Saturday Night Is Not Ready for Primetime

Anyone who's ever watched Saturday Night Live knows what a profoundly mixed experience it can be. For every five minutes of genuinely groundbreaking comedy, you often have to suffer through 85 minutes of bad political caricatures and tedious "topical" sketches that will age like milk. (Hypothetical example: Kamala Harris sitting for an interview with the "Hawk Tuah" girl, Hailey Welch.) Such is the same with Saturday Night, director Jason Reitman's solipsistic re-creation of the show's fateful first episode, where, in order to get to the one truly funny bit — Andy Kaufman's legendary, still hilarious "Mighty Mouse" routine, performed verbatim by Nicolas Braun as Kaufman — audiences have to sit through 85 minutes of unfunny jokes, thin characters, and references to cultural figures unintelligible to anyone under the age of 50.

The film is, of course, not strictly intended as a comedy. It follows Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and his wife, writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), as they attempt to shepherd his fledgling sketch-comedy show, NBC's Saturday Night, through its troubled premiere. We see brawls between cast and crew, lighting rigs falling from the rafters, employees getting high on all sorts of drugs (one assistant unrealistically gets incapacitated by a single hit of someone's joint), and lots of storming off. It is a classic example of Murphy's Law in action: Anything that can go wrong does. Everyone doubts the show will go on, and many root for it to fail, from the religious head of NBC standards and practices to the network's sleazy head of talent, David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), who flips between effusive praise and ruthless condemnation of Michaels. Even Johnny Carson gets in on the act. There is a subplot dealing with a Tonight Show contract dispute that is glazed over because Michaels is too busy putting out fires to think about it.

Of course, they pull it off, and that's the problem with the film: There is absolutely no sense of tension in Saturday Night because we all know that the show is destined to be a hit. SNL has been on the air for nearly 50 years. The film's October 11 release date is meant to sync up with the anniversary of the original episode's airdate. It is an institution, and the real Lorne Michaels, whose reign over the show has lasted nearly unbroken for as long as it's been on the air, has long been regarded as the obstinate kingmaker of American comedy, a man of incredible power that can destroy careers as easily as he can make them. This is the guy who invited Donald Trump to host while he was running for president in 2015 and Dave Chappelle, an avowed transphobe, in 2022. And yet, the Lorne Michaels in the film is a plucky upstart, so strong in his belief that TV should be seized by the generation that grew up on it and insistent that his show will start a revolution. His antagonists are so equally insistent that the show will fail that it removes any sense of realism from the plot and turns it into a simplistic underdog story.
So many of the characters are underwhelming, and the performances are so unconvincing, more like bad impressions than actual portrayals, that they make the film look and feel like a high-school theater production. The cadre of young actors playing each of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players varies greatly in terms of their ability to channel their '70s counterparts. I clocked Braun's rendition of Jim Henson immediately — you can't mistake that beard — but it took me nearly an hour to figure out that Dylan O'Brien was supposed to be Dan Aykroyd or that Nicholas Podany is playing Billy Crystal. Part of this is due to the abysmal sound mixing, which, during my screening, made the dialogue unintelligible underneath Jon Batiste's frenzied, jazzy score. The frenetic editing style and shaky-cam cinematography, reminiscent of the Safdies and The Bear, also felt distracting.

Plenty of the female characters feel especially undefined. Ella Hunt plays Gilda Radner as a ditz, and the other women barely figure. Meanwhile, Lamorne Morris plays Garrett Morris (no relation), the lone Black cast member, as a man searching for his identity on the show, a Julliard-trained playwright slumming it on a variety TV show. He finally makes a mark for himself after performing a racially charged ditty during the soundcheck that comes off as accepting his tokenization.

The film is so convinced of the original SNL's greatness that it fails to show or adequately explain why it's so revolutionary. It's a film made with a specific audience in mind — the baby boomers who watched the show in the first place — and its attempts to distill the specific time and place SNL began in make the film distasteful to anyone outside of that demographic. It's not just the dated, often racist humor and open sexism on display; the audience is expected to know who everyone is from the get-go, and while I am probably more familiar with the show's golden age than most people my age, I could barely recognize anyone in this movie or know who they're supposed to be or why I should even care. Saturday Night regards these people uncritically as trailblazers and iconoclasts. Yet, in a sense, the film is another pale repetition of the same socio-cultural dominance boomers have been inflicting on their children and grandchildren for decades now. It's not enough that the SNL generation runs the world; they must also demand our cultural fealty.

A more interesting way to make a film about Saturday Night Live exists. It would be a documentary, shot fly-on-the-wall style, showing a single year of the show's production, warts and all. It will never be made because the people who make SNL — the real Lorne Michaels — would never allow that kind of access. Saturday Night is what we get instead: a tiresome hagiography that aims only to flatter an audience of geezers. At least Andy is still funny.

Saturday Night. Starring Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, and Willem Dafoe. Directed by Jason Reitman. Written by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan. 109 minutes. Rated R. Opens Friday, October 11; check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/movietimes.