Conversations about the legacy of “Saturday Night Live” must include its daring film shorts. Not the Please Don’t Destroy gags or Andy Samberg viral raps, but the artistic swings like “La Dolce Gilda,” Gilda Radner's indelible third-season homage to Federico Fellini. Or “Love Is a Dream,” a fantastic 1987 swoon into a bygone era and lost youth featuring Jan Hooks, Phil Hartman, a romantic Bing Crosby track and a tiara in a safety deposit box. That may be a close second. Neither of these slices of heaven were designed to draw laughs. They existed to create wonder and endure as evidence that this network TV fixture veered away from the expected.
Whether Morgan Neville drew inspiration from those post-midnight gems in conceiving “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” I can’t say. But he and Neil Berkeley, who directed its deep dive into the making of the infamous "Behind the Music" spoof featuring a fictional version of Blue Oyster Cult, find a pleasing middle ground between art and however you'd describe Will Ferrell’s eternal bang-bang-banger. TV nerds might defend those esoteric departures, but the “More Cowbell” sketch probably has higher value to the average viewer — it will never, ever get old.
