How “Saturday Night Live” Reinvented Television, Fifty Years Ago

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Speaker 4 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Speaker 5 Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 4 This is probably as good a time as any to say a few words about an appealing new comedy program called Saturday Saturday Night, which is broadcast at 11.30 each Saturday night by NBC and is definitely not to be confused with Saturday Night Live with Howard Kosell, which comes on earlier in the evening on ABC.

Speaker 5 In 1975, the New Yorker reviewed a new television show that aimed pretty deliberately to redefine comedy, and it came to be called Saturday Night Live.

Speaker 6 Starring the Movement for Primetime Players, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi.

Speaker 5 The cast was a bunch of unknowns, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, but it became such an institution, you can barely think of a comedian in the last half century who didn't go through SNL as a writer or as a performer.

Speaker 5 Here's Tina Fay, reading from the review by Michael Arlin, the New Yorker's television critic at the time, published just after the show's debut.

Speaker 4 The Kosell show and NBC's Saturday Night are both mainly live, but there is a crucial difference between the two programs.

Speaker 4 Cosell's show depends on that strange fantasy language of celebrity public relations, which has been concocted by mass entertainment producers and stars.

Speaker 4 It is the language of kisses blown, of God bless you, of this wonderful human being, of a sensational performer and my very dear personal friend, and of you're just a beautiful audience.

Speaker 4 In short, the language of celebrity hype, perhaps a contemporary equivalent of dandyism and powdered wigs.

Speaker 4 Much of the appeal of Saturday Night lies in its contrast with this ubiquitous show business language.

Speaker 4 Its format, like that of most comedy programs, consists of a familiar assembly of skits, songs, and monologues.

Speaker 4 But the spirit of the material is in opposition to conventional show business. Football is kind of nice.

Speaker 10 They changed it a little bit. They moved the hash marks in.
Guys found them and smoked them anyway.

Speaker 4 The hosts don't do very much in the way of hosting in the conventional TV manner of promoting themselves or the guests, but are content mainly to sit around providing a periodic focus for the loosely tied together skits and sometimes telling a story or two.

Speaker 4 Skit humor usually defies cold description, so I won't try much of it here.

Speaker 11 Good evening.

Speaker 12 This is Candace Bergen reporting from

Speaker 12 one of those little third world countries, and I'm talking to the ruler of that country, his Royal Honor.

Speaker 4 On the recent Saturday, with Candace Bergen as host, the show began with a not very brilliant takeoff of a presidential news conference, which showed the actor impersonating President Ford bumping his head on the lectern, fumbling with his drinking water, and repeatedly falling down.

Speaker 13 I do have two major announcements to make.

Speaker 13 No problem, no problem.

Speaker 4 But then there was a crisply done parody of a TV news program, concluding with a lunatic news for the hard of hearing, which consisted of a newsman yelling items of news very loud.

Speaker 12 Our top story tonight. Our top story tonight!

Speaker 4 Also, a takeoff of a black perspective program with the black host attempting to interview a hair-brained white girl on the subject of a book she had just written about black ghetto life.

Speaker 4 Also, an amiable but fairly juvenile parody of Jaws.

Speaker 4 Also, a skit by a fine young comedian, Andy Kaufman, about a TV guest who couldn't manage to perform properly or at all, and so forth.

Speaker 15 I would like to imitate Archie Bunker. You stupid, you, you are so stupid.
Everybody's stupid.

Speaker 15 Get out of my chair, meet.

Speaker 4 For the most part, in the past 20 years, commercial television has largely ignored the important new trends in modern comedy.

Speaker 4 Whether as a result of the caution of advertisers or of the personal prejudices of network bosses, mass entertainment television comedy has been firmly rooted in the past.

Speaker 4 A synthetic Hollywood-style show business past, despite the fact that the new forms of comedy have demonstrated a considerable popular appeal.

Speaker 4 It's not a matter of wishing to replace Bob Hope with an elitist in-group kind of humor. The popular audience continues to adore Bob Hope.

