There is no show in history more obsessed with its own lore than Saturday Night Live. Almost every week the long-running sketch show is sprinkled with returning alumni and jokes that reference the show’s illustrious and controversial past: its social club status for the great and good of New York; the drug-fuelled deaths of its brightest lights such as John Belushi and Chris Farley; the superstars it created in Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Tina Fey, to name but five of hundreds.
SNL is so fabled that it’s already inspired scores of documentaries and numerous scripted TV shows based on it, including 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In February, there will be a three-hour primetime special celebrating the show’s 50th anniversary, an event likely to be more starry than the Oscars (at a similar event for the 40th anniversary, Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney and Prince formed an impromptu band to entertain the afterparty). At the centre of it all, Lorne Michaels, the show’s inscrutable Canadian executive producer, who has become the most powerful man in American comedy, yet famously is incredibly difficult to make laugh.
