put him in the role of Bryant Gumbel code-switching on the set of The Today Show. Those are the people I come back to whenever I skim through SNL on Internet Archive. That’s the place where—because of the efforts of SNL nerds who collected episodes in either their original form or the form of re-edited reruns filled with dress rehearsal versions of sketches Michaels preferred over the aired versions—so many episodes and VHS compilations of SNL sketches have been preserved in their entirety, while Michaels’s Broadway Video production company always experienced problems whenever it tried to reassemble full episodes for big streaming services due to music rights issues. It’s why a lot of ’80s and ’90s SNL episodes are so damn short over on Peacock.
Thanks to Internet Archive and the One SNL a Day Project, I finally found one of my favorite Meadows sketches after having not seen it in about 20 years: the 1997 sketch where he played a quiet-storm DJ who continually interrupts a newsreader played by Alec Baldwin with his DJ drop. SNL‘s official YouTube channel never posted it just because the Meadows character put on Luther Vandross’s “A House Is Not a Home,” Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” and Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love.” It’s still funny.
So is Meadows’s performance in the best scene from the movie that was based on his Ladies Man sketches: Leon Phelps’s awkward interview with an elderly nun. Today’s prompt is: What’s your favorite movie based on an SNL sketch? Bob Roberts? The Blues Brothers? Coneheads? Mine is MacGruber.
Though it was, like The Ladies Man and six other movies based on SNL sketches, co-produced by Michaels, MacGruber didn’t follow the formula that was established by Wayne’s World. (It also didn’t follow the formula of the original MacGruber sketches, which were a MacGyver parody where MacGruber and his assistants died at the end of every sketch due to MacGruber getting distracted by his personal issues. It was more of a parody of ’80s and ’90s Joel Silver action flicks like the original Road House.) Those seven other Broadway Video movies were either PG-13 or a soft R, their lead characters were lovable clowns whose faces could be put on a lunchbox, and they each had a bland and inoffensive scene that was ready-made for the star to bring with them as a clip to a morning news show interview. MacGruber was a hard R, the title character was an unlikable prick who begs a soldier to join his team (which was now without any members because MacGruber accidentally killed all of them) by repeatedly offering to suck his dick, and the movie was so vulgar and gory that the only clip Will Forte could bring with him to a morning news show interview was one of the scenes with the least amount of laughs. No wonder it tanked.
But MacGruber‘s tastelessness doesn’t get tiresome like the most tasteless sketches from SNL‘s most dire seasons. (The 1989 Road House was famously crass, and MacGruber imagines what it would look like if the crassness and mullets that defined Road House became an incongruous part of some solemn Jack Ryan thriller about stolen nukes.) It’s the funniest out of all the movies that were spun off from SNL sketches—despite an extremely low budget, Jorma Taccone, who directed MacGruber, succeeded in making it look exactly like big-budget Silver action flicks, so part of the movie’s charm is the recreation of that aesthetic—and you’ll never forget the wonders of KFBR392. KFBR392. KFBR392. KFBR392. KFBR392.