Speaker 4 But it is also true that for years, substantial segments of this same popular audience have been been sneaking away in droves from its hoopla show business comedy hours in order to commune with the rising number of lesser-known, more personal, more political, more sexual comedians.

Speaker 4 Thus, what is noteworthy about Saturday Night, and why I commend it, is not the result of any spectacular star-studded brilliance on its part.

Speaker 4 Indeed, it has no real stars, though I hope that the ensemble of actor comics who perform most of the skits will make individual names for themselves.

Speaker 4 It is, as the saying goes, an uneven program with ups and downs and too many commercial breaks.

Speaker 4 But it is a direct and funny show which seems to speak out of the real non-show business world that most people inhabit, and it exists. One wonders, without expecting an answer, what took it so long.

Speaker 4 One wonders, too, what simple human pleasures the simple human TV viewer might someday conceivably experience if network television, that grinning, gun-toting, wise-cracking, you're just a beautiful audience, still youthful courtesan, should ever start peeling off the rest of the cosmetics.

Speaker 5 Tina Faye, reading from the New Yorker's Review of Saturday Night Live from 1975. That's an excerpt, and you can find Michael Arlen's piece at newyorker.com.

Speaker 5 Now, we don't normally know the producers of television shows, but Saturday Night Live is a real exception to that rule.

Speaker 5 Lauren Michaels was a Canadian who had been writing comedy shows in LA, and he had a very specific idea about what he wanted to do in comedy.

Speaker 5 He promised NBC executives that his show would be different, very different than anything else on television.

Speaker 5 Michaels has always been full of maxims and rules about comedy, and over the years, he cultivated a kind of mystique on the show.

Speaker 5 Lauren Michaels also doesn't like to talk to the press very much, so a new book by Susan Morrison about Michaels sheds a lot of light on one of the most important people in show business in our time.

Speaker 5 Susan spent years talking to Michaels when she wasn't at her day job as an editor at The New Yorker.

Speaker 5 Susan, I don't want you to give away your age or mine, but what's your first memory of watching a Saturday Night Live?

Speaker 3 I definitely watched it in the first season, but my chief first memory is being at this show in the first season.

Speaker 5 50 years ago.

Speaker 3 50 years ago, we got in, we sat right next to the stage in Studio 8H, and it was Elliot Gould and Leon Redbone. What I really remembered was

Speaker 3 the kind of strange thrill of sitting in a working television studio with sets being hustled hustled by you and cameras on cranes flying over your heads.

Speaker 3 What really hit me was the kind of strange deconstructed aspect of it. I'm sure I didn't get most of the comedy.

Speaker 5 So let's start from the beginning of the beginning. You've been an editor at The New Yorker for a long time.
Why write about Lorne Michaels, somebody who people think they know who he is, but

Speaker 5 maybe they only see him as a kind of fleeting image once in a while on a show on a Saturday night.

Speaker 3 My first job in New York City was working for Lorne

Speaker 3 on his one big public failure. It was a show called The New Show that was a prime time kind of quasi-version of SNL on NBC.

Speaker 3 And the show flopped terribly, but it opened the world to me in a very interesting way. And, you know, I would say hi to Lorne.

Speaker 3 And so I always was interested in the culture.

Speaker 3 And around the time of SNL's 40th anniversary, 10 years ago, I was a new empty nester, and I had the preposterous idea that I was suddenly going to have a lot of free time.

Speaker 3 So I went to Lauren, who knew me a bit, and

Speaker 3 told him, I've signed a contract with Random House to write a book about you.

Speaker 3 I don't need anything from you because

Speaker 3 I'm familiar with your world and your friends and these people, but it would be a better book if you wanted to be involved. And after

Speaker 3 looking like he was going to pass out for taking a few deep breaths, he, you know, he loves the New Yorker. He agreed to give me a lot of time and open a lot of doors.

Speaker 3 A lot of people don't know that in the very first season of SNL,

Speaker 3 the New Yorkers

Speaker 3 famous writer, Lillian Ross, and William Sean, the editor of this magazine, showed up at the show one day because they were huge Richard Preyer fans.

