Conversations about the legacy of “Saturday Night Live” must include its daring film shorts. Not the Please Don’t Destroy gags or Andy Samberg viral raps, but the artistic swings like “La Dolce Gilda,” Gilda Radner's indelible third-season homage to Federico Fellini. Or “Love Is a Dream,” a fantastic 1987 swoon into a bygone era and lost youth featuring Jan Hooks, Phil Hartman, a romantic Bing Crosby track and a tiara in a safety deposit box. That may be a close second. Neither of these slices of heaven were designed to draw laughs. They existed to create wonder and endure as evidence that this network TV fixture veered away from the expected.
“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” is not for the completist.
Whether Morgan Neville drew inspiration from those post-midnight gems in conceiving “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” I can’t say. But he and Neil Berkeley, who directed its deep dive into the making of the infamous "Behind the Music" spoof featuring a fictional version of Blue Oyster Cult, find a pleasing middle ground between art and however you'd describe Will Ferrell’s eternal bang-bang-banger. TV nerds might defend those esoteric departures, but the “More Cowbell” sketch probably has higher value to the average viewer — it will never, ever get old.
"More Cowbell" sets the bar for the kind of meticulously curated buffoonery people want from the show and any tribute marking its 50 years in business. (We've already gotten a movie, and another special about its music is right around the corner, premiering on Jan. 27.) It is not overtly Fellini-esque, although we discover that a lot of it unintentionally defied and reshaped reality. At least one interview subject is surprised to find out that Ferrell's cowbell master Gene Frenkle isn't a real person.
The four-part "Beyond Saturday Night” takes cues from Lorne Michaels' late-night institution, in that every installment is a distinct work joined to the next by the thread that makes "SNL" singular. If you’re not blown away by the nostalgia terrarium that is “Five Minutes,” you may find “Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room” has the gravitas you want.
If, like me, you appreciated that installment’s solemn deference to the toil and grind the show's writers gut out every week of each season while feeling as if I were reliving the most stressful parts of my job, hang in there. The third and fourth episodes are premium catnip — the third being the chanciest, since it's a nearly 50-minute look at a sketch that runs five minutes and 42 seconds.
“Season 11: The Weird Year” is more of a head trip since it walks us through the show’s notoriously bad 1985-‘86 season and persuasively makes a case for its reevaluation while using its players' experiences to explain more than a few of the show’s sins without expressly calling out a couple of its biggest.
This was the season that made Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, and Randy Quaid part of the show’s legacy and ensured Robert Smigel, Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz and Dennis Miller places in one of the show’s strongest casts – starting in the show’s 12th.
It was also the season that introduced Damon Wayans as a mainstream comedy force and squandered what he had to offer; his audition consisted of characters that came to define “MADtv.” Also, notably, the so-called “Weird Year” included an episode “directed” by Francis Ford Coppola and scored by Phillip Glass.
“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” is not for the completist. Its organization and execution draw from the archives of feeling more than any lists of best episodes or cast members. Anyone can do that, and most events marking a TV show’s longevity do.
Lorne Michaels is many things to many people, but his most undeniable talent is vision, and his power is in his insistence on creative control.
That’s why television anniversary celebrations tend to be listless affairs, zombie marches through the realm of Remember When. By that standard, the “Saturday Night Live" 40th anniversary special wrung out all the juice its tribute cloth soaked up from over the years. The audience was stacked with celebrity guests applauding the classic sketch clips traipsed when former cast members and famous fans weren't recreating them live.
The 2015 special aired in primetime and is probably the last time an “SNL” product would pull 23 million viewers, giving NBC its best primetime non-sports ratings since the 2004’s “Friends” finale. Michaels is many things to many people, but his most undeniable talent is vision, and his power is in his insistence on creative control. The streamer revolution was still several years away but he must have seen it coming and realized his late-night child might not see 50.
Since it has, a 50th anniversary special is due on Sunday, Feb. 16 when one expects we'll retread some of the 40th's victory laps. But Michaels’ decision to hand the general vision of at least part of the show’s rearward view to the Oscar-winning documentarian who made “20 Feet From Stardom" was smart. The opening pair of installments play up the mythology surrounding “Saturday Night Live,” with "Five Minutes" featuring the show’s best-known performers — and a few the show passed on who achieved greatness anyway — watching their auditions.
These scenes make the likes of Amy Poehler seem even more human and likable and argue that Tracy Morgan, who has no shortage of grinning confidence and charm, might be one of Michael’s savviest discoveries. By the end of the hour, you may also want to hug Bobby Moynihan and Heidi Gardner, who can’t help crying.
