Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Emily Fairn, Lamorne Morris and Matt Wood
Directed by Jason Reitman
Streaming on Netflix
Rated R

First Impression: Director Jason Reitman gives us an intimate behind-the-scenes look of what happened in the 90 minutes leading up to the first ever airing of “Saturday Night Live.” The film succeeds when it focuses on the long rumored feuds and drama between legendary sketch comedians and other celebrities who were at the taping, but story-structure-wise Reitman crafted the event like a hard-boiled political thriller—which it most certainly is not.

When you think about a show like “Saturday Night Live,” it shouldn’t have lasted as long as it has. This year NBC and many viewers around the world are celebrating its 50th anniversary. NBC and its streaming service, Peacock, have made a “SNL 50” show, where sketch comics who appeared on the show all gathered to celebrate the anniversary. (It’s very funny and you should give it a viewing on Peacock if you can.) But to get back to my original thought, there was nothing quite like SNL on the air at the time of its arrival in 1975. Sure, there were variety shows like “Laugh-In,” which made fun of counterculture and “hippie humor,” and “Hee Haw,” which focused more on country living and rural humor. But both of those shows as far as forms of comedy had roots in vaudeville and stage comedy, which were both older than television itself. SNL was unique because it was to be the first sketch comedy show written and performed by the first generation who actually grew up watching television.

So how did something so fresh and bold end up on television, when we can even see in today’s atmosphere so many networks play it safe with traditional shows that don’t really step outside the box? Well, according to the film “Saturday Night” it was supposed to be an epic failure/disaster. The greenlighting of the show was all part of a scheme devised by an NBC executive at the time, David Tebet, played by the villainous character actor Willem Dafoe, to make Johnny Carson (the king of late night) who was in contract negotiations with NBC at the time, sweat a little bit and come back to the negotiating table. Of course none of this was known to the creator of SNL, Lorne Michaels, a young timid man at the time, and played very convincingly by Gabriel LaBelle, or the cast of mostly unknowns at the time, including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Belushi; and musical appearances by Andy Kaufman and a sketch by a puppeteer named Jim Henson with his puppets he called Muppets (who you all know later became legendary staples of television and film). Like I said earlier, the film is crafted with a sense of urgency and is kind of an anxious experience because we are constantly reminded of the clock and it keeps ticking down and more things keep going wrong with the sets and the costumes and the fights regarding both artistic censorship and actual physical fist fights! Overall it was enjoyable to me even though it took itself a little more seriously than I thought it would.

Final Verdict: 3 stars