Jason Reitman commemorates TV’s Great Corruption.
Show business can be exciting, that’s why Warner Bros. made its popular Gold Diggers series during the Great Depression. So why did television’s comedy-musical-variety show Saturday Night Live succumb to political bias, ruin itself, and become unwatchable? Jason Reitman supplies no answer in Saturday Night, a carnival-like recreation of the program’s first broadcast on October 11, 1975.
Treating that date like a comedic, sociological event is a sign of what has been called our current Great Corruption. Reitman introduces the cast of newcomers-and-soon-to-be-stars — Lorne Michaels, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd — like legends at the Continental Congress of July 4, 1776. But what’s the point of immortalizing a show that has lost its cultural cred? And where’s Bill Murray?
This is another Reitman boondoggle — like Juno, Up in the Air, and Thank You for Smoking — that mines the zeitgeist, congratulating the SNL institution rather than scrutinizing it in terms of the cultural realities that produced it. There’s no mention of Vietnam or draft-dodging, but the funniest moment checks the feminist box with a skit where female hardhats harass a buff Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien). The most patronizing moments are the running-gag of token black cast member Morris (Lamorne Morris) wandering NBC’s Rockefeller Center stage asking “What is my identity on the show? Why did you hire me?”
Reitman’s film carries a Millennial stigma, endorsing media power through the figure of SNL producer Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle, young Spielberg in The Fabelmans) who gets blasted with fake blood and utters profundities like: “Art is but a measure of sacrifice.” This “ringmaster of geniuses” corrals the multiple egos and mishaps. NBC executive producer David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) outlines Michaels’s future: “I expect you to be an unbending force, a seismic disturbance. We’re standing in the presence of a prophet, a man with a vision, and I want you to take that vision like a Sherman tank and plow through anyone that gets in your way.” When accidentally locked out of 30 Rock, Michaels smashes a glass door.
Reitman follows Michaels through hazards and good luck: placating his wife and writing partner Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), proffering cocaine to George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), discovering the prodigies Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun). He imitates P. T. Anderson/Scorsese’s snooping steadicam style, but the brackish backstage colors prevent real virtuosity. This is Boogie Nights for people who learned how to watch TV from Sesame Street, and Licorice Pizza for those who learned to misread pop culture from Entertainment Weekly. (The word “postmodern” pops up twice, more than “confirmation bias” in Juror #2.)
Are the Great Corruption’s informed masses supposed to care about behind-the-scenes intrigue? Caustic put-downs of Milton Berle, Jim Henson, and Johnny Carson anticipate the partisan snark by which SNL would pillory Millennial conservatives as non-hip — the antiquated value that has bankrupt stand-up comedy today. (Reitman’s bias shows in the excessive screentime given to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s Jon Batiste portraying musician Billy Preston.) The film’s politics are defined by the snideness shown to NBC’s middle-aged censor Joan Carbunkle (Catherine Curtin) who warns the wayward children: “This red pencil is a weapon. It has kept America safe from vulgarity, sex, communism, hedonism.”
Reitman celebrates egotism. His script relates Michaels to the Prometheus statue in Rockefeller Center. (“He stole fire from the gods so that we could have science.”) Extolling a producer whose ego is unstoppable, no matter what anyone says to kill his confidence, is also part of the Great Corruption. It’s not exactly Renoir’s French Cancan, or Warners’ classic 42nd Street where the impresario in the midst of a whirligig loves his work and is humbled by what will be his own bequest.
Saturday Night, one of the livelier films from 2024, offers a glimpse at TV hubris and yet the secrets of show business (nepotism, cronyism) remain hidden. The curious absence of Bill Murray (who only joined the show in its second season and elevated it) reminds us that this SNL myth is not so clever or moving as Murray playing a cynical TV exec in the 1988 Scrooged, the most revealing comedy ever made about television production; that’s the secret history of SNL.