Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Saturday Night’ on Netflix, a Wild and Crazy Recreation of the ‘SNL’ Debut

It ain’t live, but Saturday Night (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is a live wire, a sort-of real-time tick-tock dramatization of the countdown to the first-ever episode of Saturday Night in 1975 (trivia: it wasn’t officially named Saturday Night Live until a year later). Jason Reitman directs this cast-of-dozens homage to comedy greatness, which, if this movie is to be believed – and it sure as hell seems wise not to believe it! – almost didn’t happen at the final second of the final minute of the final hour before the broadcast began. The film, which barely eked out about $10 million at the box office, falls somewhere amidst mainstream comedy, prestige picture and TV-biz inside-baseball biopic, and is mostly enjoyable for its propulsive tempo and wow-HE-kills-it-as-Chevy than its insight into the act of creating something revolutionary. But I think that’s OK.

SATURDAY NIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: OCT 11TH, 1975, 10 p.m. Actually, make that 10:01 p.m. In the first of far too many hey-that’s-that-one-actor-playing-that-famous-person moments, we see Gabriel LaBelle of The Fabelmans fame playing Lorne Michaels as he hustles outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza to gather up Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun). Eighty-nine minutes to showtime. Pressure’s on, and there’s no better way to convey that tension than with a really long tracking shot that winds its way through doors and hallways and studios and dressing rooms and elevators as the preshow bustlebustlebustle gets really super extra bustling. There’s Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) and Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Jim Henson (also Braun) and George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) and I think I’ll stop there. No, wait! THERE’S JOHN BELUSHI (MATT WOOD) WHO HASN’T SIGNED HIS CONTRACT YET AND SOMETIMES ONLY COMMUNICATES IN GRUNTS. Would somebody please shave Belushi’s face? PLEASE? He looks like bigfoot over here. 

We mostly hang with Lorne, who’s in charge of this madhouse that’s built out of scraps of wet, disintegrating construction paper and held together with the sheer force of will, which is to say, nothing is holding it together. If Lorne actually somehow manages to pull the show off, he will be superhuman, a person who can herd the atoms of the air itself into a Thanksgiving Day parade. Or something like that. Let’s just say it’s chaotic. Lorne stares at a bulletin board full of cards representing every segment, including numerous comedy sketches, mini standup sets, short films, Henson’s Muppet bits, a coupla live-music performances, a partridge in a pear tree, the kitchen sink and your mom getting drunk and singing showtunes from Camelot. It’s a lot of moving parts. It makes Howl’s moving castle look like a ball-and-cup game. 

Lorne walk-and-talks with everybody. Writers, executives, actors, stagehands, the angry lighting director who quits on the spot, your mom, etc. Two people are fiercely dedicated to helping him make this choo-choo train achieve flight: his writer-spouse Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), who’s sympathetic and calm, and producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), who’s passionate and believes in Lorne’s vision of creating an edgy, countercultural, youth-oriented comedy show that’ll shove the stale ol’ olds of the showbiz status quo into oblivion. NBC veep David Tebet (Willem Dafoe, in his 332nd movie of 2024) isn’t so sure about this crap, and his finger hovers over a button that’ll run a Tonight Show with Johnny Carson rerun instead of this highly probable embarrassment to the network. Belushi is nowhere to be found and Kaufman wanders around and Henson needs his script pages and Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) shows up to quite literally whip his dick out and Lorne and Saturday Night are teetering so dang precariously on the very cusp of absolute and total and utter failure. Gee, I hope this becomes a highly influential comedy institution for a half-century and not just an asterisk next to a footnote in the annals of TV history, don’t you?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Anyone else feel like they should revisit Man on the Moon sometime soon?

Performance Worth Watching: Simmons steals scenes as Berle, Hunt is an amazing Gilda and O’Brien is an amazing Aykroyd and Smith is an amazing Chevy. But Sennott and LaBelle are the highly credible, talented and charismatic actors who make the most of their moments together, and should be cast in a less-busy movie that’ll give them room to cultivate an on-screen relationship. It’d be great, I’m convinced.

Memorable Dialogue: OF COURSE this line is recited, because without it, this movie wouldn’t be complete: “Perhaps you kids aren’t quite ready for primetime.” – Tebet

Sex and Skin: A brief glimpse of the shaft of Milton Berle’s hog.

Our Take: There’s an inevitable (and pretty funny) moment in Saturday Night where Lorne is full-on blasted with Julia Child’s blood. I’m sure it didn’t happen. It feels too capital-M Movie to be true (and besides, the famous Aykroyd sketch didn’t happen until 1978). But the symbolism drives home the theme of the movie: Lorne followed his passion through grueling circumstances in order to achieve his dream. Even if it’s corn syrup and dye, blood would be spilled for a greater cause. And the rest – and here I pause to take a very dramatic drag from a cig – is history. 

OK, so it’s not the most profound statement. And the overly heightened drama of the film renders it immediately and heavily fictionalized, hyperbole in rosy retrospect for the eventual praise pop-culture mavens would heap upon SNL for setting the perfect tone for political and cultural satire for 50 years. Yes, that’s also a degree of hyperbole; one could argue that the show’s relevance has diminished as the internet splintered attention spans and pop-cultural focal points. But there’s no argument for how it influenced the zeitgeist for many years.

Simplistic as it is beneath the artificially byzantine uber-hoopla of its will-they-actually-pull-it-off drama, Saturday Night is a lot of fun. It’s a high-energy explosion of celeb impressions, madcap bits, showbiz lampoonery and – well, I feel like I’m describing the formula for SNL itself. Maybe that’s the pointedly meta point Reitman’s aiming at. There’s even Easter eggs for you to scoop up if you’re familiar with SNL lore behind the scenes or in front of the camera, not that you need to get a Colon Blow reference in order to appreciate the movie. Reitman’s essentially lionizing Lorne Michaels and SNL for the way he created chaos so he could overcome it and, rather improbably, turn it into a conservatory for American comedy. Sure, the rebellion eventually would become the establishment, but that’s a different movie. Maybe a sequel. 

Our Call: With Saturday Night, Reitman recreates and amplifies the probable chaos of SNL in a thoroughly enjoyable way. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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