Tina Kakadelis
Your favorite Saturday Night Live cast is the one you watched when you were a teenager. For fifty years, the late-night sketch comedy show has been making people laugh. Now, it’s considered a juggernaut. The show has launched hundreds of careers in almost every facet of the television and film industry. When a musician or actor gets the call to be a host or a musical guest, it’s a clear indication that they’ve reached a mainstream level of success. However, Saturday Night Live wasn’t always a pillar of late-night television. When it premiered in 1975, there was a strong likelihood that it would fail. Then known as Saturday Night, the show was staffed fully by a bunch of counter-culture twenty-something weirdos, and it was going up against Johnny Carson. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night chronicles the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of what will be Saturday Night Live. The film is a frantic mad dash to showtime, and its success hinges on how much nostalgia audiences have for that original cast of comedians.
Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is on the verge of either history or disaster. He’s the mastermind behind Saturday Night, and tonight is set to be the first-ever episode of his avant garde sketch series. By his side are his wife, Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), and NBC executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman). The three of them are trying to hold together a show that is actively falling apart, but one thing is certain: the group of young comedians they’ve assembled are good. Gilda Radnor (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), and Andy Kaufman (also Braun). These names have shaped the world of comedy as we know it, but in Saturday Night, they’re young, unknown, and hungry for more.
Saturday Night feels like a superhero movie in the sense that it was made for a very specific audience. If you enter the theater without knowing these comedians, Saturday Night has no real interest in introducing them to you. And that’s fine. Every movie is made with a specific audience in mind, but some films make the effort to bring unaware viewers into the fold. Saturday Night is essentially one episode of Saturday Night Live that’s made or broken based on impressions and parodies. If the viewers know what the impressions are based on, they’ll enjoy themselves. Even without that knowledge, the performances are all immensely strong, capturing the essence of each of the beloved comedians, but that’s all there is to the film.
Perhaps the best way to sum up this sentiment is the scene mere minutes before showtime when Lorne is confronted by NBC executive David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), who still doesn’t believe that this show will make it. He tells Lorne to prove the show’s worth to him, and Andy Kaufman interrupts to do a lip-syncing routine that would make the final cut in the actual series premiere. It effectively shows the beauty and isolating nature of Saturday Night Live. You are either tuned into SNL’s odd sense of humor or you’re not, but Saturday Night is not going to convince you to change your mind.
Saturday Night has been compared to anxiety-inducing films like Uncut Gems, but it’s not an earned comparison, given how flimsy the stakes of the film feel. Since we all know that Saturday Night Live is still in existence, it would take a deft hand to create a sense of tension about the outcome. Some effort was made to do this because Lorne is bombarded at every turn with a new problem that’s potentially a roadblock to the show making it to air. A lot of the problems he’s confronted with feel as though they should have been addressed a few months before the night of the premiere, but there’s some grace to be given to twenty-somethings who have never been on network television before. The issue is that there’s no tension that stems from these problems because they’re all ignored or solved off-screen. It’s hard to feel a rising sense of uncertainty or dread when none of the problems actually linger.
Saturday Night may share a similarity with its television counterpart in introducing the world to a new generation of comedians. Some of the stars have already been making names for themselves in the comedy space like Sennott, but others, like Wood as Belushi, can likely mark Saturday Night as their breakout role. Just as your favorite SNL cast is the one you grew up with, Saturday Night is made for the people whose preference in comedies was shaped by this first cast of comedians.
