Live From New York

Preface to the 2015 Edition

It's highly doubtful that anyone associated with the premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975 imagined that the show would still be around ten, fifteen, or twenty-five years later. Some of those present at the creation, however, were definitely still around on February 15, 2015, and they, along with dozens of other alumni from TV's longest-running comedy show, returned to Studio 8H to celebrate its epochal fortieth anniversary.

The special, which spanned more than three and a half hours of prime time on NBC, truly had something for everybody who'd ever loved or even liked the program, and it also, true to form, had something for everybody to bitch about. Lorne Michaels, the show's creator and its producer for all but five of those forty years, was determined to invite everybody associated with SNL in any significant way to attend the TV special and a splashy after-gala, and he gave orders to the producers and writers of the special to include as many celebrated or notorious highlights from four decades of SNL as possible.

Blocks of memory-stirring moments were interlaced with new versions of SNL classics, all of them combined in an astonishing whirlwind ride—one that demonstrated how SNL could sail through myriad changes in American trends, fads, fashions, attitudes, institutions, social realities, political movements, and technology and manage to remain young, even as the rest of us grew older. The show had begun, actor Robert De Niro noted, "back when TV was still watched on TV," when if you missed the show on Saturday night, then you missed the show.

The special was divided loosely into thematic blocks ("Forty Years of Politics on SNL," hosted by Jack Nicholson; "Forty Years of Sports on SNL," hosted by Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning) and even included a new rap song, by Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler, to accompany a montage of "breaks"—times when actors broke up laughing.

In reviewing the special, Internet writers and bloggers and social-media practitioners dubbed it "uneven," a charge that the series has faced since its inception. The show was always bound to be uneven, partly because it envelops and displays so many different kinds of comedy, intermingling political satire with shameless slapstick and ribald or just plain dirty farce.

On the fortieth anniversary show, the clips whizzed by with once-familiar sayings and catchphrases popping back into the collective consciousness…

And, yes, Generalissimo Francisco Franco was "still dead," as Chevy Chase had regularly reported in the first season of "Weekend Update" mock-newscasts, back when the cast was known as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

"There they are—all my friends," said John Belushi, made up to look like the old man he would never live to be and pointing to headstones on a cemetery hill in Tom Schiller's poignant 1977 short film Don't Look Back in Anger. All his old cohorts from SNL had preceded him in death, Belushi said, scoffing at suspicions that he would be the first to go.

Even SNL detractors would have to admit that the range represented on the special verged on awe-inspiring; it was that breadth of scope and style that helped explain the forty-year run in the first place. That, and the fact that the show perpetually replenished itself onstage and in the writer's room, launching the careers of many an extraordinary performer in the process.

The assembled glitterati watching the special in Studio 8H represented a cross section of the pop-culture elite, just as the performers constituted a remarkable roll call of comedy royalty. They came together to honor a program that had started in the minor tributaries of television and soon became a torrent in the mainstream.

Among those seated in the audience that February night was Al Franken, once a Peck's Bad Boy of television on SNL, now grown up with a vengeance. As a writer and performer, he had maliciously insulted network president Fred Silverman in a sketch for a 1979 episode of the show, and now he was serving his second term as a U.S. senator from Minnesota. How things change.

Bill Murray, as lounge singer Nick Ocean, sang new and gratuitous lyrics to the theme from Jaws, with Paul Shaffer at the piano ("Jaws! You took me and made me part of you… you bastard, Jaws"). Eddie Murphy, who'd refused to take part in the show's twenty-fifth anniversary, made a noncomic appearance to say that all was forgiven and that "I will always love this show" (though he refused to do an impression of scandalized Bill Cosby). Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin paid tribute to Tracy Morgan, former cast member suffering through a long recuperation following a traffic accident. And, in a selection of clips, viewers saw the ancient auditions of performers who did make the cast and a few—Jim Carrey, Kevin Hart—who didn't.

"I'm just glad it's over" was one of Michaels's comments a few days after the complex, spectacular, exhaustive, and exhausting show had aired. He was saluted at various points in the program, lampooned at others, and was called up onto the very crowded stage for good nights. And it was clear, however much he and the show he created have tried to avoid sentimentality over the decades, that even Michaels was fighting back tears.

Afterward, at the Plaza Hotel, worlds collided in a way that only Michaels could probably engineer. With all due respect to Vanity Fair's fabled Oscar bashes, no one else could have summoned the array of musicians, comedians, actors, politicians, and corporate big shots that Michaels brought together that night. Music was in the center ring, starting with Dan Aykroyd summoning onstage the likes of Paul McCartney, Jimmy Buffett, Taylor Swift, Debbie Harry, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, the B-52s, and Michael Bolton. That was hardly that. Jimmy Fallon later called on Prince to take the stage and bring the evening to the proverbial "next level."

What was being celebrated that night was a phenomenon that—through the endlessly morphing and recharging organism that Michaels had created—had made not only television history but also played a role in the political and social direction of the nation. Born in an age dominated by three TV networks and a smattering of independent stations, Saturday Night Live had survived into the Internet era and was still rolling powerfully along.

The SNL special drew an impressive 26.5 million viewers according to Nielsen ratings, ranking it as the most-watched NBC Entertainment program in a decade, and also setting a record, according to Entertainment Weekly, for the largest number of tweets ever prompted by a single program—9.1 million people interacting via 1.3 million tweets, by the Nielsen Social count.

It would be all but inarguable to declare the night not only a success but also a milestone. One had to concede—considering the innumerable earthquakes and sea changes that had already occurred in American media and all the others undoubtedly lurking in the future—that, no, there would never be anything like this again.

