TV Review
‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night’ Is Part Lovefest, Part Comedy-Nerd Heaven
Four-part docuseries starts as a typical self-congratulatory tribute. Then it drills down to specific highs and lows, and delivers the goods
How much do you love Saturday Night Live? Can you rattle off your personal Top 10 favorite sketches at a moment’s notice? Have you torched friendships while debating who is the most overrated and underrated cast members of all time? (We’re not touching that first one, but the correct answer to the second part is Danitra Vance.) You’ve read all the books and oral histories, listened to the podcasts, bought the DVD box sets of the first five seasons and the occasional MVP “Best of” compilations, tracked down the week-in-the-life documentary directed by James Franco, and squealed with delight every time a new “Behind the Sketch” clip drops on YouTube. But still, you want — no, you need — to know everything you can about the legendary, long-running comedy institution. It’s like you have a fever, and the only prescription is more SNL anecdotes.
If the description above sounds familiar, then you, dear reader, may be the ideal audience for SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night. A four-part docuseries that drops on Peacock tonight, it’s one of several commemorations of the show’s 50th anniversary, along with Questlove’s doc on SNL’s five decades of musical performances on Jan. 27, and a prime-time special in February. This multipart victory lap is both deserved and de rigueur for a late-night juggernaut that’s been in love with itself since Year One. But this quartet of docs is specifically designed to be catnip for Saturday Night Live obsessives, despite the fact that much of it contains backstage material, making-of tidbits and many, many war stories they likely already know. There’s the rub: The “perfect” viewer for Beyond Saturday Night, i.e., someone who’s willing to dig into four hours of deep-cut trivia, creative-process musing, and beaucoup back-patting, is likely the same person who comes to it already fully loaded with a solid sense of SNL history. They know how the sketch-show sausage gets made. The question is how many more platefuls of leftovers they’re willing to scarf down.
Editor’s picks
Thankfully, the closest thing we get to an overall survey of SNL‘s legacy, similar to the previous tributes mounted in its honor, comes first. “Five Minutes” refers to the amount of time that a performer gets to audition for creator Lorne Michaels and the producers; the gauntlet run of performing as many characters or as much of a stand-up routine as you can in that slot, while dealing with a traditional lack of laughter from the judges, is infamous. “If they can’t handle five minutes in front of everyone live,” says Ayala Cohen, the former talent executive for the show, “then [they’re] wasting time.” These screen tests are taped and archived, which is why we get to see audition snippets of everyone from Joe Piscopo to Ego Nwodim.
Even better: We watch them watching themselves, so young and nervous as hell, and see them instantly react to a trip down memory lane that often dovetails into the sentimental and occasionally detours into the traumatic. There’s as much cringing as there is crying. Kenan Thompson keeps telling his babyfaced twentysomething self to wrap it up. Amy Poehler almost makes it a full minute through hers before she says, “OK, that’s enough.” Bobby Moynihan’s mortified reaction to his audition, which involves both a questionable impersonation of an old co-worker and a dance involving repeated ass-slapping, is as hilarious as anything he did over his decade-long tenure at 30 Rock. Regrettably — or maybe not so regrettably — no one asked Henry Zebrowski to comment on his singular audition for the camera. Let’s just say people still talk about it to this day, and no, it didn’t get him the gig.
These bits give you a great sense of how future legends prepped to become Not Ready for Prime Time Players, as well as glimpses of beloved characters (Kristen Wiig’s Target Lady, Bill Hader’s Vinny Vedecci) in zygote form. It also shows you those famous folks who got their five minutes but didn’t end up making the cast — somewhere, there’s an alternate universe in which Stephen Colbert, Mindy Kaling, Donald Glover, Kevin Hart, and Jennifer Coolidge are all on SNL. Buffering these segments, however, are a lot of recycled clichés about how the show changed everything. You know the drill: it was “comedy as rock & roll,” Michaels can be a father figure and a kingmaker as well as a cold fish, the experience was nerve-racking yet exhilarating, there’s still nothing else like it, yada yada yada. “Five Minutes” at least has the good sense to begin and end with Tracy Morgan, who runs the conversational gamut from the cultural isolation he initially felt to the moment he started being funny (“when my mother’s water broke”). His chaos energy gives this a jolt.