Speaker 3 And they loved Lauren and they kind of took him under their wing and showed him around town. He didn't really know New York at the time.
He's Canadian. He's Canadian and he had been in LA.

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 so he learned a lot from them and they learned a lot from him. A lot of people don't know that William Sean was a real comedy nerd.
And in his later years, his favorite film was This Is Spinal Tap.

Speaker 5 Wait, I have to absorb that. You know, the stereotype of him or the caricature of him was very buttoned up, let's just say.
And that was his favorite.

Speaker 3 He loved it, yeah.

Speaker 5 Incidentally, after Sean was deposed in the mid-80s, there was this thought that entered Lauren Michaels' head at some point that he would succeed William Sean as the editor of The New Yorker.

Speaker 5 I want to know everything about that.

Speaker 16 Sean was a mentor.

Speaker 3 If you think about our two enterprises, 50 years apart, the New Yorker's 100, SNL is now 50, a lot of what these guys do is very similar.

Speaker 3 They're corralling a gang of needy egos, figuring out how to keep the thing afloat every week, once a week. You know, they have to say no more than they can say yes.
And

Speaker 3 Sean talked a lot to Lauren about succession. And it turned out that Sean didn't manage his own succession terribly well.

Speaker 5 No, and was under the delusion that he would go on forever something.

Speaker 3 And so Lauren definitely got this idea that

Speaker 3 he would perhaps be asked to step into Sean's shoes.

Speaker 3 So I think when I came along, part of the New Yorker Yorker, wanting to write this book, I think a penny dropped with Lauren and he felt there was a kind of a continuity.

Speaker 5 What's been its cultural import and importance and why has it been able to last this long?

Speaker 3 Well, in the beginning, it really was renegade. You know, it started at a time when television was the Rady Bunch and Lawrence Welk.
And

Speaker 3 because it was on at 11.30 late night, you know, that time slot was like a vacant lot at the edge of town. You know, no executives paid attention to it.
No one gave notes.

Speaker 3 They could do whatever they wanted. But I think the reason it's lasted

Speaker 3 is that Lorne, he had a lot of really oddball jobs in LA writing for people from Phyllis Diller to Perry Como to Flip Wilson and a lot of schlock.

Speaker 3 It was that strange period of the early 70s when you know some of television felt like the 60s, some felt like the 50s.

Speaker 3 It was, you know, Dean Martin would have the stones on his variety show just almost out of obligation and, you know, would introduce them in this disparaging way, saying,

Speaker 3 I've been rolling, I've been stoned, but I've never seen anything.

Speaker 5 Right, and even Ed Sullivan didn't seem entirely comfortable with the Beatles and rock and roll on his Sunday night show.

Speaker 3 Exactly. So the reason I bring this up is that I think Lauren was a real student of what I call sort of the hinges between eras.

Speaker 10 When the music changes, you have to change. You know, by 1968, you can't do Love Me Do,

Speaker 10 which worked perfectly in 1965. And we're, it's Vietnam.

Speaker 10 We're in the writing offices when they raid Patty Hearst's Sing Kew thing, you know, gunfire and they kill, you know, all of that chaos of 74. We're watching Watergate every day.

Speaker 3 You know, it's like... He noticed how one time slid into another.
And I think he was always determined to not be that, you know, the grandmother with a hula hoop. He wanted the show to stay current.

Speaker 3 He paid attention to replenishing the casts in a sort of seamless way so that it would never seem like an old guy trying to do an entertainment for young people.

Speaker 5 So in a way, the show, which was replacing Dead Air on Saturday night and kind of replacing a Johnny Carson repeat on the weekend,

Speaker 5 was to become itself rock and roll as well as just the guests being rock and roll.

Speaker 3 Yeah, definitely. I mean, Lauren, you know, when he was toiling in L.A.
at these kind of lame shows writing for Perry Como, a bunch of times he thought, God, television is just a backwater.

Speaker 3 You know, the movies, you know, you had John Cassavetes and Terrence Malik, you're really pushing into new territory and rock and roll was so exciting.

