Saturday Night (2024) - A Review

It’s October 11, 1976 and the clock is ticking down to 11:30PM in New York. Television producer Lorne Michaels is frantically trying to pull together this new live television show that he somehow convinced NBC to gave him the green light to put on – Saturday Night Live.

And there is a a lot of aspects to the lead up of this show that needs managing. There’s the young inexperienced cast who are filled with doubt and uncertainty, an angry host, a shy and quiet puppeteer, drugs being indulged, an eccentric comedian who’s going to lip sync the Mighty Mouse theme song, upset union workers, a writing staff that are dueling with the network censors and television executives who are just baffled by this brand of comedy.

Can Lorne Michales wrangle all this madness together and get the show on the air?

Saturday Night is an almost real-time frantic comedy countdown. It’s a docdrama/comedy about the historic making of the first episode of Saturday Night Live. Fans know the legendary stories and director Jason Reitman brings to life that night with an excellent cast creating a suspenseful tale that will make you immediately want to rewatch that first episode of the show.

Director Jason Reitman has somewhat of a family connection to SNL. His father Ivan Reitman directed or produced some of the most famous and popular comedies starring SNL alumni (Animal House, Meatballs, Ghostbusters). So there’s something poetic that Reitman was the one to tell this story.

You get convincingly thrust into the atmosphere of 1976 television. The backstage setting with all the ancient television equipment, shoddy dressing rooms, plumes of cigarette smoke, tacky clothing, wild haircuts, it’s all very convincing. Reitman captures the era very effectively. Exaggerated or not, this is how you imagine making Saturday Night Live looked like in 1976.

The cast are all really good. Of course actors are playing the original ‘Not Ready For Primetime Players’, and they not only capture their appearances, mannerisms, voices and in some cases all of the above, but they make them believable characters. Upcoming performers who got hired for this weird gig, not sure if it’s going to work, but are game to try it.

Out of the supporting cast, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Lamorne Morris as Garret Morris and Nicholas Braun pulling double duty as Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson are the standouts. It wasn’t until after watching the film I learned Braun played both roles. The Henson scenes are quite funny, with the quiet, hippieish Henson very upset with how his prized Muppets are being treated.

The film jumps back and forth between all these different subplots and characters to showtime, but the main focus is on Gabriel LaBelle’s Lorne Michaels, the producer who’s in the middle of it all. LaBelle is is the center of the film and is very good as the beleaguered producer who’s desperately trying to keep all these plates spinning and pull this thing off.

Michael’s is juggling network execs, the affiliates, confused pages, belligerent writers, apprehensive performers, a cynical crew. The film captures the stress and chaos is raining down on him. You’re rooting for the guy throughout the film and hoping he can make this reign in this growing fiasco and turn it into a television win. Of course we know the answer to that, but it’s very entertaining to watch it unfold. LaBelle’s performance is the lynchpin to the entire film.

Sprinkle in some added performances by Willem Dafoe, Brad Garrett and J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, who those old-school Hollywood fans will appreciate his notorious difficult reputation and legendary mammoth appendage is brought to the screen.

One standout supporting character I really enjoyed was legendary comedy writer Michael O’Donoghue. Played by Tommy Dewey, we get a taste of O’Donoghue’s dark humor and no-holds-barred angry attitude when it came to any kind of rules and his eagerness to break them. His confrontation with the NBC censors help illustrate the radical brand of humor SNL represented at the time.

Saturday Night Live fans will enjoy spotting some Easter Eggs sprinkled throughout the film and really get a kick out of seeing the behind the scenes dramatization.

Is it all completely accurate? Well, not really, but it doesn’t very much matter. It would have been hysterical if he did, but I never read that Berle showed up or dropped his pants that opening night behind the scenes in Studio 8H.

There’s some exaggeration and creative tinkering the film takes in the ninety minutes to make it more of a compelling and frantic countdown to showtime than what actually happened. That’s the usual tact you’ll find in most ‘real life stories’. So you can point to some inaccuracies that pop up, but it’s still an entertaining story and does capture what the atmosphere must’ve been like very well. The essence of the story is told with some wonderful comedic and dramatic moments.

Saturday Night is a very entertaining look at a moment of television history and those who had no idea what they were making, how to do it or if this whole live comedy show would even work.