Tracy Morgan on "SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night" (Peacock)
Neville and his directors are also careful to spread the celebrity cameo wealth as evenly as possible across its four parts. Tina Fey doesn’t show up until the second episode, which makes sense since she and Seth Meyers are the most high-profile writers the show’s modern era has produced. Bill Hader, Cheri Oteri, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Molly Shannon are first-episode stand-outs; Fred Armisen turns up in the first and the third to add his observations as percussionist. Jason Sudeikis is a light sprinkle; Kenan Thompson is there because when it comes to "SNL," he's never not there.
You’ll also notice who wasn't interviewed, including Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy, who was awkward and uncomfortable during the 40th anniversary’s tribute to his work.
As for Chevy Chase — who has since been outed as one of the world’s least pleasant people — since the special can’t say anything nice it leaves it up to Season 11 castmember Terry Sweeney to summarize his essence: “You know how they say ‘Never meet your idols’?”
But there are absences acknowledged – like Miller, who doesn’t show up either — and those seen and not discussed, including Jim Breuer and Victoria Jackson, two former cast members who have taken up residency in MAGA-ville.
The same people who have been cuddling up in bed with America’s go-to Saturday night consolation date for half a century now don’t want to think about scandals. They want a love letter.
Surely that’s not the only reason they and others aren’t included. But this is a special that invites a lot of reading between the lines. "Weird Season," for instance, highlights the lack of Black women on its writing staff by having Coppola call attention to the lack of material geared toward Danitra Vance's experience and identity. Unlike her co-star Lovitz, she didn't have anybody writing for her.
Neville may be the executive producer but you’d better believe Michaels determined who and what would be left unmentioned and the aspects of “SNL” lore he wanted to be played up. We can’t help spending time staring at Horatio Sanz in the third hour, and we also understand why people may not want to think about what he’s been up to lately.
Still, it’s bizarre that a 50th-anniversary view of a show that shut out non-white and openly queer writers and performers for most of its existence wouldn’t cop to that. After all, in 2013 its longest-tenured castmember Kenan Thompson created a very front-and-center PR kerfluffle when he claimed "SNL" could never find Black female comics that were "ready." Soon after that, it hired Sasheer Zamata and Leslie Jones — and didn't hire Amber Ruffin, who went on to write for and star in "Late Night with Seth Meyers."
"Beyond Saturday Night" leaves it to Ego Nwodim to name the Black women who came before her — it's a short list — and diplomatically say that part of her tenure’s purpose is to make things easier for the next one. Good luck to that person. Bowen Yang also carries water in that department too as the first cast regular of East Asian descent, which only took 45 seasons.
Depending on how closely you follow “SNL” and its notoriously hard working conditions, “Written By” has a similarly bitter aftertaste to it too. Its spine is the 49th season week in which Ayo Edebiri served as host and shows a writing staff that includes Black and Asian people.
Left out of its down-to-the-bolts gaze at the stress and effort that go into producing every “SNL” was mention of that week’s surprise cold open guest: former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who opposes marriage equality and transgender rights.
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Not every docuseries is meant to show its subject’s warts, understand. The same people who have been cuddling up in bed with America’s go-to Saturday night consolation date for half a century now don’t want to think about scandals. They want a love letter. It’s easy to love something you already love.
But even that easy target could be dull and saccharine, bringing us back to the docuseries’ greatest triumph. The bit that brought the cowbell to society is the pinnacle of this pleasant if uneven journey because it takes a sketch that’s already weird and supplements every bizarre second with trivia that somehow doesn’t feel useless.
You will not come into this expecting to learn about the history and musical significance of cowbells from Dave Grohl, but you will. It's all part of revisiting the sketch with Chris Kattan, Chris Parnell, Jimmy Fallon, Ferrell, members of Blue Oyster Cult of course and…sadly, not Christopher Walken. The reason he’s absent is as satisfying (well, maybe not to him) as the painstaking explanation of why his contribution to his everlasting gut-buster is irreplicable.
The key to its success is assigning Berkeley, the man behind “Beauty Is Embarrassing” and a documentary about Gilbert Gottlieb, to handle this mission. Berkeley’s other work channels the spirit of artists he profiles, finding that pinpoint between what a work is and the invisible, unnamable forces, including near-misses that brought it into being.
It’s a daring, cinematic run at the show’s most widespread and quoted contribution to popular culture, the likes of which we don’t see as often these days on “SNL” but reminds us there may still be room for more like it down the road. Of course, that assumes there’ll be another round anniversary for “SNL” to mark. Nothing is certain, but “Beyond Saturday Night” renews our belief that with enough willingness to aim for our astonishment now and then, it could happen.
"SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night" is now streaming on Peacock.
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