On October 11th, 1975, the first episode of an upstart young sketch comedy show called Saturday Night hit the NBC airwaves. It originated because talk show god Johnny Carson wanted more time off. They aired Tonight Show reruns on the weekend, but Carson wanted to use them on weeknights, which left the Saturday night slot open. (It’s also worth noting that the show didn’t add, “Live,” to its moniker for a couple of years, because Howard Cosell already had a show called Saturday Night Live). The show itself was meant to be young and hip, featuring a cast of mostly unknowns, doing edgier comedy that appealed to an emerging demographic.

Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night starts 90 minutes before 11:30 PM that October 11th night in New York, with a ticking clock counting down to showtime. And even though we know what happened that night — the show aired as planned — the film keeps us in suspense while reveling in the chaos surrounding that first broadcast, with an untested cast of writers, comedians, producers, and crew. We move from moment-to-moment, following a huge cast and a lot of story threads, like a time-compressed Dazed and Confused with a nose full of medical grade coke. For the most part, it’s deftly handled, all the pieces working together. You get a palpable sense of the stakes and the bedlam around the whole production.
A few people are going to hate this movie, and I can understand why. Yes, it sometimes feels like a year of compressed anecdotes (and it’s true, some of these things happened in the weeks before or after the show aired, or not at all — some of it is metaphorical mythologizing). You could probably make a 10-episode Netflix series about this story, perhaps based on the excellent Miller/Shales book. Yes, Saturday Night feels forced and on-the-nose when they try to make winking reference to future events (“That Chevy Chase is gonna be a star!”). And yes, they pack a lot of story and characters into the movie and not all of it works — you could remove a few of the plots/characters from the film and it wouldn’t affect the outcome.

So, fair enough if these things stood out to some. However, they didn’t bother me enough to turn me off. The story moves quickly and these things were few and far between. In fact, much of it also added to the shaggy dog notions of those first attempts at stumbling towards greatness for the show and its cast and creators. I would perhaps question how some of this would work for a person who doesn’t know much about the history of the show, or of celebrities like Carson or Milton Berle. A lot of it zips by quickly, so knowing some of the intertextuality probably helps. That said, maybe a movie like this isn’t for a Gen Z audience that isn’t interested in the history of 50-year-old TV shows.
While deeper character arcs aren’t the point of the film, we do get some details along the way. Especially about creator and producer Lorne Michaels, his journey with the show, and his relationship with his then wife, Rosie Shuster (daughter of Frank Shuster from the famed Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster). It’s enough to build stakes and meaningful moments.

The cast is really good; I don’t want to name them all here but key players like Gabriel LaBelle (Michaels), Rachel Sennott (Shuster), Cooper Hoffman (Dick Ebersol), Nicolas Braun (in a dual role as Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman), and Willem Dafoe (as NBC Head of Talent, Dave Tebet) all shine. And I can’t say enough about the actors playing the main SNL cast. Haters have called it SNL cosplay, but I think the actors found the ground between impersonations of very famous people (who are mostly still alive) and inhabiting them as characters. They didn’t feel like impressions to me, yet, they looked and sounded like their real-life counterparts. Morris, Ackroyd, and Chase are especially uncanny.
Through rehearsals, the movie manages to showcase some of the now classic sketches from that first episode, which I thought was smart. This serves to show the audience what was special about those first years of SNL; it was often a counter culture machine, not afraid to dip into low brow humour to achieve silly surrealness or smart satire. It was an antidote to much of what was happening in the world and in popular entertainment of the time. In fact, we could use more of this in our current slick and inauthentic entertainment and social media landscape. Each era of SNL is built for its time and environment and this movie lets us look through a window into the mores of the 1970s and compare them to now, or other decades of the show and our lives.

Speaking of then and now, the costume and set design bring 1975 in New York to life. It serves to prop up the story; the anarchist, butt-pinching, cocaine snorting, lights falling from the ceiling moments, but also the friendship and love, the creativity, and the drive required to make a show like Saturday Night work. Jason Reitman captures the buzz of these frenzied beginnings, taking us inside all the pressure and joy of that night, that era.
So sure, not everything works, but the movie juggles all this insanity with what feels like ease. I wandered into the theatre without too much hype as to what I was about to see. But the movie won me over the way the show won North America over and later, popular culture. I left the theatre with a grin on my face; in a sea of the diminishing returns of franchise IP at the multiplex, Saturday Night tells a smaller, but impactful story that is one of the most fun times I’ve had at the movies this year.

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