For 50 years, late-night TV viewers have heard the words “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” at 11:30 p.m. ET.
Saturday Night Live, the groundbreaking live sketch comedy show created by Toronto-born Lorne Michaels in 1975, has captured multiple generations with its oddball comedy and political satire — and launched the careers of countless Hollywood stars.
With the biographical film Saturday Night hitting theatres on Friday, fans and critics are looking back on the show’s five decades and assessing its relevance in the age of streaming, social media and heightened political polarization..
While this fall’s season debut on NBC saw a spike in ratings — pulling in 5.3 million viewers, the most in four years — its overall popularity has been declining throughout the 2000s.
Is SNL getting worse?
Cassie Cao, a Canadian comedian and television writer, got into SNL during its 2000s lineup featuring actors like Kristen Wiig, Amy Poehler, Jason Sudeikis and Andy Samberg.
Since then, she said, the show has lost a lot of its appeal.
“I feel like the difficulty that people are struggling with is: Is it the show that’s gotten worse? Or is it that the show hasn’t actually kept up with the context in which it’s airing?” Cao said.
Cao said the uniqueness of SNL — the fact that it’s performed in front of a live audience — is not as novel as it once was.
“We currently are in an age of hyper authenticity. You can log on to your phone and see tons of people reacting emotionally to things in the moment,” she said. “So for them to still have a little bit of a veneer of reading off the cue cards, it just looks so dated in a way that it would have been really charming decades ago.”
The show had its highest ratings in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and spiked again in the early ’90s, but it has generally been in decline for the last two decades.
According to Statista and reporting by the Post, the show’s most frequent viewers are aged 30 to 44, and its most engaged viewers are those who are old enough to remember the show’s 1990s “golden era,” featuring the likes of Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, David Spade and Chris Farley.
The buzz around new rising stars on the show and attempts to bring on hosts like Charli XCX to appeal to younger viewers keep conversations about SNL going but don’t seem to be bringing in consistent audiences.
SNL has been criticized for taking a vaguely liberal standpoint on political issues but also for refraining from taking hard shots at Democrats or Republicans. Cao said that ability to be incisive and cutting is an important missing component for a lot of viewers who were once fans.
“I watched the premiere of the 50th season and I was quite disappointed. Because all summer America was on fire, and every week everyone was like, ‘If only SNL was on the air, they would really have something to say about it.’ And the first episode went by and it barely had any political commentary,” she said.
“I think that over the last few years, the thing about SNL is that it’s clearly trying to walk the line of the political divide in the States.”
‘A broad, inoffensive big tent’
Nick Marx, an associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, said SNL is “one of the most important cultural institutions in North America of the last 50 years.”
The show’s topical nature initially led some viewers to see it as a sort of news broadcast that they would rely on to see major world events played back to them in comedic form, he said.
Lately, though, in a media environment where there is no shortage of instantaneous political commentary available on our phones, the show has positioned itself as “kind of a broad, inoffensive big tent” that doesn’t get into the weeds with tense political subjects the way other shows that deal explicitly in political satire might, Marx said.
“I think because the broadcast television model in the United States and in North America is dying, there’s an incentive to play closer to the middle and try to appeal to as many people as possible.”
As a kid, Marx said he was especially struck by “oddball” skits on SNL featuring performers like late Canadian actor Phil Hartman. When the show debuted in 1975, it was “weird, adventurous and off the wall” and unlike anything that came before, he said.
“From the very beginning, Lorne Michaels very intentionally wanted to give cool, youngish people a place to hang out on Saturday night at home,” said Marx, who co-authored the book Saturday Night Live & American TV.
“It’s always held this sort of edgy late-night appeal because of its time slot. And the very nature of its sort of cyclical turnover in cast members means that it’s constantly refreshed with young, youthful, edgy humour.”
Marx’s favourite SNL era was the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Cheri Oteri and Adam McKay, who carried on that spirit of “weird, absurdist adventurousness” that he said is not incentivized as much in broadcast television these days and lacking from recent seasons.
SNL is ‘built for now’: Saturday Night director
Jason Reitman, the Canadian American director of the new film Saturday Night, revisits the origins of SNL by taking a snapshot from its first night, recreating the backstage chaos and uncertainty of the 90 minutes leading up to its live TV debut.
He said that night was the moment young people “ripped” television out of the hands of the older generation.
“They made a show that represented the generation that grew up on TV,” he said. “And not only for comedy, but for music, for politics, for everything.”
Reitman, whose father, Ivan, was known for directing a number of popular comedy films, was enamoured with the show at a young age — becoming obsessed with the “bumpers,” when audiences got a peek into what the cameras and stagehands were doing to prepare the sets between sketches.
In 2008, following the success of his film Juno, Reitman’s dreams came true when he got to be a guest writer on SNL.
He said he was blown away by how quickly the team worked to put together a full-fledged, 90-minute show in just three days, between choosing the scripts and going live.
“It boggles the mind. I think about how hard we work making a 90-minute movie over the course of a year,” he said. “The comedy craftsmanship of their minds is staggering.”
Reitman said he believes the show has staying power as long as it has strong leadership that is open-minded about what’s funny and what’s relevant.
In some ways, he said, Saturday Night Live was always tailored for the current time.
“Lorne Michaels … made a show in 1975 that is digestible perfectly on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube,” Reitman said. “So SNL is built for now, and it is built for the future.”