Fifty years. That’s a long time on television. Especially live television. This year, Saturday Night Live will mark its 970th episode. That’s 87,300 minutes, including commercials both real and fake. What’s truly remarkable is that the original format remains essentially unchanged – the cold open, the celebrity host, the musical guest, the hand-written cue cards, the hit-and-miss sketches – and that the man who created it is still in charge.
Lorne Michaels, the Canadian who reinvented American television, isn’t just the boss. At 80, he’s the showrunner, overseeing every detail of every show right down to the wire. What changes is the talent, the fresh cohorts that cycle through the seasons like college students on speed, chasing what’s left of comedy’s cutting edge in all-night writing sessions, hoping to graduate as movie stars, talk show hosts, or slaying a live concert audience with their own HBO special. For inspiration, they look to a legion of SNL legends, dead or alive: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Martin Short, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Tina Fey, Bill Hader, Kate McKinnon . . . and to the godfather guru everyone just calls Lorne.
It’s a live show ruled by an oligarchy of ghosts. That’s the SNL paradox. A phenomenon that revolutionized television has matured into its most hallowed institution. While the show persists as a singular oasis of live TV, increasingly it’s watched as snippets on social media, or with a finger on fast-forward. And when the show celebrates its 50th anniversary with a three-hour prime-time special on Sunday Feb.16, much of the show won’t be live. It will roll by as a milestone collection of memes, sketches and musical numbers pulled from a massive archive.
SNL is the Great Barrier Reef of comedy, a living coral built on fossils of ancestral wit. But it has been just as significant for music, if not more so. While the sketches have largely stuck to Lorne’s basic formula over the years, music has consistently propelled the show into the future, as artists ranging from Nirvana to Adele electrified their first mass audience on its stage, a platform that even superstars find humbling. “SNL is always the biggest deal,” Billie Eilish proclaimed in Questlove’s documentary Ladies and Gentlemen . . . 50 Years of SNL Music, another prime-time special that aired recently on NBC. The 23-year-old singer, who has performed on the Grammies and the Oscars, said, “I can’t think of anything that’s as powerful and inspirational.”
At the other end of the generational spectrum, Mick Jagger, 81, popped up in the documentary to marvel at SNL’s wealth of live recordings, noting that until SNL, bands never played live on TV, but just lip-synched to their latest single. After half a century and several thousand live tunes, the show has created a definitive canon of post-Sixties pop. “If you think about it,” said Jagger, “what you’ve got is something that wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been for Saturday Night Live – this huge, broad popular music library of performances.”
But then SNL has been in the milestone business from the beginning, ever since its first episode aired on Oct. 11, 1975. Right out of the gate, it was on a mission to disrupt network TV with the subversive energy of a cast fuelled by sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – steered by a circumspect producer with deep Canadian roots. Born and raised in Toronto, Michaels (who changed his name from Lipowitz early in his career) literally married into a founding family of TV sketch comedy. His high-school sweetheart and first wife was Rosie Shuster, daughter of Frank Shuster, who pioneered the craft with Johnny Wayne in a duo that was a staple of The Ed Sullivan Show.
For Lorne, who lost his father at 14, Frank become a surrogate dad, mentor and role model. As Rosie Shuster recalls in the 2015 oral history Live from New York, “Lorne had a partner and did radio shows and then CBC specials just like my dad had done. I saw the whole thing unfold, and felt like Saturday Night Live was so much a part of something that grew from my home.” As a writer, Schuster was at the core of a team that invented SNL, along with compatriots Dan Aykroyd, band leader Howard Shore, and musician Paul Shaffer. (Other Canadians who later joined the cast include Martin Short, Mike Myers, Phil Hartman and Norm Macdonald). “The whole thing sort of marked the beginning of comics being thought of the way rock stars had been,” observes Shuster in the book. “The rock stars had that real pulsing energy . . . this particular show, because of its live, New York danger vibe, gave you that same kind of raw immediacy.” Michaels says that was the plan: “We wanted to redefine comedy the way the Beatles redefined what being a pop star was. So much of what Saturday Night Live wanted to be, or I wanted it to be when it began, was cool. Which was something television wasn’t, except in a retro way.”
