Saturday Night (2024)

Listen to this post:

How do you tell a 90-minute mess in just 90 minutes? Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night tells the tale of SNL’s infamous debut tape night, when it was still a giant question mark in the programming lineup, only to be a game-time decision by executive David Tebet. The evening was filled with mythology, inhabited by personalities that are just as mythological — Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Jim Henson, and Andy Kaufman, just to name a few (these four in particular are treated with a welcomed level of reverence in this film over most of the others being depicted).

Reitman, co-writing with Gil Kenan, throws in Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) for good measure, who does double-duty as counterpoint for both television’s Changing of the Guard and Chevy Chase’s ego. As Lorne Michaels puts it, “This is the first show created by the generation raised on television.”

via YouTube

Saturday Night Live isn’t just the longest-running comedy series of all time — now in its 50th season — but it’s become the backbone, the cultural signifier of several generations. Entire nations have gone to war over which was better: the Belushi Era or the Sandler Era (the correct answer is the Seth Meyers Era, but I’m a pacifist). So how do you distill 50 years of unfettering legacy into a single movie so that it serves as a proper representative of how and why the show was successful, and what it was to begin with? Well, you can’t.

To say that the fate of SNL would rest on the success of a single night would be a travesty. In fact, the show was nearly canceled just a few years later, prior to a huge overhaul between seasons 5 and 6, only to be saved by a young comedian named Eddie Murphy (the drama that went on at the time, including the departure of creator Lorne Michaels, would have arguably made for a better biopic as well). Likewise, SNL would be on the chopping block once again after season 11, bailed out by the return of Michaels and a fresh lineup that included Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, and Jon Lovitz — the popularity of this lineup was actually what ultimately saved the show for good.

The inability to define Saturday Night Live and the continuous rebranding in its early years essentially normalized its eventual resilience. The general public knows that one bad season of SNL won’t ever make or break the series (and we’ve seen plenty), and it’s now embedded itself into the fabric of American television that it’s considered as untouchable as Meet the Press or The Simpsons.

However, on October 11, 1975, Saturday Night Live would air its inaugural episode and nothing was certain — not even that episode. The show was written with more than 3 hours of material — double its time slot — and its cast and crew were faced with problems up the wazoo.

These myriad of issues are properly highlighted in Reitman’s film, but the issue is a rather inherent one. You see, when going over the events of a single night, it’s easy to throw in interesting scenarios that happened historically, whether or not they hold any weight for the rest of the story, as it were. Movies need a running thread that most, if not all, scenes should refer back to. And while this movie has a throughline of a revolutionary show trying to get made against all odds, there are plenty of instances that occurred that are completely irrelevant to that throughline.

And so, the film is riddled with B-plots like a sitcom. The most interesting include John Belushi’s (Matt Wood) being reluctant to sign his contract due to artistic integrity, as well as a running discussion from Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) chatting with people about why he got cast on the show. I love Garrett Morris but, as a kid watching reruns, always wondered if he was just a glorified garnish intended by the creators to engage a different demographic at home. The actor studied at Julliard and was a published playwright prior to getting cast on SNL, arguably the only one there with any meaningful artistic experience. Moore plays him effortlessly, nailing inflections and eye squints, to where I could almost see the SNL icon right there on stage.

A lot of the other one-off bits feel like mere flavoring to enrich the loose premise. This is a hangout movie the likes of Dazed & Confused or Fast Time at Ridgemont High, where all of these minisodes revolving around its slew of minor characters occupy the same setting, but almost all of its instances could have been replaced with something else instead. Very few of the vignettes feel essential. And others require too much contextual knowledge to even appreciate fully, referring to things outside the bounds of this film Dan Aykroyd being insecure about wearing daisy dukes is interesting at best but this may have been apocryphal and nonetheless refers to a sketch that wasn’t even in the pilot episode. Even the film’s conceit that we already know how iconic SNL will become is simply assumed.

While the storyboard can be nitpicked to death, it’s at least fun to see this assemblage of talents depicted in a fictionalized way, really for the first time on this level. The original cast consisted of Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Belushi, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Morris, Laraine Newman (Emily Farin), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), each excellently casted near perfectly for this film. You really get a sense of the overall essence of each personality without needing to dive too deeply into each one’s lives, for better or worse.

Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), on the other hand, is our surrogate into this story yet doesn’t get a lot of room to develop due to the movie’s natural constrictions. As our protagonist, he’s hardly portrayed as more than just a generic visionary or iconoclast who didn’t have a knack for holding a room. We understand him enough but need to understand him more so that we can care whether or not he succeeds.

It’s almost impossible not to love being a fly on the wall watching these now legendary names during a time when nobody knew who they were. But that alone doesn’t make Saturday Night a good movie. While it does the best it can considering the premise it chose for itself, it may have proven to be a bit too ambitious. I would’ve loved to see more of the writing process during these first few weeks leading up to the pilot episode. You could have reasonably made a biopic about the actual casting of SNL’s first season and it might have been more interesting than this. However, it wouldn’t have been as unique.

In a film industry fatigued with boilerplate biopics, Saturday Night might be a breath of fresh air. However, it never really sings. With few meaningful strands keeping it together outside of its central conflict, the film begs for a wider scope. Encumbered also by cringe-worthy theater kid energy and cheap shots at the network censors just doing their job, the SNL biopic has a real, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” message that I just can’t get past. As one of the most successful TV shows of all time, it needs to stop playing the underdog.