Speaker 3 And television was, you know, it was still the boob tube. And he was determined to help television catch up.

Speaker 5 Why did he want to have this be in our capital?

Speaker 3 When he finally got an offer from NBC to come to New York and make this show, he almost said no. He didn't want to come to New York.
He wanted to do it in California.

Speaker 3 NBC's president Herb Schlosser wanted to do this show out of Rockefeller Center, which was Deadsville. Lawrence said, you know, there were deer running in the halls back then.

Speaker 3 At that time, New York was on the brink of bankruptcy, crime everywhere, graffiti everywhere. It was very cold.
Remember, this is is a furrier son from Canada.

Speaker 3 He wasn't eager to get back into that climate. And

Speaker 3 he considered New York the anxiety capital of the world. But he decided it was worth it to make the show that he'd always dreamed of.

Speaker 5 And what is the show that he always dreamed of? What was it based on, and how is it unique?

Speaker 3 What it is, it's a combination of comedy sketches that reflect kind of

Speaker 3 real-world 1970s preoccupations, politics, short films, rock music.

Speaker 3 If you were to compare it to, say, Carol Burnett, which was a popular, huge hit show at the time, which I, as a kid, adored, that was for an older generation.

Speaker 3 Their pieces were about the PTA and alcoholism and parents in the suburbs getting the garage door to work. I mean, Lorne wanted the show to be about drugs and

Speaker 3 romance and sex and just wanted it to be for his generation.

Speaker 5 So, Susan, now when we see Lauren Michaels in those little snippets on Saturday Night Live, he's wearing an exquisite suit and he's a guy of a certain age, but he did have one big moment in the show's first season.

Speaker 5 This is from 1975.

Speaker 13 Hi, I'm Lauren Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night. Right now we're being seen by approximately 22 million viewers.
But please allow me, if I may, to address myself to four very special people.

Speaker 13 John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the Beatles.

Speaker 13 Lately there have been a lot of rumors to the effect that the four of you might be getting back together. That would be great.
In my book, the Beatles are the best thing that ever happened to music.

Speaker 13 Well, if it's money you want, there's no problem here. The National Broadcasting Company has authorized me to offer you a certified check for $3,000.

Speaker 13 This check here is made out to the Beatles. You divide it any way you want.
If you want to give Ringo less, that's up to you.

Speaker 3 I mean, first of all, it's an incredibly funny bit, and it was Lauren's idea. But it was an example of what Lauren calls the show itself speaking.

Speaker 3 One of the things that was very unusual about early SNL, or SNL even now, is the meta-aspect, the sort of taking apart the show and looking behind the scenes of the show be part of the action.

Speaker 5 I'm talking with the New Yorker's Susan Morrison. Her new book is titled Lorne, The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.
And we'll continue our conversation in just a moment.

Speaker 5 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Speaker 5 It's Saturday Night!

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Speaker 5 This is the New Yorker Radio Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 5 I've been talking about the 50th anniversary this year of Saturday Night Live with Susan Morrison.

Speaker 5 Susan's my longtime colleague at the New Yorker and the author of a new book about the producer Lauren Michaels. Michaels launched Saturday Night Live in 1975 as a brash young man of 30.

Speaker 5 He's still running the show with an iron hand 50 years later.

Speaker 5 As a producer, Michaels stays largely behind the scenes, but he's cultivated a character, a larger-than-life personality, which is catnip for the comedians who have worked for him over the years.

Speaker 3 When I was researching this book,

Speaker 3 I remember asking Alec Baldwin, so who do you think does the best, Lorne? Because as you say, a lot of the people on the show impersonate Lorne. And Alex said, Lorne.

Speaker 3 And, you know, David, I hope I'm not the first to tell you that there are a lot of pretty good David Remnick impersonations around this place.

Speaker 3 But, you know, it's a way to blow off steam. And it has to do with what you were saying before about people having this strange fascination with Lauren and trying to figure him out.

