Movie Review: Saturday Night

I don’t think that anyone involved with getting Saturday Night Live on the air back in 1975 would have expected that the show would still be going strong 50 years later, but here we are and it certainly is. So what was going on in Studio 8H that October evening as the first episode of the show, then titled only Saturday Night (the Live would first appear in the title in 1977), was getting ready to go to air? Unsurprisingly, quite a lot, and much of it involved some variety of panic.

Executive producer and creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is pinballing around the still-under-construction set, trying to corral his unruly cast, and putting out all manner of behind-the-scenes fires, both literal and figurative. His boss at NBC, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) is trying to keep the network’s top executives at bay and get Michaels on track but is becoming increasingly concerned that the show is not ready to go live.

While some of the cast members appear to be enjoying themselves and are just happy to be along for the ride, John Belushi (Matt Wood) seems to look down on some of the material and has been resisting signing his contract, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) is already beginning to behave like a prima donna, and the lone Black actor, Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), struggles to feel like he fits in at all. Then there are the demands of the episode’s guests and the battle between the show’s writers, led by Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and NBC’s very-strict censor Joan (Catherine Curtin). And that’s just scratching the surface of the relentless chaos that somehow managed to come together into a groundbreaking hour-and-a-half of television that night at 11:30.

It makes for a very entertaining, if somewhat scattershot, viewing experience. There are times when it almost feels like too much is going on to follow, but I can understand why co-writers Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman felt the need to memorialize as many of those involved as possible. Also handling directing duties, Reitman builds momentum and suspense as the time to air gets smaller and smaller, while still keeping the tone light and funny enough to avoid feeling like 24 for TV nerds. Jon Batiste’s jazzy score is perfectly suited to the material, though at times it is mixed too loudly to allow the conversations to come through.

The cast is heavily populated by up-and-coming actors and they all do wonderful jobs portraying the show’s original crew and “Not Ready For Prime-Time Players” as well as the various other figures circling that night. The large number of characters does mean that no one really “steals the show”, but LaBelle as Michaels and Rachel Sennott as his wife and sketch writer Rosie Shuster serve as the 2 cores of the story and are imminently watchable, sharing a remarkable chemistry with each other.

Watching Saturday Night, it feels almost miraculous that the show actually made it to air at all, let alone grew into a hit, but 5 decades on it endures. It may have had its ups and downs, but few TV programs can claim to have grown into cultural institutions in the same way that SNL has. This entertaining slice of the madness that went into making it is a fitting way to celebrate the show that feels like a special peek into what would become a milestone in our nation’s shared artistic history, seen through the eyes of a group of misfits who had no idea that that is what they were making. ★★★★