Peacock Docuseries ‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night’ Adds Little to a Long-Established Legacy: TV Review
To mark the 50th season of “Saturday Night Live,” putting together 90 minutes of live TV in six days — already a herculean feat — is not enough. In addition, the venerable variety show is flooding the zone with shows of its pop cultural might. On the heels of Jason Reitman’s hagiographic film “Saturday Night” and ahead of next month’s three-hour telecast from Studio 8H comes the four-part docuseries “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night.” Executive produced by Oscar-winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom,” “Roadrunner”), the show is the latest prong in NBC’s full-court marketing press to celebrate the anarchic experiment turned established institution. But 50 years in, the legend of Lorne Michaels’ merry circus has already been celebrated, many times over. (Season 40, too, got a star-studded anniversary fete, giving this round of toasts a distinct sense of déjà vu.) “SNL50” adds little to this half-century of anecdotes, oral histories and archival footage. Instead, it embellishes around the edges, making use of gimmicky formats and the access that comes with aiding a corporate PR push to dress up old chestnuts.
Each chapter of “SNL50” is meant to stand alone as a mini-documentary unto itself. Though Juaquin Cambron serves as showrunner of the whole series, every episode’s director oversees their own project. Robert Alexander’s “Five Minutes” is a look at the audition process; Marshall Curry’s “Written By: A Week Inside the ‘SNL’ Writers Room” is exactly what it sounds like; Neil Berkeley’s “More Cowbell” is a 49-minute exegesis on a six-minute sketch; and Jason Zeldes’ “Season 11: The Weird Year” recaps an infamous interlude that nearly sank the show.
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The common denominator throughout is the stuffed Rolodex of talent made available to producers. Michaels himself doesn’t sit down for an interview, but pretty much everyone short of him does, from talent bookers to prop masters to, of course, the stars. So many stars: pretty much every generation of cast members past the original Not Ready for Primetime Players is present and accounted for, from the beleaguered ‘80s (Joe Piscopo! Terry Sweeney!) through more nostalgic eras (Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon from the ‘90s, Bill Hader and Andy Samberg from the aughts) and the present day (Ego Nwodim, Heidi Gardner and Bowen Yang speak for the current roster).
What “SNL50” adds to the overstuffed canon of 30 Rock lore is a direct result of all this eager participation. “Five Minutes” is structured around performer after performer watching and reacting to their own audition tapes, kept in a vault but made freely available to Alexander’s team. The device wears thin when repeated ad nauseam for over an hour, but yields a few endearing nuggets: Maya Rudolph’s childhood classmate Gwyneth Paltrow recommended her to the producers; Hader made the notoriously stone-faced audience laugh with his Al Pacino impression; Jennifer Coolidge, Kevin Hart and Jordan Peele didn’t make the cut, yet we get a glimpse into the alternate timeline where they did. “Written By,” too, indulges our benign sense of voyeurism with a front row seat to Ayo Edebiri’s first hosting gig in February of last year, showing the half-baked pitches and last-minute punch-up behind the finished product.
The problem is that, if you’re the kind of comedy nerd inclined to watch a docuseries about “Saturday Night Live,” you almost certainly hip to what it purports to reveal. Did you know Lorne and his deputies almost never laugh during tryouts? Did you know Tuesday is when everyone stays up all night to write sketches, and on Wednesday there’s a table read that determines the lineup? Those intrigued by a show called “SNL50” can likely say “yes,” because they can already access even more comprehensive resources like “Live From New York,” the doorstopper of a tome by journalists Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. Miller appears in a talking head in the final episode, as if he’s been summoned by the echoes of his own essential work.
At just four episodes, “SNL50” is also stranded between a generalist survey and a niche deep dive. “Five Minutes” and “Written By” are overarching, era-transcending looks at basic building blocks of the show. (“Written By” includes testimonials from past writers like Alan Zweibel, Larry David and John Mulaney to flesh out its main footage.) After them, “More Cowbell” and “The Weird Year” feel like a hard, disorienting pivot to the ultra-specific. “More Cowbell,” a quasi-mockumentary, makes a daring, doomed attempt to be funny while profiling some of the funniest people on Earth. “The Weird Year” picks a worthy subject — an anomalous season starring an all-rookie cast, including Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall, with minimal sketch experience — but excises large swathes of context from its condensed history.
Said context involves the exit and eventual return of Michaels as executive producer, bracketing the brief reign of NBC executive Dick Ebersol. Ebersol’s name is never uttered aloud on “SNL50,” and though Eddie Murphy’s star-minting time in the cast comes up, no one mentions Michaels can’t take credit for that particular success. Sometimes, the authorized nature of “SNL50” manifests in what it can include; sometimes, a trained eye can see how Michaels’ blessing influences what’s pointedly left out. “SNL50” is far from a definitive account, nor is it content to be a collection of minor curiosities. But it doesn’t need to be either to win its subject’s stamp of approval.
All four episodes of “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” are now streaming on Peacock.
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