Speaker 5 Well, let's listen. We grabbed a few Lauren imitations from Bill Hayter, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, Dana Carvey, and Mike Myers, too.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so like one would be like, I went to Kansas City

Speaker 6 with Alec and Marcy

Speaker 13 to try to

Speaker 6 get BTK killer off death row.

Speaker 6 They said, here comes BTK. I go, you know, his name's Dennis.

Speaker 16 Just

Speaker 16 go

Speaker 16 in

Speaker 16 to the room

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 10 just...

Speaker 7 Somebody walks you out of the office.

Speaker 16 I'm I do the uh no, no, no, no, no, I know.

Speaker 7 Like that is no matter what you tell him, he knows it already.

Speaker 16 He's the authority.

Speaker 7 No, no, no, no, no, I know, I know.

Speaker 17 We're going to meditate after read-through. Um, your mantra will be Lorne, um, it'll be group, then we'll face the sun and

Speaker 17 ask for forgiveness of our sins.

Speaker 3 We get the warhead, and we hold the world ransom for

Speaker 3 one million dollars.

Speaker 5 Now, I didn't know initially that Dr. Evil was based on Lorne Michaels.

Speaker 16 Dr.

Speaker 3 Evil originated with an impression that Dana Carvey used to do sitting in the makeup chair at SNL wearing the bald wig, you know, while he was waiting for his George Bush wig before he went out to do his George Bush impersonation.

Speaker 3 And he used to do this funny impersonation of Lorne.

Speaker 3 And, you know, he's a particular cadence.

Speaker 3 It's sometimes it's kind of pretentious, bloviating.

Speaker 3 And so Dana Carvey, the first time he saw Austin Powers,

Speaker 3 he saw his own Lauren impersonation when Doctor Evil appeared on the screen. He didn't know that Mike Myers did it.

Speaker 3 Mike Myers is one of the people who did not do a Lauren impersonation around the office. That's hilarious.
And complete with the pinky to the lips, which...

Speaker 5 That's a Lauren Michaels things, too?

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 3 Dana took the pinky thing. It's an exaggerated form of

Speaker 3 how Lauren, I I think, sometimes would bite his nails at read-through. When I asked Lauren about this,

Speaker 3 he said, Well, in terms of fingers, I might be more thumb.

Speaker 16 Wow.

Speaker 10 People go, Well, does it bother you that everybody does an impression?

Speaker 10 And I go, No, because that's it's the most American thing there is, which is people make fun of the boss.

Speaker 3 You know, so they don't do that in Canada?

Speaker 10 I don't know, but in Canada, I don't know because nobody's ever that successful. But

Speaker 7 I think that

Speaker 10 what happened with it is people tell stories about me, and then they take on a mythic thing, and then they become true.

Speaker 5 He's got a mystique, and what you're saying is that he's cultivated this mystique. What is the nature of it, and what kind of hold does he have on the people he works with?

Speaker 3 Anything that begins as a kind of anti-establishment renegade thing like SNL,

Speaker 3 and I'm thinking of Rolling Stone also, which began a little bit before that. The magazine.
As it gets successful, you know, it's tough to stay a renegade and be making gazillions of dollars.

Speaker 3 One of the ways Lorne, I think, dealt with that, consciously or not, was by playing into that with his character as this kind of

Speaker 3 bored, self-satisfied, pasha kind of character. You know, he is, in some ways, you know, he plays his cards close to the vest.

Speaker 3 He is inscrutable. He can be aloof.

Speaker 3 People are always saying that

Speaker 3 he is stinting with sort of obvious praise. Like if you go out there and you kill in a sketch, he's not going to say at the Monday meeting, that was fantastic.

Speaker 3 But he'd single out somebody who had like a tiny role and he'd say, you know, you were breathtaking as the third cop. So he...

Speaker 3 You keep people off balance a little bit.

Speaker 5 It seems like everybody there is, even years after starting to work with him, kind of terrified of him. And he tells them how to live.

Speaker 10 I said, get yourself an apartment you don't believe you deserve.

Speaker 10 So when you're,

Speaker 10 after you've worked 14, 15 hours,

Speaker 10 you get to your door and you go, who lives here? This is amazing. And you go, you do.
And you feel good about yourself. And the fear that it will all go away, which your parents are giving you,

Speaker 10 I'm telling you it won't go away. And I'm your boss.
And I can tell you that we'll be here next year and the year after and the year after that and you will only make more money each year.

Speaker 10 So treat yourself well because it's the beginning of how you can

Speaker 10 adjust to other levels of show business.

Speaker 5 He also has rules for comedy itself and you get into this in the book and I think it's absolutely fascinating. What are those rules?

Speaker 3 One that a lot of people talk about is do it in sunshine. And what that means is don't forget that comedy is supposed to be an entertainment.

Speaker 3 He's always warning, especially young people, against going for a kind of a gritty indie vibe.

Speaker 3 If you think about the posters for the movies he produces, like Wayne's World and many, many others, they're very often the characters standing against a bright blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds.

Speaker 3 Lauren says, never have a coffin in a sketch. You just, you don't want to bring people down.

Speaker 5 So even while he's ostensibly being politically,

Speaker 5 at least oppositional to the moment, it's never that renegade.

Speaker 3 One of the things that I think Lawrence sometimes has difficulty with in our age is that from the beginning, his idea was that you just, you wanted to be needling who's ever in power.

Speaker 3 The show would make fun of Jimmy Carter. The show made fun of Bill Clinton, all kinds of Democrats as well as Republicans.

Speaker 3 And I think that's one way that he and the show think of themselves as differing from some other kind of political talk shows and comedy shows.

Speaker 5 Do you think it's gotten more politically toothless over the years? That's been some of the critique of it.

Speaker 3 I think that Lauren is always pushing his people to make fun of liberals as well as conservatives.

Speaker 3 And in the current climate, which is something we say here all the time at The New Yorker about our own younger staff members, that's much harder to do.

Speaker 3 I don't think that the show has gotten more politically toothless. I think if anything,

Speaker 3 we live in this kind of cataclysmic time where I think people feel that if they're not just

Speaker 3 going after the kind of MAGA Trump Republicans and treating

Speaker 3 that they're going to go to hell. And that kind of an attitude is

Speaker 3 oppositional to comedy, I think.

Speaker 3 There's a term,

Speaker 3 Seth Meyers coined it called claptor.

Speaker 3 And that means when you get an audience reaction, usually to a political joke, which isn't laughing, but it's more this kind of, I agree with that sentiment kind of clapping.

Speaker 3 And that's not really something a real comedy

Speaker 3 wants. It's not satisfying.
A comedian really wants somebody to have this,

Speaker 3 you know, laughing is it's

Speaker 3 an uncontrollable physical reaction. And that's really what you want.

Speaker 5 Let's listen to Lauren Michaels talking about about his culture that he established and his management style.

Speaker 10 There's an old Stanley Myron Hanelman joke that I told the first time we got a Peabody.

Speaker 10 It used to be a straight line that you could take 50 monkeys, put them in a room with typewriters, and sooner or later they'd write the word

Speaker 10 Shakespeare. And his was,

Speaker 10 I let them in there, you know, and I checked, and then I came back and I realized they're just fooling around. My point with it is, is that's what we do.

Speaker 10 It looks like we're not doing anything because they're just throwing jokes around or whatever, and you don't know, and they don't look serious and they don't look that, but you create a culture with walls around them where they can be that.

Speaker 5 He's describing a process, and it's a weekly process, and it has a rhythm to it every week. How does it take shape? How does the fooling around take shape from Monday to Saturday?

Speaker 3 Like putting together an issue of The New Yorker.

Speaker 3 Every day of the week has a particular, you know, there's something that has to get done that day.

Speaker 3 And, you know, Lauren says all the time, we don't go on because we're ready. We go on because it's 11.30.

Speaker 3 And so it is, you know, Jim Downey, one of the show's most long-term head writers, used to say that if you got a lot of Swiss engineers to try to look at everything that has to happen in a week in SNL and figure out how long it would take, they would say, oh, probably about 17 days to get these things done.

