Even the superest superfan of the legendary US TV comedy show Saturday Night Live is going to struggle with the unbearable self-indulgence and self-adoration of this exhausting film from director and co-writer Jason Reitman.
It’s a frantically dull dramedy about the supposedly adorable chaos that attended the show’s first ever live broadcast in 1975, with all the iconic players including Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris). For some obscure and not obviously funny reason Nicholas Braun plays both Jim Henson (of Muppets fame) and Andy Kaufman, and Gabriel LaBelle plays the show’s presiding producer-genius Lorne Michaels, who announces that his experimental comedy wackfest is “the first television show by and for the generation who grew up watching television”.
