“Comedy slowly became rock n roll,” says Joe Piscopo, a Saturday Night Live cast member between 1980 and 1984, in the opening episode of SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night.
The Peacock docuseries, which is exec produced by Morgan Neville, the man behind Fred Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, 20 Feet From Stardom and Pharrell Williams Lego doc Piece By Piece, tells the story of the venerable NBC sketch comedy show ahead of its 50th anniversary next month.
It features a slew of cast members including Amy Poehler, Andy Samberg, Bill Hader, Bobby Moynihan, Bowen Yang, Cheri Oteri, David Spade, Tina Fey, Ego Nwodim, Fred Armisen, Heidi Gardner, Jason Sudeikis, Jay Pharaoh, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Kenan Thompson, Molly Shannon, Pete Davidson, Tracy Morgan, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Rachel Dratch, Will Ferrell, Billy Crystal and Damon Wayans as well as writers and producers such as Alan Zweibel, Al Franken, Harper Steele, Jim Downey, John Mulaney, Larry David and Laila Nabulsi.
The four-part series is structured into four distinct parts: Auditions, Writers, Will Ferrell’s infamous Cowbell sketch and Season 11, the “weird year” that nearly saw the show canceled.
It’s an in-depth look at the Lorne Michaels-run show, which launched in 1975 and celebrates its 50th anniversary on Sunday February 16.
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Neville tells Deadline that he was initially approached a couple of years ago. “They’ve told their story before. As a comedy nerd, I thought about it, and I said, ‘What I want to see as a fan is not another survey about the history of SNL, but specific stories that can go deeper into the nooks and crannies that we don’t normally get to talk about’,” he adds.
He was also keen to showcase different directors across the four episodes; Robert Alexander (Shaq) directed the audition episode, Marshall Curry (Street Fight) helms A Week Inside The SNL Writers Room, Neil Berkeley (Gilbert) takes on cowbells and Jason Zeldes, who has directed series such as Netflix’s Ugly Delicious and edited Neville’s Piece by Piece and Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, delves into season 11.
Neville, who grew up watching the likes of John Belushi on SNL with his dad, adds that he had about a dozen ideas including topics such as SNL’s shorts, the politics of SNL and the women of SNL. “You could still make all those episodes,” he says.
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He didn’t want to focus on the early years because he says it has been a “little overcovered” with docs such as Live From New York: The First Five Years of Saturday Night Live.
It doesn’t, however, go into some of the more unseemly elements of SNL including the drug use and misogyny over the years.
There’s also not a lot of Lorne Michaels, who only really appears in archive footage and some clips from a 2005. The man, who is the subject of a new book Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison, which comes out next month, is “not dying to participate in these things”, according to Neville. “He doesn’t really like looking back, but there is a kind of Wizard of Oz quality to him that I kind of liked,” he adds.
Five Minutes
Amy Poehler (Peacock)
The series opens with the audition process, where rising comedy stars are all given five minutes to impress Michaels and his team and features incredible archive of auditions from the likes of Poehler, Morgan, Moynihan, Samberg, Davidson, Hader, Thompson and Armisen.
“It’s like a comedy emergency room,” says Poehler. “Emergency rooms are hectic, they’re filled with risk takers and there’s some trauma involved.”
Jason Sudekis, who started as a writer before becoming a cast member between 2005 and 2013, adds, “It’s a tough place to work, no bullshit, it owes you nothing and yet is designed to be fun.”
Heidi Gardner tears up when she watches her audition tape (reminiscent of the way Michael Jordan watches an iPad in The Last Dance), while Davidson recalls his first interactions with Michaels.
“Oh my gosh, did other people cry?,” Gardner says. “I just had never seen that at all. And I didn’t think I could because I was scared I would be a little too critical.”
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There’s also footage of those who auditioned but didn’t make it including Jennifer Coolidge, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, Jim Carrey, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, a naked man named Henry Zebrowski, and Stephen Colbert. The Late Show host jokes, “It doesn’t matter, I wasn’t on SNL, this is nothing.”
These audition clips are discussed by some of the backroom believers at the show including Marci Klein, a producer and head of the talent department from 1995 to 2013, Mike Shoemaker, a producer and writer who worked on the show from 1986 to 2009, and Lindsay Shookus, who worked on the show for 20 years, initially as Klein’s assistant before running the talent department.
