Having been in the mainstream for 50 years at this point, "Saturday Night Live" is still one of the biggest names in live, late-night television. Beginning in 1975, SNL is a weekly sketch-comedy show that airs live from New York on Saturday nights.
Every week, the show brings on one of the biggest names in pop culture to play host to the show and star in some of the week's skits, as well as having a popular music group to play a short set between sketches.
Regardless of your opinion of the show over the last few years, I can say with absolute certainty there are at least three SNL videos somewhere in your YouTube search history.
They are an absolute icon in pop culture, if not an empire.
But how did it get to where it is today? Well, lucky for you, the brand-new biopic "Saturday Night" got added to Netflix, showing all of the struggles to get the show off the ground and onto the airways in a real-time 90-minute format.
Before we talk plot, let's break down the biggest concern with every biopic: how much of it is actually true? Well, when cross-referenced with other SNL documentaries and tell-alls’, most of the events are fairly accurate, but the timeline is way too hyperbolized.
All the events that occur in the time frame of the movie, which is supposed to be the 90 minutes before the first episode airs, did not all happen on one wild night where they were trying to hold everything together.
Instead, it pretty much brought together all of the mishaps of the first five or so years of the show airing and used that to dramatize the movie. So, what were some of the troubles?
Some of the troubles include light arrays falling from the ceiling and nearly killing the actors, rampant drug abuse throughout the entire studio and the bricks of the main stage still being placed with less than an hour to go.
Not to mention George Carlin… Just… George Carlin…The FCC ruining the script, TV execs all praying on the show's downfall and meddling around backstage and the writer's room being so mean to Jim Henson (yes, Muppets Jim Henson) that they tied a noose around Big Bird's neck and hung him from the ceiling.
All of that was roughly half of what the movie had to deal with in less than a two-hour time frame, but I have to say, it was incredibly done. I absolutely loved this movie. You don't even have to like SNL to like it. I didn't even know who a quarter of the people in the movie were portraying, but they still did an amazing job.
The pacing and screenplay are brilliant. The cinematography is killer. There's so many one-shot scenes that make you feel so immersed in how hectic everything was. Every actor portraying a big-name face hits their marks perfectly. Cory Michael Smith absolutely crushes as Chevy Chase. I don't even want to know how many National Lampoon's movies he watched in preparation for the role, but man, he was by far my favorite despite having less than 10 minutes of screen time.
I highly encourage absolutely everyone to watch "Saturday Night.”
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