By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
October 11, 1974, was a Saturday night, long considered to be a death slot for television networks, but on this particular night, Lorne Michaels’s crazy vision of a sketch comedy series airing live, coast to coast, was going to change everything. Saturday Night Live hit the airwaves, changing comedy, television, and pop culture all at the same time, and through the decades have brought some ups (the 1986-1993 seasons) and downs (1994), it has remained an American institution. That’s why Netflix found itself with another hit, when it became the first streaming home for Saturday Night, the wild movie about the chaotic night just before the first episode aired, bringing to life the true stories and tall tales of the Not Ready For Primetime Players.
Live From New York
Saturday Night is not structured like a typical film and, instead, throws you directly into the storm at Rockefeller Plaza by bouncing between multiple characters, loose plot threads, and wildly disparate situations with Lorne Michaels (played to perfection by Gabriel LaBelle) in the center. The first season of the show would go on to make an overnight star out of Chevy Chase (played by Cory Michael Smith), which is why he’s featured so heavily in the film, alongside Dan Aykroyd (played by The Maze Runner’s Dylan O’Brien) and John Belushi (Matt Wood). Director Jason Reitman has firsthand knowledge of some of the cast, his dad Ivan directed Aykroyd and future cast member Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, which helped capture the over-the-top personalities that couldn’t help but clash.
Backstage fights defined most of the early years of SNL, and Saturday Night features multiple in its brief 102-minute runtime, including host George Carlin (The Americans’s Matthew Rhys) and a network censor and Chase and Belushi going at it, which, given the way his co-stars spoke about him, if Chevy didn’t get into a fight with anyone it would be a surprise. A different type of fight, and perhaps the most interesting of the many stories weaved through the movie, shows Lorne Michaels defending the very nature of the show to the incredulous NBC executive in a microcosm of his real-life struggle to bring the series to life. Between the Aaron Sorkin-style long-tracking shots featuring multiple characters entering and leaving conversations and the rapid-fire cuts between moments of small triumphs, the one thing you can’t call the film is boring.
Behind The Scenes Of Comedy’s Big Bang
Saturday Night does include, fittingly, a cast of mostly up-and-coming stars, with Dylan O’Brien and Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things) as tow of the more recognizable, but credit has to to go to Nicholas Braun (Succession) playing dual roles that could not be more different: Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson.
Most people have forgotten that Henson and the Muppets were part of SNL during the first two seasons, but as the film makes crystal clear, it was an uneasy partnership on both sides: the sketch writers hated writing material for the Muppets, and Henson, trying to break out of the Sesame Street box that he was worried had trapped his career, wanted to push the envelope with “The Land of Grouch” sketches featuring Muppets mixed with adult humor. It’s another storybeat that Saturday Night glosses over but could stand on its own and, like everyone else involved in the film, deserves more time to explore.
Though the series itself remains popular today, Saturday Night failed to find an audience in theaters, starting out in only five theaters before expanding nationwide for the show’s 49-year anniversary, barely breaking $9 million at the box office. While critics loved it, Jason Reitman shared that Chevy Chase hated it, which is another reason to go watch the film; no one wanted to trek to the theater. That all changed when the film debuted on Netflix in the Top 10, and finally, it found an audience.
Saturday Night Live Is Still Going Strong
Saturday Night may not be a straight-up comedy like the series it documents, but it presents a fascinating look at an era of television and comedy that helped elevate stand-up, defined sketch comedy, and, through the Weekend Update segments, allowed Americans to laugh at the news as satire went mainstream like never before. It’s impossible today to imagine a world without Lorne Michaels’s genius idea for cheap Saturday night programming, especially given how many stars it launched, from Eddie Murphy to Will Farrell, Billy Crystal, and Tina Fey, and someone very familiar to Netflix subscribers, Adam Sandler. Reitman’s film isn’t a perfect one-for-one recreation of the night that changed comedy, but it’s the closest we’ll ever get to being down there in the trenches as scrappy upstart New York comics proved though they weren’t ready for Prime Time, the world wasn’t ready for them.
Saturday Night is now available on Netflix, and if you want to know more about the history of SNL, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, released in 2015, is an incredible oral history told by the writers, cast, crew, and producers who lived through it.
