Saturday Night Live loves to document, curate, and mythologize its history. It’s probably more associated with self-documentary than any American pop culture brand, aside from Disney and WWE.
The show airs annual clip shows for every holiday, plus elections. Every ten years, a new anniversary special excavates the show’s history through clips, reunions, and more. And that’s to say nothing for the independent, unauthorized projects, such as the multiple book-length oral histories, the “Fly on the Wall” podcast, various cast members’ memoirs, the forthcoming Lorne Michaels biography, and any Conan O’Brien podcast episode in which the guest is a former SNL writer. And then there’s last fall’s Saturday Night movie…
That’s mostly fine. As a longtime SNL buff, I tend to devour this stuff myself. And I’ve seen so much of these things that I feel like I know the basic layout of the backstage area of Studio 8H, even though I’ve never been there.
But now we have the “official” SNL commemorative docuseries, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, which debuted this week on Peacock. A four-part, more than four-hour affair, SNL50 is not to be confused with next month’s official anniversary special on NBC or the Questlove-directed doc about the history of the show’s musical guests set to debut at Sundance. Or the live SNL pop-up experience.
The SNL50 series has four parts, each exploring different aspects of SNL’s history. All four have their moments, but while three are well in the tradition of SNL self-mythology, full of stories that are going to be well-known to most SNL fans, one is truly, truly great.
While the project is supervised by executive producer Morgan Neville, each episode has a different director, which might explain the wildly different styles.
Part 1
The first part is about the SNL audition process, in which SNL stars of the past (including some who auditioned but didn’t make it) discuss how they auditioned, and in some cases watch their old auditions and react to them on camera.
The main takeaway from this is that a lot of SNL mainstays weren’t funny in their auditions at all. “How did I get this show?,” Pete Davidson asks at one point.
It’s illuminating at points, but the director of this one has an extremely annoying tic of cutting together montages of five different people saying the same phrase over and over again.
Part 2
The second hour, directed by the great documentarian Marshall Curry (of Street Fight and A Night at the Garden), follows the writing process of the show and how it gets on the air, and mostly features the show’s current cast. There’s not much here that’s any more illuminating than any typical Conan podcast episode when he interviews Jim Downey, Al Franken or Robert Smigel. They all participate here, but they saved the better stories for Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
More Cowbell
But the truly outstanding installment in SNL50 is the third, which spends nearly an hour telling the story of one individual sketch: The “More Cowbell” bit from the spring of 2000. It’s a great sketch, but the story behind it is even better and undoubtedly worth the examination. What’s also wild is that 24 years passed between the recording of the 1976 original song and the sketch, which is now 25 years old.
Will Ferrell is a great storyteller, and proves an able narrator, for this story about a sketch that barely got through dress release but soon emerged as one of the most-loved SNL bits of the current century.
As we learn from the producers of the song, as well as some members of Blue Oyster Cult, the sketch is full of factual inaccuracies, and not only the part about “Gene Frenkle” not being a real person. The band members’ clothes were based on what they were wearing on the cover of one of their albums, but the actors in the sketch aren’t playing the correct corresponding instruments.
Also, “Bruce Dickinson” did not produce the track; the writers had seen that name on a compilation album when they wrote the sketch in 2000; Bruce Dickinson had in the credits as a “reissue producer” of the compilation but had nothing to do with the original recording (and is not to be confused with Bruce Dickinson the Iron Maiden singer.)
(The real-life producers and musicians also bicker a bunch, clearly having longstanding beef over who deserved credit for producing the song, and even who played the cowbell.)
The Weird Year
The first three parts barely touch on anything from the first half of SNL’s 50-year history, but that’s rectified a bit with a look back at “The Weird Year”: That was Season 11, the 1985-’86 season when Lorne Michaels returned to the show after a five-year absence and assembled a hodgepodge of a cast filled with big names (Robert Downey, Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Randy Quaid, and Damon Wayans) who were talented but weren’t sketch performers, although Jon Lovitz and Dennis Miller were on board too.
The result was a disaster of a season that nearly led to SNL’s end, although it got a reprieve, leading to the rise of the Dana Carvey/Phil Hartman/Mike Myers cast not only after.
Part 4
The fourth part has a wildly different style than the first three, using a sci-fi conceit that uses Kevin Nealon as the narrator. It also features old interviews with Bernie Brillstein, the famed talent manager, which stick out since Brillstein is long dead and just about every other interview is contemporary.
When it comes to the SNL 50th anniversary hype cycle, we’re clearly near the beginning; the actual anniversary of the show’s start isn’t until September. While the SNL50 series will likely appeal to most of the show’s diehards, one installment is much better than the others.
