Saturday Night: A Power Fantasy for Aspiring Creatives

Love it or hate it, Saturday Night Live is a cornerstone of American media. It’s where many of the funniest comedians and writers out there got their start and the origin of too many iconic pop culture moments to count. On the other hand, despite being built around cultural commentary, it rarely has anything interesting or subversive to say in this day and age. This is due in part to social media and how quickly culture moves nowadays. By the time SNL gets around to parodying something, every unique joke has already been exhausted by people online, and whatever jokes SNL make have to be filtered through what’s “acceptable” for mainstream television as opposed to the unfiltered freedom an anonymous Twitter user might have. This has contributed to the lack of appeal the show generally has to today’s young people. For all of these reasons, I was fascinated by the announcement of Saturday Night, a film directed by Jason Reitman that set out to chronicle the lead-up to the first-ever Saturday Night Live broadcast back in 1975. The early days of SNL is a topic that would primarily appeal to those alive to experience it, older Gen X people and Baby Boomers. However, the key players in the creation of SNL were all very young, mostly in their 20s, and the cast reflects this. This creates an interesting juxtaposition of a film that's topic is appealing to mainly older audiences, but has an ensemble cast of largely young, up-and-coming actors popular with Generation Z. Who was this film going to appeal to? Would people across generations find interest in it, or would it miss the mark all together? I had to find out.

Saturday Night follows the creator of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Micheals, (played by Gabriel Labelle,) in the 90 minutes leading up to the show’s first-ever broadcast. Everything that can go wrong is: set pieces are falling apart, actors are refusing to cooperate, and the show itself barely has a cohesive plan. The film entirely takes place in real-time, heightening the tension and immersing the audience in the character’s anxieties about the upcoming performance. Every time something went wrong for the characters, you could feel time slipping away, valuable minutes being wasted on petty arguments, and accidental destruction of equipment. Of course, we as an audience have the knowledge that Saturday Night Live would go on to become one of the most famous television shows of all time, which is an unfortunate aspect the film shares with most biopics. Can you fully invest yourself in a narrative so built around the question of success or failure when it’s a foregone conclusion? Despite this, I found myself very engaged with the narrative due to the excellent performances. Gabriel Labelle is an extremely charismatic lead and has great chemistry with the rest of the ensemble, working as a throughline to connect numerous different characters and storylines. The ensemble is great as well, featuring stand-out performances from the always hilarious Rachel Sennot as SNL writer Rosie Schuster and Cory Michael Smith as the self-centered rising star Chevy Chase. Overall, the cast perfectly captures the energy of any creative project made by a group of ambitious young people. They’re all filled with intense passion and ideas but lack the experience to back it up, desperate to be seen as adults by the people around them rather than children acting as professionals. It’s difficult to reconcile with the current state of Saturday Night Live, but back in the 70s, it was revolutionary for television. The cast and crew were a new guard of young upstarts, writing and joking about controversial issues that were rarely mentioned on television and managing to push back against heavy network censorship. It was one of the first shows created by the generation that grew up watching television, actually understanding what young people wanted to see on TV. Despite knowing little about SNL or its history, this sentiment resonated with me, and watching a ragtag group of young creatives succeed against all odds felt deeply satisfying.

So, who is this film for? Those with any knowledge of the history of SNL probably won’t like it. Due to the film’s short run time, it lacks a lot of key context for the individuals involved and fans of any individual cast member may feel as if they’re a parody or caricature of the actual person. However, this is a flaw of most biopics. Films based on real people and events are usually more interesting when trying to engage with them on a narrative level rather than nitpicking whether or not certain things actually happened. Going into it without a lot of knowledge of the real story, Saturday Night was a very enjoyable film. The current state of the entertainment industry often feels hopeless; the executives in charge will never allow anything interesting or subversive to be made. Despite the flaws of modern-day Saturday Night Live, it’s always nice to see stories of success and people achieving their dreams in such a tumultuous industry. This film is a power fantasy for all the aspiring creatives out there, and a reminder that no matter what weird or crazy idea you might have there is an audience for it out there.