As Saturday Night Live heads into its 50th season of production, Saturday Night transports us back to the 70s to witness where it all began: a studio in a crowded disarray, the cast and crew unsure if the show would actually air. In a chaotic slew of what comes across as witty sketches of their own, Saturday Night, in all of its comedic success, accurately opens a door into TV production pre-green screens and CGI—where lighting equipment quite literally falls from the ceiling and stages are built brick by brick.
Jason Reitman directed this movie of full-fledged profanity and crude humor, a consistency that contributed to creating that bold, outlandish, and innovative spirit that characterizes the SNL we know and love. Most impressively, Saturday Night manages to provide that same fuzzy feeling of a familiar face on the screen, even building up characters with less than five minutes of screen time. Though the dynamics may take a few watches to truly nail down, they were there nonetheless with fleeting hints of affiliations strewn in each scene.
The movie carries you from skit to skit as the cast rehearses and remedies an overpacked show schedule before their first episode goes live. The skits themselves are hilarious, kicking up laughs from the entire theater.
Ultimately, however, I got lost in between the skits as problems on set continuously arose without a clear resolution. I found myself racking my brain for the small details that would have kept this movie on track, taking my attention away from whatever scene was right in front of me. The entire movie felt like a game of catch-up, with the scattered two-minute skits acting as breathers for a quick laugh.
Saturday Night follows Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he crusades a vision for the future of TV comedy via the scrambled debut of NBC’s Saturday Night Live—his scruffy brainchild projects whose extensive parts flail uncontrollably across the many floors of NYC’s iconic 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Disregarding the credits, the movie spans almost perfectly across the 90 minutes leading up to the moment the first episode goes live, sectioned off by mere minutes to show just how fast the episode was put together.
The idea, for Michaels, was simple: TV made by the generation that grew up watching it (in the form of a sanctuary for the comedic rejects). Thus, the late-night slot of NBC’s TV programming was filled, where all of the Billy Joels of the comedy industry found an outlet for their genius. At the time, a pretty face was thought to be a television qualifier, a standard debunked by the many masterminds whose skits collaborated to comprise an SNL episode.
The mid-70s were characterized by the funk and glamor of finally embracing individualism and letting go of the uptight standards of society. SNL was a pioneer production in bringing taboo topics such as sex, drugs, and anything else considered too risqué to discuss to the forefront. But even deeper than the adoption of the obscene and the offensive was the relinquishing of all that was understated. In Saturday Night, the viewer gets immersed in a bygone era, with enough big hair and big ego to silence the slew of NBC producers stuck in the old ways of TV.
To provide any further context into the movie would only mean going into its astounding number of subplots that plummet you into a confusion you’re sure to feel when watching the movie. Michaels stands as a grounding character to follow in this movie, the sole constant in a sea of pandemonium as the plot moves from one storyline to another. This made for a tumultuous 90-minute attempt to keep track of who is who and how they pertain to the plot.
Beyond Michaels, we are introduced to a cast of nearly 100, where any introduction beyond these three characters would be in vain due to their irrelevance to the story’s development. You meet David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) and Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), but beyond that, it’s hard to keep track of intercharacter dynamics. Though each other cast member may lack enough screen time for true characterization, their minimal contributions were still invaluable to the nature of the movie to represent the many moving parts that contributed to such a bizarre production.
Gabriel LaBelle is known for the role of Sammy Fabelman in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans—for which he won the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer. His sparse repertoire beyond that is not a testament to his performance on Saturday Night.
LaBelle shoved a stick just far enough up his ass to play the uptight Michaels, unwilling to sacrifice any bit of his vision to a ruthless crew of out-of-touch NBC executives. He has the perfect look on his face from start to finish—the one where he’s just one screw-up away from a breakdown while still managing to keep it all together. Michaels is the vertebrae in a meticulously curated bone structure of the production, only so effectively holding it together by the will of LaBelle.
Dafoe provides a compelling villain to this heroic underdog story, challenging LaBelle to dig deep for the grit that Michaels requires. He was convincingly firm in his character, holding steadfast in his opposition to the success of NBC’s Saturday Night until the final few scenes of the movie. His portrayal of Tebet was reminiscent of his role as Dr. Godwin Baxter in Poor Things; the antagonist that you so desperately want to despise and yet you can’t quite seem to. Perhaps it’s for the sheer love of Dafoe that the hatred is so hard to muster. But I like to think that it’s because he has an impressive ability to create that cunning notion of goodwill behind his maliciousness.
The final character of note is leading lady Rosie Shuster, Michaels’ “What are we?” Portrayed by Rachel Sennott, this role felt like just another on her repertoire of underappreciated sidekicks, slated beside her performance as Leia in HBO Max’s The Idol. With that said, this repeated role seems to suit her well. However, it would be refreshing to see her in a more intense, forward casting in the future.
From the perspective of realism, the tumultuousness of Saturday Night would serve as a massive contributor to the accuracy of what you’d experience observing the crew on a show like SNL—especially in a time when live TV was still somewhat of a marvel. So, in an effort to see eye to eye with Reitman, this choppy style of story development is arguably fitting.
Perhaps the confusion was all intentional, where the lack of characterization and side-story development intends to mimic the unimportance of these individuals and their situations. We can find credibility in this defense, but ultimately Saturday Night finds itself as a product of a dense director who is overconfident in audience deductive skills. Easter eggs of this mimicking would have been intellectually stimulating to those always in search of a movie’s deeper meaning. But full, sweeping adoption of this plot style may just deter viewers from a second watch. Despite its confusing ensemble cast, the comedy and nostalgia of Saturday Night shines through.
This movie is entirely worth the watch.
Want to keep up with HCBU? Make sure to like us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, check out our Pinterest board, watch us on TikTok, and read our latest Tweets!