SNL’s existence can be blamed on Johnny Carson. When Carson asked NBC to stop airing reruns of The Tonight Show on weekends, the network asked Michaels to come up with a replacement, and he pitched something he described as “a cross between Monty Python and 60 Minutes.” No one expected the show would last, never mind for 50 years with Michaels firmly at the helm (except for a bleak interregnum from 1980-85). And the show has been notoriously uneven over the decades, which Michaels admits with this sage and sanguine credo: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” People have said SNL isn’t as funny as it used be. And it’s true that the inspired chaos of its the first five years set the bar high – from Belushi’s rubber-ball Brando cartwheeling across the stage to Aykroyd putting a bass in a blender.
I didn’t see the show in those early years because wherever I lived there was no television. I watched a ton of it when I was young, but once I’d left home, no one I knew was watching TV. It wasn’t cool. We were so immersed in the whirl of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll that gave rise to SNL, we barely knew the show existed. But in the late ’70s, while touring in a rock band, I got glimpses of the show in motel rooms. And I once met Aykroyd backstage after playing a gig at a louche venue called the Cheetah Club, where I also had a surreal moment sharing a joint with Ringo Starr. But in 1993, when I was interviewing celebrities for a living, I spent two nights witnessing an SNL episode being mounted and aired at NBC’s fabled Studio 8H in Rockefeller Centre.
I remember Mike Myers in his dressing room saying how starstruck he was before doing a sketch with Mick Jagger: “It’s as if Niagara Falls could talk. You’re looking at him and you think, ‘I’m having a conversation with Niagara Falls.’ It’s imponderable.” Close to midnight on Friday, I was interviewing Lorne in his office when the episode’s host, Christina Applegate, nervously stepped in to bid him goodnight. Lorne told her the monologue was funny in a tone that suggested it wasn’t. Later, he mulled over the conundrum of playing elder statesman to a young cast: “The problem I have is this. It’s 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. I’m 48 and I’m talking to writers who are 23. They’re suggesting an idea, and I’m thinking, ‘We’ve done that five or six times and it hasn’t worked ever.’ I’m just about to say the dreaded phrase, ‘I don’t think it will work.’ But if I say that, they’re thinking, ‘He just doesn’t get it.’ So then you think you should let them do it and make their own mistakes. But then my friends will say, ‘I can’t believe you’re still trying that thing. It has never worked.”
More than three decades later, the generation gap just keeps widening. But Lorne’s legacy seems safe. His rotating troupe of Not Ready For Prime Time Players have ventured far beyond prime time to become movie stars, talk show hosts, and arena-rocking stand-up comics. The show’s political satires blazed a trail for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Larry David bounced from the writers’ room to create Seinfeld, eventually casting SNL graduate Julia Louis-Dreyfus. A young cohort of comic actors fulfilled their rock-star fantasies with mock music videos that went viral – most famously the “Dick in a Box” sketch with Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake –and inspired a whole new genre on YouTube and TikTok.
While sketch comedy has been SNL’s bread and butter, the show has brought gravitas to grim milestones in American history, as a national campfire of consolation. In the wake of 9/11, after New York mayor Rudy Guiliani fronted a phalanx of the city’s firefighters on SNL’s stage, Michaels broke the spell by asking him, “Can we still be funny?” Replied the mayor: “Why start now?” And after the election that saw Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, her impersonator-in-chief, Kate McKinnon, opened the show alone at a grand piano, singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah as requiem for American democracy – and for Leonard, who had died on the eve of the election.
So when will it end?
Michaels blew up TV’s most intimate universe, the family sitcom, by fathering an ever-expanding clubhouse of rebellious youth. Even though he wasn’t much older than the players, he was the patriarch from Day One. But while the cast stays forever young, Lorne, the revered and feared Oz watching from the wings, can’t stop aging. He has vowed to stay with the ship as long as he’s able. The question is: can the show survive without him?
That may depend on the survival of the medium he transformed. Network TV is eroding faster than the Antarctic ice cap as its content gets sucked into the ecosphere of streaming and social media. The extinction of television as we know it seems inevitable. But SNL may, in fact, serve as the medium’s last, best bulwark, both because it’s a live theatrical show that unfolds with momentum that can’t be bottled on social media and because it’s SNL is a weekend ritual as steeped in tradition as Sunday Night football.
If Saturday Night Live’s destiny stays true to the spirit of its creation, the house that Lorne built may find a new foundation, with another cast that comes out of nowhere and reminds us why we still need TV.
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