I am old enough to remember the long decline of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson. By the time the 1980s came around, the show and its host were just a tired, two-dimensional representation of what it had been back in its heyday. And part of that calcification naturally comes with age. Once a show has been around for a few decades, the framework of the show is dialed in and set - for better or worse. And that familiarity with the process naturally leads to everyone involved just walking through the show in the same way they've done it a thousand times before.
A variety or talk show that has been on the air that long becomes an institution and an influencer of culture. But it also inevitably loses the things that made it special. Like an imperfect wheel that becomes round once it's been used long enough, the repetition that comes with doing a show again and again and again wears down everyone in the process. This doesn't mean that there still aren't magical moments. It just means those highlights are fewer and farther between. And you find yourself appreciating the length of the show's run over the quality of the entertainment.
This weekend, Saturday Night Live celebrates its 50th anniversary and it will be as much a celebration of longtime producer Lorne Michaels as it will be an acknowledgement of what viewers have watched over the past decades. And while there's much to celebrate when any show lasts that long, I find myself not all that nostalgic or interested in the show's past.
It's not that there hasn't been an insane amount of talent that has moved in and out of the show over the years. Many of them have gone on to have long careers outside of the show. But as I think about why I have this ambivalence about the anniversary, I suspect it has a great deal to do with Lorne Michaels and his vision of the show. To be fair, his vision for the show has been commercially very successful. But while I can appreciate his success, I can also find his vision to be often abusive and coldly corporate.
I can't fully describe how mind-blowing it was when I watched SNL during those first couple of seasons. It wasn't just that it was funny or creatively unlike anything else on television. The cast were for the most part true counter-culture believers. The sketches, the humor, and the point of view of the show reflected this late-stage hippie vibe that was contagious. As the original cast left and the show evolved under the guidance of Lorne Michaels, it began to reflect his worldview and sense of what the show should be.
Michaels was never a counter-culture type of guy and was more likely to feel comfortable hobnobbing in The Hamptons than hitting local clubs. Over the decades, everything about the show - from the way it is produced to the casting and who the show targets - became a reflection of Lorne Michaels. And that meant the show slowly shifted from being a mirror of the young comedy radicals to a platform for the humor to be the equivalent of corporate America's court jesters.
As stories from cast members and the occasional court case will attest, Michaels would put up with high levels of substance abuse, misogyny, and sexual misconduct. But he pushed back hard against attempts to make populist points. That would make the show "political" in his mind.
A perfect example of that is his decision to have Donald Trump host SNL ahead of his first presidential campaign. He claimed that the decision was driven by the fact Trump was well-known to the audience, had an ongoing relationship with NBC, and would draw a curious audience. But having Trump host the show was by its very nature a political act. What Michaels meant was that Trump was "one of us" and having him one would be the culturally safest of moves.
You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who has been a part of Saturday Night Live who doesn't have a complicated relationship with Lorne Michaels. He's notoriously cold and difficult, constantly playing mind games with cast members in order to show them who is boss. From making auditioning cast members wait for hours to see him and then refusing to laugh or react during their auditions, to reminding existing cast members they are there only due to his benevolence, Michaels is the classic case of a boss who always, always, wants the upper hand.
According to New York, Michaels is known to punish cast members who displease him—for instance, by taking roles in movies he’s not producing—by nixing their sketches or assigning unfavorable time slots. When Bill Hader was cast, SNL flew him to New York on the same flight as a not-yet-hired Andy Samberg, from whom Hader was instructed to keep his own hiring a secret. After Colin Jost’s first season as “Weekend Update” anchor, he was invited to re-audition for the gig, learned from his manager that his audition was successful, then received a furious call from a producer who told him Michaels was angry that Jost had told his manager the news. (To recap: he hadn’t.) By that point, Jost was a nine-year SNL veteran and co-head writer. “Until you’re actually on the air,” he wrote in his memoir, “you have no idea if Lorne will change his mind and give it to someone else.”
He approves every cast member, every sketch. He can be abusive and because Saturday Night Live is a solid linear success for NBC, the network essentially lets him run the show as he sees fit. And even on the rare occasions when he's over-ruled, his ego won't allow him to let it go. He is convinced to his core that he understands comedy better than anyone else.