No, not ever.

Preface to the 40th Anniversary Edition

In the twelve years since the paperback edition of Live from New York was published, Saturday Night Live has gone through many changes, as have we all. Twenty-eight cast members have been hired; twenty-six have left. Some departed for sitcoms or movies; others simply vanished from the public eye. There have been uproars, embarrassments, firings, budget cuts, a writers' strike that nearly derailed an entire season, and the construction of a new stage in Studio 8H. Women anchored "Weekend Update" and played a hugely prominent role in a presidential election.

This new expanded edition of LFNY is meant to chronicle those changes and others, help mark the show's fortieth anniversary, and document further its lasting imprint on American culture. After thirty-nine seasons, this much is still true: through triumphs and troubles, through incomparably memorable moments and fitful flirts with mediocrity, Saturday Night Live marches on as the most successful comedy show in the history of television.

As with previous editions of this book, here we endeavor to write history through commentary and reminiscences from the show's cast members, hosts, and writers—this time including those who have been part of the show since the original book was published. We originally conceived LFNY as a book of record, and we welcome the chance to make that a living record—an illumination, we hope, for those who have lived their entire lives within the time frame of the show and for those old enough to remember its first tumultuous years.

One consistency through the decades—despite all the changes and upheaval—is that Saturday Night Live still hews to tradition. It began as and remains the expression of primarily one man: Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer, who, except for a five-year hiatus during which others ran the show, hasn't missed a performance. He is the guiding spirit, and many of the standards he championed in the beginning are still evident in each subsequent iteration.

So even when its content may be sophomoric or semismutty, Saturday Night Live continues to reflect its old established values—no canned laughter, no fake breakups by cast members, stringent technical standards. Indeed, one of the most common refrains from hosts involves awe at how expertly and impressively the machinery of SNL operates; live television has no margin for error.

As a result, even in its own middle age, and with many cable channels now proclaiming themselves as major players in the comedy business, Michaels's creation stands out. It has, let's face it, a better pedigree than do pretenders to the throne, and beneath the ballyhoo and profits it evinces a palpable sense of purpose—something rare for commercial television.

You don't get to be forty without a little paranoia. SNL has always tried to stay ahead or at least abreast of industry developments, repackaging material for cast-member "Best of" home-video releases, DVD boxed sets, network specials, and exposure on Hulu and other Internet sites. In the past decade, though, Saturday Night Live has managed even to co-opt candidates for its own replacement. Former cast member Andy Samberg, along with writers Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, convinced Michaels to feature weekly digital shorts on the program just as YouTube was becoming part of America's daily routine. More people now see SNL's digital shorts on computers than they do when watching the show itself on Saturday night.

Of course that digital ecosystem has put the show under a brighter and, arguably, harsher spotlight than ever, with each episode being analyzed and pounced upon by the Internet's cacophonous chorus of opinionators. The show has ridden a roller coaster of ups and downs, sometimes making news as well as commenting on it—or doing both at the same time. A "sketch that kills" can go viral now in a flash and be seen by millions who no longer watch the show. As a result, SNL has had to face, from Twitter and elsewhere, a huge new array of would-be satirists and commentators.

The same Internet that supplies perpetual criticism for SNL supplies perpetual competition for it, with a seemingly infinite array of satirical or pseudosatirical voices clamoring for attention. Competition has become even fiercer, especially against the bottomless pits of programming on cable and satellite television. Cable stars like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert try to do nightly what SNL does weekly on the "Update" desk, making it even harder for SNL writers and performers not only to be funny but also to say something distinctive and unique about the week's news and pop-culture parade.

To his credit, and even though there has sometimes seemed to be a lag between criticisms of the show and attempts to address them, Michaels has remained vigilant in maintaining the show's prominence in the zeitgeist and in the increasingly hasty march of time; he and the writers, producers, and performers under him try desperately each week to keep the show fresh and relevant. Obviously, currency is the show's most important single attribute.

NBC has exploited the success of SNL at every opportunity: its reruns often plug holes in the NBC schedule and are licensed to play on cable channels (some partly owned by NBC). Michaels's own domain and wealth have vastly expanded; with the ascendancies of Jimmy Fallon to The Tonight Show and Seth Meyers to Late Night, Michaels became executive producer and guardian angel of NBC's entire late-night schedule, Monday through Saturday.

The flagship broadcast, Saturday Night Live, has developed into a relatively dependable audience delivery device, so much so that it has become common for SNL—where the resident troupe used to be self-mockingly called the Not Ready for Prime Time Players—to score higher Nielsen ratings than any show in NBC's Saturday prime-time lineup. Of course that's attributable not just to SNL doing well but also, in the thousand-channel universe, to everybody else being in the dumps, or almost in the dumps. The size of the pie stays relatively the same, but the slices grow ever smaller; the audience now must be divided among new channels, new networks, and new media.

Can there be anything left, meanwhile, of SNL's original rebellious, maverick swagger? Can SNL continue to satirize what it has, arguably, become?

Maybe these worries are spurious, perhaps as irrelevant as some claim the show has now become. But week after week and year after year, perpetually replenished with new young talent who claim Studio 8H for their own, Saturday Night Live continues to push on, and the man whose name remains first in the credits at the end of each show has vowed to stay there as long as he lives. Michaels still manages to identify with the audaciousness and irreverence that have always been vital to the show's DNA.

For us, this journey has proved a hilarious pleasure at times and a daunting challenge at other times. But always, more than anything else, it has been an honor.

No kidding.

—James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales