‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night’ Reveals Hidden Details About a Comedy Institution
For the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, an American institution, we’ve seen a prime-time special, a well-regarded feature-length film (with a theatrical release) about its first broadcast, a limited-time immersive attraction, an upcoming SNL50 anniversary special and music documentary and now, this week, the show that has been at the center of the comedy world for half a century gets the multi-part documentary treatment on Peacock.
SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, Peacock’s new docuseries with the massive task of defining a show that is both beloved and criticized, holds deep and personal connections for its fans, has always tapped or been a major part of the zeitgeist, has a cast that needs a catalog — Steve Martin, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey and hundreds of comedic forces over five decades — to discover its unknown history and tease out a narrative that honors the massive legacy of SNL.
Thankfully, this is pulled off. Unconventionally, the series manages to deliver on the tall task of these requirements, provide insight into how this feat of television is achieved weekly, while also bringing in some laughs. With interviews from 60 contributors who have defined the show, the docuseries covers decades of SNL history in four unique episodes: a look at the cast via their auditions; a deep dive into the engine-like writers room; a 360-degree view of the show’s most popular sketch; and the strange mid-1980s season when SNL was nearly lost to the world. The walkthrough of the show’s rich past also reveals many funny, unexpected and eye-opening details along the way. Here are a few.
In a lengthier section that is a loving tribute to SNL’s many casts and performers, viewers see the first glimpses of the comics who have made the show soar — and many of the cast members are forced to watch along, frequently cringing with hands over their eyes. Others are absolute naturals (“every character Kristen Wiig auditioned with was gold”) and Will Ferrell’s classic “Get Off the Shed” sketch, we learn, was what he used to get the gig. What all cast members have in common is that they had five minutes to tell the casting team everything they needed to know. Somehow, Heidi Gardner got through 12 impressions in that brief window; Pete Davidson explains it’s blacked out so from the stage so they can’t see anyone (he also revealed here that he asked Michaels to fire him); and, as several cast members share, they never get laughs in auditions. As Ayala Cohen, a former SNL talent executive and producer says, “The truth is if they can’t handle five minutes In front of everyone, live, then you’re wasting time.”
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In the pilot episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s heroine Liz Lemon, top brass in an SNL-like show’s writers room, is said by her lead producer to have “the best job in New York.” For any writer or comic, or dreamer, SNL Writer is indeed that dream job. And the second episode of SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night shows the writers room in all of its nerve-wracking, exhausting, blood-on-the-floor, cutthroat glory.
The doc’s producers spent a week with a few young writers as they struggled with ideas, reworked, rewrote, workshopped, edited and then submitted their sketches. Then, only if boss and executive producer Lorne Michaels, aka The Final Word, chooses their work do they transform into a producer, ensuring that their sketch comes to life. Before all this is the table read with all of the writers, which comes after mid-week overnights, delusional bubbles, paranoia about the group of colleagues cackling down the hall, and the rest of the hallmarks of a competitive workplace. “We write on Tuesday, we rewrite it on Thursday, Friday; it’s rewritten again and on Saturday, it’s rewritten again,” one scribe shares.
At the table read, the writers assemble and the knives come out — sharp, passive-aggressive knives that include what some of the writers we meet here call “pity laughs,” “aggressively supportive” laughter and “aggressively not laughing at something.” The prayer that defines this experience — written by Andy Breckman, who penned and directed Eddie Murphy’s famous “White Like Me” sketch — is read aloud here: “Dear Lord, please let my sketch kill harder than anyone else’s sketch. But please let me also be perceived as a team player.”
At one point, SNL alumni and former U.S. Senator Al Franken provided the hard truth to the producers about how it feels to be a professional writer of the time: “Writing comedy is either easy or it’s impossible. If it’s easy, it’s really fun. And if it’s impossible, it’s terrible. Because you can’t think of anything — and that’s your job.”
In a true stroke of genius, the doc’s producers decided to use the third episode to discuss one sketch that is said to be the current all-time favorite. “More Cowbell” (2000), written by none other than Will Ferrell, who gets to flex his physical comedy muscle here as fictional cowbell player Gene Frenkle, and guest host Christopher Walken, at his most deadpan, fictional music producer Bruce Dickinson, this is the sketch that practically caused a movement.
The scene: Blue Oyster Cult’s recording of their soon-to-be-classic hit, “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” What one may have never noticed about this well-liked epic song until the sketch debuted in April 2000 is that there is a constant clank-clank-clank-clank throughout — which, in the sketch, Ferrell plays aggressively while Walken. as Dickinson, demands more and more cowbell, to the band’s creeping chagrin; the antics crescendo with Walken as producer uttering, “I have a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell.”
First, it’s notable that this sketch aired in 2000, the halfway point of the show’s 50-year run — so far — and that it hits because it combines the joys of Ferrell’s flailing physical performance and absurdity; an essentially repetitive gag that works — then doesn’t, then does again; and finally, an absolutely perfect tagline — which soon went on T-shirts and was shouted at sporting events as Ferrell, Walken and the cast graced jumbotrons. It haunted Wlken, who grew over time to detest the sketch as he signed another cowbell for another fan.
Revelations abound in this 45-minute mini-doc that tells you everything you’ll ever want to know about this sketch and the phenomenon that came from it. Ferrell was originally meant to go to host Norm MacDonald (the late comic and SNL player whose dry, deadpan delivery is perhaps competitive with that of Walken), and it bombed in dress rehearsal and was nearly cut. But a true bombshell is exposed here that will drop some jaws: BlueOyster Cult likely used a wood block, not a cowbell on “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and it’s essentially proven in the film doc.
That’s no matter, however, as any good comic knows to print the legend in this sort of situation. This is truly a legendary SNL moment that here gets its due respect.
Did you know Madonna hosted and performed as the show’s musical guest in her prime, True Blue era? Neither did we. Or that Francis Ford Coppola directed an episode hosted by George Wendt, complete with fourth-wall-breaking meta-commentary happening live? It’s so weird and petty incredible, right? This was all on the swept-under-the-rug 11th season of SNL, which in 1985-1986 saw the return of creator-producer Michaels, who’d left the show for five years, and a strange new cast of then-famous players or soon-to-be-famous comic actors. No regular characters emerged in what, so far, might be the weirdest chapters of this long-running show’s wild history. In fact, the season ends with a dark gag that has the cast and studio set on fire — which is recognized via interviews in the documentary as written for an audience that only included a handful of men: NBC’s executives.
What’s brilliant about this unknown-to-many detail is that Saturday Night Live is so deeply entrenched In our culture, has been around for so long and is so consistently there for us through highs and lows that it soon could be studied academically as a mirror of the very history it parodied and lampooned. Each episode on this docuseries carves out such a well-defined aspect, it’s almost as though NBC should order a full season of episodes so any other compelling, strange or funny details that went missed get a moment in the spotlight. It would be a hell of a feat to do 10, 12 or 22 episodes as rich as these four are, because as Larry David says early on from his restaurant chair perch: “It’s an institution. It’s just an American institution. It could go on for another 200 years.”