A perfect example of this was the 2019 hiring of Shane Gillis. NBC forced Michaels to fire him after some earlier racists and sexist comments he had made on various podcasts surfaced. Michaels continues to insist the reaction was overblown:
He got beat up for things that he’d done years earlier [racist and homophobic jokes] and the overreaction to it was so stunning — and the velocity of it was 200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show. It became a scandal and I go, “No, no, he’s just starting and he’s really funny and you don’t know how we’re going to use him.”
Let's recap a bit of what led to the 2019 controversy around the hiring of Gillis:
In one “A Fair One” segment, Gillis uses the n-word, ostensibly quoting his father’s nickname for a childhood prank: “[n-word]-knocking.”
Gillis hasn't changed at all, other than making sure that when he makes the comments these days, he does it in places people are less likely to notice.
And this is an example of the transactional nature between Michaels and his talent. You can say or do nearly anything, as long as he believes you're funny and he can make money off of you.
And let's be clear, Michaels makes a LOT of money off of his relationships with the cast. In most cases, it's a very transactional deal. You get on the show, suffer through the 90-hour weeks and emotional abuse. But when it's over, you have access to executives and producers who can help set you up with a TV show or movie. And of course, Michaels' production company is part of the project and he gets his taste of the revenue.
But getting through to that creative promised land can be difficult at best.
From the beginning, Saturday Night Live had a reputation for gender-based harassment and it continued for decades because Michaels believed that if that's what it took to get the show on the air, then that's what needed to happen:
Gender-based harassment has blossomed under Michaels’ leadership since year one, when John Belushi refused to perform in sketches written by women and intentionally sabotaged them during read-throughs. The boys’ club atmosphere persisted through the ‘90s, when Chris Farley’s handsiness with women was so frequent that longtime producers Mike Shoemaker and Jim Downey pranked him with a fake sexual harassment lawsuit (while brushing aside the extra who lodged a real complaint against him). Last year, former production staffers told Insider about the demeaning sexual jokes and unwanted advances they dealt with in the early 2000s, an era when “male members of the cast and staff would hook up with female college-age interns at post-show parties.”
Former cast member Jerry Minor recalled feeling “disturbed” by the presence of “obviously teenage girls” at these events. This was the same era, according to a lawsuit settled last year, when Horatio Sanz groomed and abused a teenage fan whom he brought to SNL cast parties—including one where Jimmy Fallon introduced her to Michaels himself, and another one where Sanz assaulted her as fellow cast members looked on. “If you want to metoo me you have every right,” Sanz allegedly texted her in 2019, insisting he would “swear on a stack of improv books … I’m a different person.” (His attorney denied the allegations, while NBC argued in court filings that it was not liable for actions that allegedly took place off its premises.)
Saturday Night Live also has been a difficult place to work for anyone who wasn't white. Much is made of Eddie Murphy's success on the show. But it is worth remembering that his early days were difficult and it wasn't until he began drawing attention playing secondary characters that he was allowed to tackle the roles that made his stint on the show so memorable.
It's been even harder for women of color. In 2013, cast member Jay Pharoah made news with an interview he did for TheGrio in which he criticized the show's reluctance to hire black women. He noted the show hadn't had a black female cast member since Maya Rudolph left the show in 2007. Pharoah later said the interview almost cost him his job, and that his role on the show never recovered from the comments.
And the complaints didn't seem to have any impact on Michaels, who later noted in the book Live From New York that SNL is not taxpayer-funded, so there isn't any requirement to be diverse. He also added that he’d seen “fifty or sixty” Black women audition over the years—one or two per season—but “we’re about finding people who are funny.”
I have often wished over the past couple of decades that ABC would have decided to take on SNL. Set a variety in Chicago to take advantage of the large existing talent pool of improvisation and Second City graduates. Produce an aggressively digital-friendly format with a point of view that takes aim at "the man," however that is defined these days.
But no one has the stomach to take on SNL at the fifty-year point. So we're left with the option of celebrating a show in its late-stage Johnny Carson era. We get to appreciate the talent and the show's longevity. While left wondering what the show would have been like with someone running who is much more respectful and is slightly less of a spokesperson for mainstream upper-middle class white society.
