A biography of Lorne Michaels, creator and showrunner of Saturday Night Live – now with his sights on the UK – reveals a ruthless perfectionist. Simon Shaps reports
In case you missed it, Saturday Night Live has been celebrating its 50th birthday. It is sometimes said that people in US television have two jobs. The first is their day job. The second is figuring out how to fix Saturday Night Live.
Nobody can agree when the show was at its brilliant best, but most think it was some time ago. When you were at college – or, say, at the start of the Trump era, when Alec Baldwin was honing his impersonation.
If you have wondered why SNL occupies such a unique place in US television history, there is no shortage of ways to find out. Try Beyond Saturday Night, a four-part documentary on Sky. There’s Saturday Night, a feature film about the show’s debut on 11 October 1975. There are profiles and magazine articles, and a 50th anniversary live concert featuring Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Chris Martin and David Byrne.
There’s also the three-hour SNL: 50th Anniversary Special, which opens with Paul Simon singing Homeward Bound, the song he played on SNL with George Harrison in 1976. This time he is joined by Sabrina Carpenter, and other guests include Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Martin Short, David Letterman, Will Ferrell, Scarlett Johansson, Kim Kardashian, Kenan Thompson, Tracy Morgan, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Tom Hanks, Emma Stone, Paul McCartney, Robert De Niro… you get the picture.
Despite this blanket coverage – and the news last month that a UK version of SNL is set to premiere on Sky next year – there may still be a much-talked-about sketch, a bust-up, some piece of network chicanery or episode of wild drug-taking or premature death that you missed along the way.
Luckily, it’s all there in Susan Morrison’s Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, a 650-page book, 10 years in the writing. I have read it – so that you don’t have to. Unless, that is, you work for talent agency WME, where the book is apparently now mandatory reading for all comedy agents.
Morrison has, in fact, written two books. The first is a meticulous account of the rise from precocious teenage comedy talent to gnomic TV titan of one Lorne Lipowitz, aka Michaels, born in Toronto in 1944. Along the way, he found and nurtured generation-defining comedic talents, many of whom venerate and fear him in equal measure, and who paid their dues at that 50th anniversary show.
The second book is an access-all-areas account, interleaved into that narrative, of a typical week in the run-up to the live show at 11.30pm on Saturday night. This climaxes – but not until page 560 – in an account of the 90 minutes that Michaels allows for changes, both minor and major, between the end of dress rehearsal and the start of the live show. In that time, Michaels is famous for cutting sketches writers have lovingly crafted through sleepless nights, rewriting the “cold open”, giving tweaks to make-up and wardrobe, directions to the camera crew, notes to the performers and re-ordering the show from opening credits to the final all-cast farewell.
Having completed that task, he has a glass of wine and finally retreats to his command bunker beneath the bleachers to watch the show on air, making trims for timing as it is broadcast. The other famous Paul in his life, McCartney not Simon, says of this process: “I like to see him in action because I know him just as a mate.”
Or as Michaels puts it: “We don’t go on air because we are ready – we are on air because it is 11.30.”
The process of cutting begins in earnest every Wednesday after a table read-through of around 40 sketches. By dress rehearsal, the writers’ work is tantalisingly close to making it to air. It is the survival of the funniest.
One sketch that did make the cut went out in 2019. It is set in a canteen at a Nato summit, with Alec Baldwin’s Trump, James Corden wonderfully cast as Boris Johnson, and other members of the SNL ensemble playing the “cool kids” Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron. Trudeau says to Johnson: “Macron and I were talking, and we think you should throw a party… at Buckingham Palace.”
Trump overhears: “Did somebody say something about a party?” he asks.
Trudeau and Macron discourage him from attending – he might need to climb steep stairs, no junk food will be served. And Johnson tells Trump: “You like younger women, but this party only has Macron’s wife.” That is followed by the entry of Angela Merkel, an award-winning turn by Kate McKinnon, who can barely contain the lustful frisson she feels at meeting Trudeau and Macron.
In just seven minutes, SNL has sent up several world leaders. Over its 50 years, very few have publicly taken offence. Rather like British politicians cast as Spitting Image puppets, impersonation has been seen as a compliment; making it on to SNL is just so cool. Think of Kamala Harris’s full embrace of the skit about her, crazy laugh and all.
Although Morrison touches on SNL’s politics, the book can’t fully take account of Trump 2.0 and the threats to all his supposed enemies. Around the 40th SNL anniversary in 2015, the soon-to-be president urged the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the show, tweeting: “There must be collusion with the Democrats and, of course, Russia.” He went on: “I once hosted Saturday Night Live, and the ratings were Huuuge! Now, however, LM [Lorne Michaels] is angry and exhausted… it is over for SNL… a great thing for America.”
Morrison writes of the 2015 season: “The show was hotter than it had been in years, but it was an uneasy buzz. The writers worried that something they put on air might provoke Trump to blow up the world (or make the IRS audit them).”
A decade later, with the “crooked media” firmly in his sights – not least NBC, home of SNL – Trump’s willingness to wage war on those he believes enemies is in no doubt. For Michaels, now 80 – with his 5,000 acres in Maine, homes on the Upper West Side and Amagansett, as well as a holiday house in St Barts – the temptation must be to vacate the hot seat. But he has tried that before and it didn’t work.
As this book makes clear, Michaels has created an enduring and hugely influential television series in his own image. The question now is this: will SNL survive the Trump era intact?
It’s not just the show’s power to make us laugh that matters. It is also its ability to skewer the rich and powerful – of all political persuasions – with the critical intelligence of great satire. And that is what has made it indispensable television for five triumphant decades.
Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison is published by Random House.