Speaker 3 But, you know, you have six days.

Speaker 3 But so it is interesting that within that incredibly tight framework, there is just this amount of foolery. I mean, just goofing around.

Speaker 3 And that is, because that's the petri dish, that's a medium you need for comedy. And that's, you know, a good portion of that is them just making fun of Lauren.

Speaker 5 You've been watching Saturday Night Live and studying it to some degree for 50 years, as long as it's been on.

Speaker 5 A lot of people talk about their favorite season.

Speaker 5 What is yours? Because it seems axiomatic that your favorite season is when.

Speaker 3 Well, Lauren always says people, everyone says that their favorite season is when they were in high school. When I was in high school was, as

Speaker 3 same with you, was the first cast. But my favorite cast is,

Speaker 3 I love the sort of Bill Hayter, Kristen Wig,

Speaker 3 Armison cast. I think they worked really tightly together.
I think it was, in a way, maybe as much as the original cast, like kind of the coolest cast, you know.

Speaker 3 And, you know, for somebody as old as he is,

Speaker 3 and people make fun of him for this, Lauren really cares about cool. I also thought that the Amy Poehler, Tina Faye cast, Will Farrell, you know, Will Farrell cast.

Speaker 3 I mean, the thing is that, as you know, they all blend.

Speaker 3 And, of course, the great Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, that period was incredible.

Speaker 5 There was a period somewhat early on that Lauren Michaels left the show. Why did he leave the show and what effect did it have?

Speaker 3 Well, he had been doing the show for five years.

Speaker 3 It was punishing. They did many more shows a year then,

Speaker 3 and I think they were all just completely out of gas. They had lost, you know, first they lost Chevy, then they lost Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and they were going on fumes.

Speaker 3 And Lorne, basically, he said, if I come back for the sixth season, it was just negotiation gone wrong. I need three or four months to regroup.
I'm going to need to hire a a lot more people.

Speaker 3 I need to rest up.

Speaker 3 And the network said, we don't want to do that. And in fact,

Speaker 3 the line was that they had sold the ads already in September and October. The next thing Lorne knew, they had hired somebody else to take over the show,

Speaker 3 which was a shocker to him because even though he didn't own the show, I think he had this idea. It was his child.

Speaker 3 And the idea that NBC felt that they could carry it on without him took him by surprise. That was Gene Demanian.

Speaker 3 She had been the talent coordinator for the show, and she did a disastrous partial year,

Speaker 3 which ended abruptly when one of her actors said, fuck on the air. And then he was replaced by Dick Ebersoll, who had been an NBC executive who had helped Lauren

Speaker 3 in the very beginning. And that kind of sputtered along for a few years until Lauren,

Speaker 3 in 85, Brandon Tardikoff asked Lauren to come back. He had had.

Speaker 8 So he was in good negotiating position.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Well, they were going to pull the show off the air.
So at that point, it was really like, save your baby, come back and save it, or

Speaker 3 it's going nowhere.

Speaker 5 What's the difference in his level of engagement and the way he lives his work life now,

Speaker 5 80, things have been on for 50 years, as opposed to 30, 40 years ago?

Speaker 3 These days,

Speaker 3 you know, he's in the office every day, but the really key, you know, there's a Monday meeting where everybody meets the host. There is read-through on Wednesday, and that's key.
He's there.

Speaker 3 He listens to everything, and then he kind of picks the sketches that they're going to proceed with with the help of a handful of deputies. And then it really is just Saturday night.

Speaker 3 That's the crucible. You know, he watches the dress rehearsal with the writers and his key deputies.
And he barks commands, you know, notes and changes, all kinds of things that need to be fixed.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, just an hour before air gathers the whole group and,

Speaker 3 you know, pretty much rips the show apart.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 3 I mean, we occasionally do this here at the magazine, but not that often.

Speaker 5 It doesn't come on live in an hour and a half, right? You know, for an hour and a half.

