Who watches Saturday Night Live anymore? 5.3 million last month for the Season 50 premiere, their biggest audience in four years. So, the biggest audience since 2020… What about 2016, when the show went into full meltdown over the failure of Hillary Clinton? Even more than the election of Donald Trump, it was Clinton’s loss that especially singed Saturday Night Live, with a clearly and understandably bitter Kate McKinnon, ready for four-to-eight years of good work and national recognition as the First Female Presidential Impersonator. Instead, she sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as Hillary just days after Cohen died, one in a wave of deaths that made 2016 feel particularly apocalyptic—or, as Peggy Noonan said that election night, “We’ve entered a new epoch.”
How were the ratings then, on that episode of SNL with the piano and the pantsuit and the “Hallelujah?”
6.2 million.
How many millions are just televisions left on in the background, in hotels, in cafeterias, airports, bars? With the decline of commercial cinema and the total disappearance of the studio comedy, SNL has lost its primary purpose: as a springboard for future movie stars and burnouts who’d become icons, either through their characters (Mike Myers and Austin Powers) or their spectacularly tragic deaths (Chris Farley and Phil Hartman). The country’s “premiere comedy program” was muzzled like nearly everyone else by the fallout from the 2016 election and the #MeToo cycle beginning in late-2017: after a wave of firings and cancellations, no one wanted to go out on a limb trying to make a joke, and coasting became acceptable in the face of “necessary” politics. It was more important to point out how many white people there were in a writer’s room or an audience than it was to make a good show or a good movie. And the business declined.
None of this has to do with Jason Reitman’s new movie starring Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels and Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, Saturday Night, because Saturday Night is a bad movie, the worst movie of the year, one without a single good note, no good decisions, no interesting performance, a terrible script, a false sense of solemnity, a facade of drama with nothing behind it, all under-lit and shot with a gun to its head, panicked and rushed without any urgency or clarity that comes from the best “live” shows. None of the cast look like any of the cast member they portray, all already mostly lost in the cultural memory—who was on Saturday Night Live in October 1975? Andy Kaufman, Jim Henson, Gilda Radner, Jim Belushi… all dead… Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Dick Ebersol, Jane Curtin… exiled or on their way out… so no wonder the movie bombed amidst a sea of fall bombs, making only $3.4 million last weekend even as Saturday Night Live itself held onto more than five million people. Maybe. Maybe five million people. But is this an institution? Come on.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith