I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Saturday Night Live is 50 years old this season. (They’ve tried to keep it quiet.) That makes the time especially fortuitous for this doorstep of a book about it’s founding impresario, the inscrutable Lorne Michaels. Everyone knows who Lorne Michaels is, but even those who know him best say they don’t really know what makes him tick.
Susan Morrison makes a decent stab at capturing his essence, starting with his upbringing in Toronto and the untimely death of his father when Lorne was just 14. He starts performing and writing comedy, but realizes shockingly early that his talents lie more with producing, in making things happen rather than making the thing itself. After working on Laugh-in and a plethora of variety specials with the likes of Flip Wilson and Lily Tomlin, Lorne lucks into the job he would hold for the next 50 years because NBC needed something to put on Saturday nights after Carson stopped letting them re-run The Tonight Show in the timeslot.
The early years of the show take up a huge chunk of the book, as you’d expect. Morrison captures the freewheeling insanity of the era, as Lorne, the writers and the cast literally figured out what the show was as it went along. There were some notable speed bumps along the way. The first episode almost didn’t make it to air, and the second episode was almost entirely music. An early episode was filmed on location in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, which was just as terrible an idea as it sounds like.
Those early years lay the foundation for Lorne’s managerial style. There’s his hands-off treatment toward substance abuse, his refusal to jump into disputes between castmates and writers, and his laxness toward casting a diverse cast. More distinctly, there’s his withholding nature. Michaels famously almost never laughs during auditions for new cast members, and he’s nearly as stingy with praise for those he’s hired. Having lost his father so early, Morrison paints him as establishing himself as a father figure in the lives of his underlings, just to turn around and become the withholding father he didn’t like having.
Morrison also paints him as the ultimate schmoozer, somehow effortlessly befriending the likes of Paul Simon and Paul McCartney (his closeness to both men inspiring the writers’ room game of “which Paul?” when Lorne only drops the first name in a story.) He also expertly plays network politics, outmaneuvering the bosses whenever they try to lessen his power at NBC. Over the years, his influence has only grown at NBC. After the messy changeover from Carson to Leno and the loss of Letterman to CBS, Michaels got a foothold in weekday late night programming as the producer of The Late Show with Conan O’Brien. Now, he produces both Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
One of the best aspects of the book is an in-depth look at one fairly random episode of SNL. Michaels granted the author an all-access pass to an episode that aired in 2018, featuring Jonah Hill as the host and Maggie Rogers as the musical guest. Each day of the week leading up to the episode gets its own chapter, and these are interspersed throughout the book. In some ways, this behind the scenes look is more revealing about Michaels than all the biographical detail in the rest of the book combined. The reader gets to see how Michaels treats his staff, and how he talks about them when they aren’t in the room. The Hill/Rogers episode takes place just before the midterm elections in Trump’s first term. Tensions in the country and at Studio 8H are high. The staff is still divided over Trump being invited to host during his campaign, and stars like Kate McKinnon and Cecily Strong are bristling at Michaels’s attempts to keep the show nonpartisan. Pete Davidson is in the gossip pages for the end of his engagement to Ariana Grande, and Leslie Jones is frustrated at what she feels is unequal treatment. Michaels spends most of the week trying to keep people placated while still being mostly dismissive about their concerns. He doesn’t treat his guest much better. Jonah Hill is trying to promote his directorial debut, mid90s, but Michaels doesn’t want the film mentioned at all, since it’s not a hit and he doesn’t think of SNL as a stop on a promotional tour. Michaels is also critical of Maggie Rogers, considering her beneath the show since she isn’t a big name. (This represents quite the change of attitude from the man who tried to stop ABBA from being booked in the first season because they were too mainstream.)
The 2018 chapters capture the main issue with both SNL and Lorne that has crept up constantly over the years: having started out as anti-establishment as you can be on network television, how do you survive becoming the establishment? Morrison can’t answer that question because nobody can, but she does an admirable job laying out the situation for the reader.