Speaker 3 But something that's really important that a lot of people don't understand is that because it's a live show,

Speaker 3 everything, you know, there can't be any surprises. So when something unscripted happens, like Schneid O'Connor tearing up a picture of the Pope on camera, or when Elvis Costello decides

Speaker 3 two bars in to switch songs. You know, the myth out there

Speaker 3 is that those people are banned from the show because they did something without

Speaker 3 telling Lauren. But it's really about deference to

Speaker 3 the camera operators and the tech guys and the

Speaker 5 discipline.

Speaker 3 Yeah, discipline, just because everything has to be a certain number of seconds because then you have a commercial slot and it's live television.

Speaker 3 And if somebody tries to improvise or in the first season, in the first five years, Milton Burrell was on the show and had all these ideas about just going off script and improvising and drove everybody nuts because

Speaker 3 even though improv is a big part of at least comedy as we know it in 2025,

Speaker 3 this is a very tightly scripted show. It has to be because it's live.

Speaker 5 You've reached this point, 50 years of the show. Lorne Michaels is 80 and we wish him nothing but good health going forward.
At some point, the discussion of retirement succession has to come up.

Speaker 5 Where is this discussion now?

Speaker 3 Last year, there was a flurry of rumors of people who would take over.

Speaker 16 TFA,

Speaker 3 Seth Meyers, Colin Joes. I just...
don't think he'll ever leave until he has to,

Speaker 3 until he's carried out of there on a stretcher. He describes the show as the TV equivalent of a David Lean epic.
It's very expensive. It's very wasteful.

Speaker 3 You know, cutting all these sketches at the last minute means scrapping very expensive sets and costumes. And

Speaker 3 I just, it's really hard for me to even think that NBC would keep it going without him.

Speaker 8 Is it still profitable?

Speaker 3 Oh, I think it is, yeah.

Speaker 7 So why wouldn't they keep it going if they could?

Speaker 3 I think his personality is just a huge part of it.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 5 how many people are watching it now? Are they watching it in bits the next morning?

Speaker 3 Amy Poehler famously said at the 40th anniversary,

Speaker 3 SNL is the show that your parents used to have sex to and now you watch on your computer at work the next day.

Speaker 3 So people consume it.

Speaker 3 You watch a sketch on the phone on the subway. You watch it.

Speaker 8 But he must hate that.

Speaker 3 Well, I don't know.

Speaker 3 I think he likes it if people watch it live. It's the same way recording artists still make LPs and they think that someone's going to sit down and listen to, you know,

Speaker 3 I mean, we'll sit around and talk about, oh, should this be a column or it should be a well piece? And we all know that to the average reader, this means nothing.

Speaker 3 And but I think that for us and for Lauren Michaels, the fact that what we do, these things are so modular, you know, I mean, people can read Talk of the Town piece on the subway and then switch to the fantastic Alice Monroe piece in the same way that somebody can sit on their phone and watch a cold open and then watch the musical act.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's actually beneficial to all of us.

Speaker 5 So just for the record, you think that he'll go as long as he possibly can physically,

Speaker 5 and then when he ends, it ends?

Speaker 3 I think that's not an impossible idea. The other thing I might...

Speaker 3 I would think of is that I could imagine a kind of coalition of a handful of people

Speaker 3 taking it over.

Speaker 8 Like after the death of Stalin, they had a few people, and then finally Khrushchev prevails.

Speaker 16 Good analogy.

Speaker 5 Susan Morrison, thank you.

Speaker 3 Thank you, David. It was great to walk down the hall and sit here and talk to you.

Speaker 5 Susan Morrison's new book is Lorne, The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. You can read an excerpt of the book, which ran in the magazine at newyorker.com.

Speaker 5 And you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well. New Yorker.com.

Speaker 5 That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week, and thanks for listening. See you next time.

Speaker 4 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 4 Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Toon Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.

Speaker 4 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer.

Speaker 5 And we had special assistance this week from Jonathan Mitchell.

Speaker 4 With guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barrish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Decat.

Speaker 4 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 4 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

Speaker 10 I know there's going to be a twist, won't they? A massive twist. At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case.

Speaker 4 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.