December 9, 2024
New Yorker editor Morrison (editor of Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary) provides an entertaining account of Lorne Michaels’s nearly half-century reign over Saturday Night Live. Chronicling Michaels’s comedic education, Morrison recounts how as a teenager at summer camp, he organized “freewheeling revues” that were written and rehearsed over the course of a week and performed on Saturday nights. Michaels spent his 20s writing jokes for several sketch and variety shows, but he “had a more cerebral, ambitious notion of what television could be.” In 1974, he pitched upstart NBC producer Dick Ebersol on Saturday Night (“Live” would come later), a sketch comedy series that would satirize the way TV “shrink-wrapped the culture.” Morrison meticulously chronicles Michaels’s leadership of the program, detailing how he maintained a “businesslike calm” while dealing with clashing egos and studio interference ahead of the premiere and how he outmaneuvered the network’s attempts to wrest control of the program away from him in the mid-1990s. Though Morrison focuses more on SNL’s first 25 years than its second, she offers intriguing tidbits about how Michaels steered the show through the aftermath of 9/11 and the first Trump administration (several writers and cast members accuse Michaels of going “criminally soft” on Trump). It’s an engrossing look at the man behind the curtain. Agent: David Kuhn, Aevitas Creative Management.