“Can satire save the Republic?”
— May 2017 cover story of The Atlantic featuring Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump“Mad TV would have done a Barron Trump School Shooter skit the week after Columbine. Donald would show up in a diaper having sex with Ivanka.”
— REDACTED podcaster
Saturday Night Live means many things to many people. In its recent There’s a Cheeto in the Damn White House era, the show’s adopted a level of self-importance and, frankly, smug ruling-class unfunniness that’s made it somewhat of a punching bag for the dispossessed young left. But go back: the rot has been pretty present for a while, as evidenced by Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived series maudit Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a Bush-era fantasy where every week a group of overpaid TV writers and comedians seemingly were able to get evangelical America to put a gun in their mouth through the pure transgressive power of sketches such as “Crazy Christians.”
Studio 60 has become an easy joke, but watching Saturday Night, the hagiographic origin story (or Air-like IP-biopic entry) about the comedy institution’s first night on air, I found myself yearning for the manic, unearned liberal sanctimony of Sorkin’s show. The takeaway from Jason Reitman’s new film is, to quote Peter Griffin, “Oh my God, who the hell cares?”
The Saturday night in question is October 3rd, 1975. The halls of 30 Rock are abuzz as producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle, disconcertingly too young for the role) tries harvesting his innovative idea (a live version of The Carol Burnett Show) to fruition. Though sure of its revolutionary potential, Michaels faces network executives (e.g. an overqualified Willem Dafoe) using him as a contract-dispute tool, a skeptical celebrity host (Matthew Rhys’ George Carlin), pot-smoking weirdo writers, a hot-headed cast, and myriad technical snafus.
Following the 90-minute lead-up (with a ticking clock and such) to airtime, one’s supposed to be placed in a pressure cooker where we ask if Lorne’s show will take off or be swiftly canceled and replaced by Johnny Carson re-runs. The issue is that the mania never builds: a few crashing stage lights and the personalities surrounding Lorne never are convincingly erratic enough. There’s no real tension, and certainly nothing in the way of feature-justifying stakes.
Trying to understand what Reitman was thinking here, it’s hard to not jump into the analyst chair and identify a blinkered showbiz-kid narcissism. Perhaps understanding that his father would be nobody if not for comedy stars of the ’70s––and so by virtue he’d be nobody if not for them––this constitutes a truly important story to tell. Perhaps it could’ve worked if the film were less about pure adulation and actually tried delving into politics beyond “young people on TV is good.” While this may be a ’70s period piece (complete with era-replicating sheen) the climax where we’re supposed to cheer on a producer getting corporate acceptance points to a work as subtly evil as the ’80s ideology of his dad’s Reaganite comedies.
Saturday Night screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and will open on September 27.