
NBC has been persistent and omnipresent in magnifying the 50th Anniversary of Saturday Night Live. The season itself is labeled “SNL 50th,” there is the 50 Years of SNL Music documentary, plus the actual 50th Anniversary Special – three hours’ worth – on Sunday, February 16.
The program is also the singular focus of a Peacock original four-part docuseries, SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night. The program is receiving much deserved recognition as is creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels.
Having watched the sneak peek of Episode 1 of the SNL 50 documentary, I went all in and binged the four parts in rapid fashion. The cultural impact of this program over 50 years, and how it has evolved and changed, is evident when the 600 months of the program (including repeats) are boiled down into something bingeable. Many of you are like me and cannot watch anything without considering its application to what we do as content creators.
The lessons from the creator are on full display in watching the series and among the many articles written about Lorne Michaels. This includes a recent one in The New Yorker written by Susan Morrison. She provides such great insight into the wizard that he has shown to be over the past half-century. Ms. Morrison herself is an excellent writer. The insight she provides is worthy of your investment in reading her work.
A friend and client who programs radio in a major market showed me the article. This programmer used Michaels’ history, and the New Yorker story, as a foundation for coaching the talent he leads. Coaching personalities is itself an art, but respecting the art of the talent starts with respecting them as performers. Michaels and this PD both do that.
If you’ve never followed Michaels’ career, you likely don’t understand how and why so many SNL cast members have gone on to bigger things. Hindsight is required to see SNL’s cultural impact and to embrace the craft of live performances. In many cases, that’s what radio does, too. The lessons to be learned are there for those who want to learn them.
MAGNIFY THE DIFFERENCE: When Saturday Night Live debuted on October 11, 1975, it was named Saturday Night. A traditional variety show would have opened with the guest host doing a monologue. Michaels wanted viewers to know immediately that his show was something completely different. His show starts full-on. It jumps right into the comedy. The “cold open” for the show is what he wants viewers to see first. The first thing viewers saw on that first-ever episode was John Belushi, playing the role of an immigrant, being taught English. The sketch completes as Belushi grunts and tumbles to the floor. After a pause, Chevy Chase enters, wearing a stage manager’s headset. He flashes a smile at the camera and says, “Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” The show was on.
MEETING EXPECTATIONS: Michaels compares Saturday Night Live to a Snickers bar: people expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. The formula is essentially unchanged. “There’s a comfort level,” he says. One of those things that really stood out to me in the New Yorker article was Michaels’s view of the durability of the show. “The show has good years and bad, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership over it.” Seldom do we see such patience from leadership in radio, as Michaels has enjoyed with Saturday Night Live. Truly a luxury.
KNOW ALL OF YOUR AUDIENCE: When the show first started the newspaper columnist Joseph Kraft had recently coined the term “Middle America.” As Michaels spent more time in network TV he would learn to keep that audience in mind. He now regularly reminds his SNL staff, “We’ve got the whole country watching – all fifty states.” Staying focused on who you’re talking to is key in all parts of the business.
RESPECT THE MAGIC: Michaels hasn’t been at the helm for all 50 years. After Season 5, he left. Five years later, he came back. Ratings had sunk, and the show had become reliant on pre-taped bits. “It lost what is magic about it,” Michaels said in 1985. “I think Saturday Night Live is about contact with another group of humans coming through this tube.” He has a clear vision for the show in his head. The very best Program Directors I’ve ever met hear their radio station in their head. They know what it should sound like.
TRANSITION WHEN POSSIBLE: After what was described as a rocky return year for Michaels, he focused on making smooth transitions between casts. Rather than abrupt changes, older players overlapped with new ones. He’d learned that it was crucial to notice changes in the world. Lorne described it as knowing “when the music changed.” It was useful when the new performers knew other cast members, helping the crew to come together. This is something that I’ve seen embraced by some of the biggest and most successful shows on radio. The Elvis Duran Show does that. The Bert Show does that. The same for Kidd Kraddick, and so many more. Changes are not abrupt.
WHAT CHANGES AND WHAT DOESN’T: Late revisions are sent to a cue-card crew, who write new cards at what has been described as lightning speed. Think about that. Today’s technology and they still use cue-cards. If you’ve ever been in the play-by-play booth of a sports broadcast, you’ve seen this. Directors hand the talent index cards which they read from. It is apparent that in some cases Michaels clings to outmoded methods; he refuses to use teleprompters and requires script revisions to be done on paper. Lorne didn’t arrive there overnight. It took him years to establish his method of producing comedy. Knowing what and when to change is learned behavior. What to keep is equally important.
EVOLVE: Straight from author Susan Morrison, Michaels largely abandoned the Andy Kaufman strain of his formula in the ’80s. When picking the show, he leaned toward harder laughs – crowd-pleasers like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, a bravura display of performing chops. SNL continued to reliably supply fans with catchphrases such as, “We just want to pump YOU up!” This is where knowing what’s happening in society, and responding to it without losing sight of your audience’s expectations, becomes true art.
THE PROCESS: On Friday, the staff often hears Michaels say, “We have nothing.” Employees a quarter of his age are amazed that, after fifty years, he can still seem scared. If things look particularly bleak, he’ll ask writers if they’ve been saving any good material for an upcoming host, telling them, “Sometimes you have to burn the furniture.” What stands out to me is that the creator of SNL is so close to his cast and writers. He’s very aware of their skills, watches them develop over time, and has their trust that he’ll use them in the right way. It isn’t lost on me that most of those performing want to be there. Fostering an environment where performers want to work is critical to long-term success.
EMBRACE CHANGE: As technology – and how the audience used technology – changed, that change was embraced by Michaels. Compare the almost Broadway-like variety show style of SNL in the early days and today’s show. Lorne understands that today the audience may watch live on Saturday night, but many of them watch on-demand, on YouTube as bits, or on social media, and sketches are often captured in a way that they can be fast-forwarded through. Today’s SNL is made for social media.
NEW MEDIA FREES UP THE MEDIA THAT PRECEDED IT: Marshall McLuhan is an oft-quoted Canadian philosopher who spent much time in the ’60s and ’70s analyzing media. Lorne Michaels, a Canadian himself, embraced McLuhan’s idea that, whenever a new mass medium emerges, it frees up the medium that preceded it, allowing it to innovate. Artists like the Rolling Stones and David Bowie were pushing the boundaries of rock. According to Michaels, “Everything but television was changing,” in those days. Given that philosophy, one could speculate that radio should be freed up to evolve and do those things that the DSPs cannot do, but instead, we’re moving in the opposite direction and mirroring them.
TIME TO CREATE HAS VALUE: He accepted the job, telling NBC executives that his show would take shape organically over time. “We will always be experimenting on the air,” he said. “I know what the ingredients are but not the recipe.” He asked the network for three months to assemble writers and performers, and then three more months for them to jell as an ensemble. The show would have grueling hours, he noted, so he was looking for “People you could drive cross-country with and not kill.” He wanted “enlightened amateurs” – people with little or no TV experience. I’ve only ever had one time in my career when I was given the luxury of time to create. That was when WMJI-FM in Cleveland was born. I had a full three months to build a team, do research, create a marketing strategy, and launch the radio station with a big on-air promotion. Seldom do we see that today.
DETAIL MATTERS: Lorne Michaels sold the point that if you miss your mark by a millimeter, the joke dies. He subscribed to Mark Twain’s observation that the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. It’s validated that he forbade improvising. From The New Yorker: “The way I work, you do all your work beforehand, and you write down the dialogue that you’ve actually chosen.” Attention to detail is critical in everything, really.