Notes from Maine - 2024/12/01
For those who observe it—hope you had a great Thanksgiving. I went to dinner with family. My trip was quick. We dined right across the river in Brunswick. They had to drive back home through a wet, heavy snowstorm, but they made it safely.
Last night, a friend came over and we watched Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night movie. It’s a depiction of the last couple hours before the debut of SNL on October 11, 1975. I liked the movie, although it felt like they took a lot of liberties with the timeline in order to heighten the tension. I’m sure that a ton of high-stakes decisions were being made that night, but I’ve heard interviews and I’m also sure that Alan Zweibel (early important writer) was not hired less than an hour before air time. In the movie (very mild spoiler) Zweibel gets a writing job and gets some jokes on air before the ink is dry on his contract. I guess if you’re going to tell a story in real time, you either have to write in a lot of exposition for previous events, or you have to fudge the timeline. They chose to fudge.
Immediately after watching that movie, I watched the first episode of SNL on Peacock. It was fun to compare the original cast members with their movie counterparts. Lamorne Morris did an incredible job in his role as Garrett Morris (no relation). Matthew Rhys was great as Carlin, in my opinion. Overall, it was a relief to see the originals. In the new movie Matt Wood was a good Belushi, but I’m not sure that anyone could be as compelling and magnetic as John Belushi was.
I’m left trying to remember why the show felt so compelling back then. I was young, but remember my parents staying up to watch. The show felt important. In later seasons I would watch SNL whenever I slept over at my best friend’s house. Love Boat and Fantasy Island would be on while we played board games or invented competitions. Benny Hill was on another channel. It was repetitive, but there was sometimes brief nudity, which was a rare commodity back then. SNL felt like it was always just barely getting away with something. It was like kids whispering in the back of the classroom. At any moment, the teacher might snap and pull the plug on the fun.
And then they did pull the plug. Everyone left. Eventually, new cast members became compelling. While I have Peacock, I thought it might be interesting to touch in on different seasons and try to remember what I was doing when I originally saw them. I expected to find a bunch of missing musical performances (because of streaming rights?), but I didn’t expect to find so many episodes gutted. In season 31, a lot of the posted episodes on Peacock are less than 20 minutes. I might have to do some research to find out what happened to those. Background songs that don’t have rights? Guest contracts that prohibit them from being streamed? I’m not trying to go back and watch every episode or anything like that. I don’t have the patience or desire for that project. But it would be nice to browse through and pick an episode or two from each season just to get a sense of how the show has evolved over the past 50 years. I wonder if Lorne will retire after this season. The big special is in February. We’ll probably know more in a few months. I’m guessing that Dick Ebersol (77) won’t take over again.
Next week, the host will be Paul Mescal with musical guest Shaboozey. I’m guessing that Paul will be promoting Gladiator 2? Both Paul and Shaboozey are about the same age. When they were born, SNL had been on for twenty years. I hope they find a way to make it their own.