“There’s a lot of people that I brought in and I’m like, I can’t believe we’re not hiring that person,” says Klein.
Neville wasn’t surprised that NBC had kept all of the audition tapes, even if the network had wiped the early years of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show to save money.
“It’s a big corporation. NBC did throw out all the original Carson shows… maybe they learned from that. But not only did they keep all the auditions, they have all the dress rehearsals, not all the way to the beginning, but pretty early on in the 80s,” he adds.
“I loved that show, I was on it,” a tearful Bobby Moynihan concludes.
Written By: A Week Inside The SNL Writers Room
SNL Writers Room (Peacock)
Do Saturday Night Live writers get the requisite credit? This is the premise of the second episode, which features a litany of scribes who have worked on the show including John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk, Robert Smigel, Paula Pell and Simon Rich as well as current writers such as Celeste Yim, Streeter Seidell, Steve Higgins, and Will Stephen.
They tell stories about how the writers work, how they interact with the cast members and the anxiety of finding out whether or not one of their sketches has made the show.
“I loved it more than any job I’ve ever had and I’m so glad it’s not my current job,” says Seth Meyers, a cast member and writer between 2001 and 2014.
“Even though everyone at SNL is working together to make one thing… it is built on competition,” adds Tina Fey, who started as a writer in 1997 before becoming a cast member through 2006.
There’s tales of Gilda Radner’s “vomit drafts” as well as the position of Betzy Torres-Mitchell, the show’s standards executive or “censor”.
Larry David, who was only a writer for one season in 1984/85 and was only able to get one sketch on the air, says, “It’s an American institution, it can go on for another 200 years.”
More Cowbell
More Cowbell (NBC)
“This is beyond my wildest dreams that you’re making a documentary about the cowbell sketch,” says Jimmy Fallon. “It’s the biggest sketch I’ve ever been part of.”
The third episode could be its own, standalone documentary about the sketch that premiered on April 8, 2000 and has become arguably the most famous sketch from the show.
Written by Will Ferrell, the sketch depicts the recording of Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Ferrell plays Gene Frenkle, an overzealous cowbell player, while host Christopher Walken plays music producer Bruce Dickinson.
Walken refuses to discuss the sketch, it ruined his life apparently, according to Ferrell, and Neville says that Walken told him he was happy to discuss anything else involving SNL but not that sketch.
Regardless, there are plenty of interesting side stories including the members of Blue Öyster Cult discussing it as well as a trio of music producers who are trying to take credit for recording the song (and the cowbell).
More Cowbell also stars Fallon, Chris Parnell, Chris Kattan and Horatio Sanz and has some famous musical fans including Dave Grohl, who got Walken to pronounce his band Foo Fighters in his signature style in 2003, and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, who appeared as musical guests on SNL alongside Ferrell and his cowbell, in 2005
Neville says there were other infamous sketches that could have been the subject of a deep dive including The Californians, Belushi’s Samurai and Wayne’s World, but the difference with More Cowbell was that it was a “one and done” yet it still had this “cultural cache”.
“Is it pathetic if I laugh at my own sketch,” says Ferrell.
Season 11: The Weird Year
Jon Lovitz (Peacock)
SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night finishes with a deep dive into Season 11 of the show, a pivotal year for the series as it teetered on the brink of cancelation.
“SNL had floundered a bit,” says Al Franken, who alongside Tom Davis was one of the lead producers on the season, which ran between November 9, 1985, and May 24, 1986.
Season 11 marked the return of Lorne Michaels as executive producer after a five-year hiatus.
Season 10, dealing with the departure of Eddie Murphy the year before, had an all-star cast with the likes of Billy Crystal, Martin Short and Christopher Guest, but Michaels ripped up the show and started again with a whole new cast, which included Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Nora Dunn, Anthony Michael Hall, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, Randy Quaid, Terry Sweeney and Danitra Vance. Damon Wayans was also on the show before he was fired midseason.
Kevin Nealon, who joined the following year, says, “The head of the network [Brandon Tartikoff] was talking about canceling the show. Lorne Michaels returned to save his first love. It’s a spin of the wheel to see if the show is going to live or die.”
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The season, which kicked off with Madonna hosting, featured Terry Sweeney as the show’s first openly gay male cast member and Danitra Vance as the first Black woman on the primary cast.
In an archive interview shot in 2005, Michaels says that the hiring of the likes of Anthony Michael Hall, fresh from the success of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Downey, coming off Firstborn, was intended to attract a youth audience. “I wanted to go younger, perhaps I went too young,” Michaels says.
Michaels admitted that when he left in 1980, he wanted the show to die. “When Brandon was trying to get me to come back in 1985… someone said you’ve already done SNL, somebody who wants to be you is doing SNL, and I thought well I kind of enjoyed being me,” he adds.
Neville says despite having the likes of Downey Jr., Cusack and Hall it “didn’t work”. “Part of it was the separation between the performing and the writing. I think what [Lorne] understood, and what everybody understood, was the show works best when the performers are also writers, and the writers are really on the same wavelength as the performers,” he adds.
As Tom Hanks, who has hosted SNL ten times, says, “That 11th year was probably the biggest risk where the division between what worked and what did not work, ooh, that was painfully obvious.”
The clearest indication of this was an episode “directed” by Francis Ford Coppola, who appeared between sketches alongside Michaels in attempt to bolster ratings. “You’re the only one who can save this sinking ship,” jokes Sweeney on the episode.
Michaels had essentially put Franken and Davis in charge with help from head writer Jim Downey associate producer Laila Nabulsi. “I didn’t know it’d be such a difficult year,” says Franken.
“I thought the ‘85 season was two steps forward, one step back. I realized it was not meshing,” says Michaels.
Tartikoff was keen on canceling the show, but with some help from his manager Bernie Brillstein, Michaels persuaded him to give it another chance. “I started to go back to doing a show that I’d like to see, we started taking bigger chances,” he says.
This was exemplified by the season finale, where co-host Billy Martin sets the cast and show on fire. Only Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn and Dennis Miller survived and made it to season 12.
“I knew, after having been beaten up for a year, I was completely determined, now I had something to prove again,” says Michaels.
Or, maybe, as Madonna said at the top of season 12, it was all a dream.
The Future Of SNL
Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson, Heidi Gardner, Marcello Hernández, Sarah Sherman, and Colin (Will Heath/NBC)
The 50th anniversary of SNL – culminating in the February 16 show – is an important milestone for the show, Michaels and NBC. It has also raised a lot of questions as to whether Michaels will continue, who will leave and whether the show will ever carry on without him.
Michaels himself has been flip-flopping on the retirement question for years. In 2021, he said that the 50th anniversary would “be a really good time to leave”. Last January, he said that sometime before February, he would “figure out what we’re gonna do” in the future, saying Tina Fey could “easily” be his replacement, along with others, while in June, he said he’s “going to do it as long as I feel I can do it”.
What does Neville, after speaking to numerous former and current cast members and producers, think will happen.
“It comes up all the time… the amount of kind of Kremlinology that happens around SNL… My sense of it is the show’s not going anywhere, that Lorne is not going anywhere soon. Though I feel like all that said SNL 50 is a huge thing that everybody’s been thinking about for years. I think after it happens, it will feel different.”
It’s speculated that a number of the long-running cast could leave after this season; Kenan Thompson has been on the show for over 20 years, Colin Jost has been with the show for around 20 years, Michael Che and Mikey Day have been involved for over ten and even relative newbies such as Heidi Gardner and Andrew Dismukes have been on the show for eight years.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a fair amount of turnover, just throughout the show, of people that kind of hung in longer to be here for the 50th,” Neville adds.
Replacing Michaels is also “kind of impossible”, he says. “There are people who can do parts of the job, but I think a lot of what, what keeps SNL [going] is Lorne. There are so many times when people have wanted to change the show. The content of each show changes, it adapts, the humor changes, the music changes but the way that the show is made hasn’t changed at all. There’s a Vatican quality to it.”
SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, which premieres on January 16, is produced by Tremolo Productions with Neville, Caitrin Rogers and Juaquin Cambron serving as exec producers.
