In a season five episode of the estimable sitcom 30 Rock, itself based on the goings-on of a network television show closely modeled on Saturday Night Live, the writer and producer Aaron Sorkin makes a cameo as himself. Introduced to Tina Fey’s ever-acerbic head writer Liz Lemon, Sorkin demands they execute his signature walk-and-talk power move, as she excitedly lists the various award-winning films and television shows that he has been involved in. There is, however, one exception. When she mentions the name of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a Sorkin-created drama that purported to go behind the scenes on a show equally closely modeled on SNL, Sorkin simply says, "Shut up"—a nod to the series’s swift cancellation after a single season, Sorkin’s sole show not to be renewed.
The reasons for Studio 60’s failure have been much-discussed, and after its star Matthew Perry’s death, many have even suggested it is an overlooked and underrated masterpiece ripe for reassessment. (Others note, correctly, that 30 Rock, which launched at the same time in 2006, was lucky not to be scrapped after initially struggling in its ratings: The Emmy awards it received save it.) Yet perhaps the key reason for Studio 60 failing to connect with its audience is that the long-running behemoth that is Saturday Night Live—which, far from coincidentally, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year—is so much more interesting a proposition, both on-screen and off, that no drama about its operation can ever match the real thing for impact.
New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison has purportedly written a biography—somehow, unbelievably, the first—of SNL creator Lorne Michaels, but it is impossible to separate the now 80-year-old writer and producer from the show that remains his most lasting achievement, despite the legions of other shows and plays and films he has been responsible for—most notably Wayne’s World and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. It is the topical comedy that made Michaels’s name when it first launched in the ’70s, and, despite occasional hiccups and disappointments, it continues to be essential viewing, with every new host and musical guest and breakthrough appearance eagerly dissected in the media. If you want proof, just look at Nate Bargatze’s instant classic 2023 sketch, "Washington’s Dream," which immediately went viral and lifted Bargatze’s career onto another plain altogether.
Still, there will always be naysayers, and, as Morrison writes early on, "Michaels likes to say that everyone in the entertainment business has two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix SNL." Amusingly, this even included the ever-reclusive writer J.D. Salinger. When he died in 2010, letters were found in which the Catcher in the Rye author opined about the show’s shortcomings. Michaels, although he is far from deaf to criticism, is also aware that SNL’s longevity speaks to its own success. Little wonder that Conan O’Brien is quoted as saying, "In my experience, all conversations, no matter how they begin, inexorably become about Lorne. You could ask me, Stephen Hawking, Ziggy Marley, and former Prime Minister Theresa May our opinions on the single-payer healthcare plan, and within six minutes we’d be riffing on Lorne trying to buy flip-flops on St. Barts."
Michaels rejoices in a variety of nicknames from his regular collaborators, some more pointed than others. Morrison lists them, complete with those responsible, perhaps in case she is ensuring they never work in this town again: "the Godfather (Chris Rock, Will Forte), Jay Gatsby (Bernie Brillstein), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Tracy Morgan), the Great and Powerful Oz (David Spade, Kate McKinnon), Charles Foster Kane (Jason Sudeikis), a cult leader (Victoria Jackson), Tom Ripley (Bill Hader), Machiavelli, and both the Robert Moses and the Darth Vader of comedy (Bruce McCall)." Gatsby, Ripley, Kane: all men who reinvented themselves to successful, and ruthless, effect, just like the character born Lorne Lipowitz to a middle-class Canadian family in 1944, who became the ultimate East Coast arbiter of intellectual, satirical taste.
Yet the portrayal of Michaels that emerges here is far from unaffectionate, in large part because of his cooperation and the access he gave its author. Morrison also notes that, when people speak of him, "The tone is a mixture of affection, reverence, fear, and sometimes a lick of derision. The people he’s hired are grateful for the opportunities he’s given them, but his encouragement can turn to aloofness overnight. He lives a mogul’s life, and the power he wields is intimidating."
Morrison uses a structure that sometimes makes the book feel like the longest New Yorker article you’ve ever read (and, at over 600 pages, this is long). She supplies sharp, pointed vignettes of a typical week’s preparations for the show, which Jonah Hill is down to host, as we go behind the scenes into sketch ideas, prima donna antics from the cast, and Michaels’s autocratic power over everything that is broadcast live on the night. Then there are flashbacks to lengthier chronological sections from Michaels’s early career as a gag writer for shows like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which made Goldie Hawn’s name but failed to make his, to his success with SNL, early disillusionment that eventually led to him quitting the show after five years, and then a triumphant return and success in making the brand a consistently beloved—if not always artistically top-drawer—one.
It is an inevitability that the early sections, which include a fantastically annoying, drugged-up John Belushi, a smarmy and self-assured Chevy Chase, and a near-catatonically laid-back Bill Murray, feature the strongest characters and the most arresting vignettes. We learn that Michaels’s stock advice to joint-smoking, coke-snorting colleagues was to "rotate your drugs" and that the famous Lennon-McCartney story, in which the two nearly appeared live on the show in 1975 to collect the check for $3,000 that the producer solemnly offered on air for the Beatles to perform, was only partially true. They considered heading down to 30 Rockefeller Plaza the following week, but the show was on hiatus then, meaning that the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime reunion was never possible.
SNL today is a safer, less risky environment for writers and performers alike, which may also have taken some of the seat-of-your-pants thrills out of the show. It is taken as a given that staffers will attend therapy, and they are advised to meet their shrinks on Monday afternoons, when it is also expected that they will discuss their stressful and demanding work with Michaels. Although the producer is, naturally, a liberal, he has also strived to make the show as apolitical as possible—including famously inviting Donald Trump to host in 2015—and pushes back against criticism by saying, "On whatever side, if there’s idiocy, we go after it. We can’t be the official organ of the Democratic Party." He reminds the performers that "we’ve got the whole country watching—all fifty states."
Morrison’s scrupulously researched and wholly engrossing book may be a demanding read, but it’s worth the effort by anyone with a serious interest in comedy. It’s not especially amusing, perhaps surprisingly, but what it lacks in humor it makes up for in penetrating psychological insight into a man who has made his life, work, and fortune in understanding what it takes to make people laugh, even if, as Morrison writes, "Being cool was almost as important to Michaels as being funny." He may never be mentioned in the same breath as his rock star friends Paul Simon and Mick Jagger, but this definitive account of a man and his life’s work leaves the reader in little doubt that, like Gatsby, he is worth the whole damn bunch put together.
Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
by Susan Morrison
Random House, 656 pp., $36
Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin's Press).