The second episode — “Written By” — offers a chance to play fly-on-the-wall as the show’s writers assemble to craft a typical show and endure the weekly rituals of job insecurity, after-hours insanity, live-performance anxiety, and the agonies of spending hours on a do-or-die piece that eventually gets cut at dress. (RIP, the Boston Duckboat sketch.) If you caught the aforementioned 2010 doc that followed the cast and crew around for a John Malkovich-hosted episode, you’ll notice that not much has changed in the year of our Lorne 2024, as folks scramble to mount an Ayo Edebiri-hosted episode. If you haven’t, you may still recognize the stations of the SNL production cross from numerous articles and BTS features: the Monday meet-and-greet pitching, the Tuesday all-night writing sessions, the Wednesday group reading, and the mad dashes to turn high-concept jokes on a page into something fit for broadcast.
What isn’t well-known is that once a writer gets a sketch passed after the table read, they’re the ones responsible for getting it ready for air, from set design to blocking the actors. The personal investment is huge, and thus the payoff of seeing something they typed out in the wee small hours turn into an instantly quotable classic they put together is a huge rush. And naturally, the nightmare of sitting under the bleachers next to Michaels as one of your babies falls flat on its face during the Saturday-night dry run is like a devastating body blow to the ego. One of the current writers notes that he’s never had a more fulfilling job, and also, his mental health has never been worse. You sense he’s not the only one.
Still, the mood remains festive and laudatory, and the Mount Olympus of past SNL writers — Alan Zweibel, Jim Downey, Tina Fey, Emily Spivey, Robert Smigel, Bob Odenkirk, Paula Pell, Harper Steele — attest to how beautiful the system works even as they acknowledge how broken it leaves everyone. The platitudes once again start to outweigh the insights, and were SNL50 not to go beyond these first two chapters, you could chalk it up to just another self-congratulatory circle jerk. It’s the third and fourth episodes, however, that ultimately turn this docuseries into comedy-nerd gold.
“More Cowbell” may as well be called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About One of the Greatest Sketches Ever But Were Afraid to Ask — it’s a stem-to-stern look at how a Behind the Music parody became a hall-of-famer and rescued a piece of classic-rock percussion from obscurity. The idea: Will Ferrell wondered what the recording session for Blue Oyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” might have been like from the perspective of a fictional group member manning the cowbell. The result: See above. It’s an incredible deep dive into what many consider the crowning achievement of SNL‘s 21st-century run to date, and gets the dirt from both the participants and the BOC members (!) and the song’s actual producer (!!) — the latter of which debate who actually came up with the idea to add that instrument into the mix in the first place. (Only Christopher Walken is MIA, which isn’t surprising — he’s gone on record as saying that thanks to its popularity among fans, this SNL highlight has ruined his life.) If this were a pilot episode for a 10-part series devoted to examining the best Saturday Night Live sketches, we’d pull out our checkbooks right now.
That hour focuses on a peak; SNL50‘s last installment then pivots to what many consider to be the scraped-barrel-bottom of the show’s run. “Season 11: The Weird Year” takes a long, hard look at what became an infamous attempt to reinvent things once Lorne Michaels returned to the fold after leaving the show in 1980. Thanks to Eddie Murphy’s Eighties run and an all-star year featuring Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest, among others, Saturday Night Live had proven it was more than just the original Not Ready for Prime Time players. Once Michaels grabbed the reins again, he decided to add in all-new writers, skew younger in terms of the cast, and add in a few wild cards like Randy Quaid. What should have been a glorious comeback turned into a disaster. The season concluded with a still–jaw-dropping sketch involving Michaels pulling Jon Lovitz out of a backstage fire — only he and Nora Dunn would return — and leaving the rest of Season 11’s members to burn.
This annus miserablis would turn out to be highly instructive to both Michaels and the show as a whole, and the episode frames everything as a teachable moment — not to mention that it finally gives Terry Sweeney, the first openly gay cast member of SNL, his due. Yet most tributes would sweep such catastrophic memories of failed experiments under the proverbial rug rather than remind folks of such belly flops, and the fact that “The Weird Year” is included at all speaks to the ambitions behind the docuseries as a whole. When it sticks to its generalized praise, SNL50 simply feels like its screaming loudly in an echo chamber. But when the project truly does go beyond the usual Saturday-night liveliness and excavates the good, the bad, and the ugly of an impressive run, you really do feel like its honoring the whole history of a show that didn’t just change television, but also the culture itself, one “Live From New York!” at a time.