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PROLOGUE

Every week at Saturday Night Live is just like every other week. Every week is the same because it's always intense, fueled by insanely hard work, full of triumphs and failures and backstage explosions, and because it's built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez or Lizzo or Elon Musk—who often has no idea what they are doing. It has been Lorne Michaels's job for the last fifty years to make it seem as if they do, and to corral the egos and the talents on his staff into getting the show on the air, live. Since he created the show, in 1975, he has periodically tweaked and fine-tuned it, paying attention to how the cultural winds are drifting. But the formula has essentially remained the same. Michaels compares it to a Snickers bar: viewers expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. ("There's a comfort level," he says.) The show has good years and bad years, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership of it. Just about every person who has ever watched SNL believes that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels likes to say that everyone in the entertainment business has two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix SNL. (When J. D. Salinger died, in 2010, letters surfaced in which even he griped about what was wrong with the show.)

The show's cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret behind Michaels's extraordinary tenure. "It's him and Hitchcock," John Mulaney says. "No one else has had this kind of longevity." Half of them believe that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he's a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil.

 

The other half wonders whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they've all projected a lifetime of hopes and fears and dark jokes; whether he, like the cramped stages in SNL's Studio 8H, is just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country's best comic minds.

PART ONE

MONDAY

Lorne Michaels's week started off with a tea party and a death threat. The death threat wasn't aimed at him, but at Jimmy Fallon, the host of The Tonight Show, which Michaels executive produces. The tea party was in honor of his friend the playwright Tom Stoppard. After that, in his office on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, he would preside over the first meeting for that week's episode of Saturday Night Live.

"I was just at a lovely tea at the Lotos Club, for Tom Stoppard," Michaels said, standing in his office, addressing a handful of his senior producers and writers, who had gathered for a preliminary meeting to troubleshoot the coming week and take a moment to check in. "It was very civilized—in contrast to this." He swiveled his head around to indicate present company, and gave a mild smirk. It was 5:45 on Monday, October 29, 2018, and in fifteen minutes the weekly Writers Meeting, the official kickoff to every episode of SNL, would start. (Monday, Michaels likes to say, is "a day of redemption," a fresh start after spending Sunday brooding over Saturday night's mistakes. On his tombstone, he says, will be the word UNEVEN.) Jonah Hill, the week's guest host, would soon be greeted by the show's twenty-seven writers and sixteen cast members, who would all squeeze into Lorne's office (everyone in the business refers to him by his first name, like Madonna, or Fidel) to pitch ideas for sketches. The goal is to make the host feel supported, like one of the gang. "At that point, you're more worried about them bolting than anything else," Michaels told me. The following six days would be punishing, physically and mentally, and would culminate in a live broadcast on Saturday night at 11:30, done with no net, before a worldwide audience of six million. Tina Fey, who worked on the show for a decade, says, "You don't say yes to that hosting job if you're not up for trying something insane." Over the years, performers have compared the experience of doing SNL to jumping out of an airplane (Fey), serving in the marine corps (Jan Hooks), and being in a "comedy emergency room" (Amy Poehler). One of Michaels's most-repeated lines is "We don't go on because we're ready, we go on because it's eleven-thirty."

The tea party for Stoppard earlier that day, held at one of the city's more elegant private clubs, was the kind of café-society affair, with a highbrow sheen, that Michaels enjoys. A phrase he uses often is "the high end of smart," and he likes to say, "If I'm the smartest person in the room, I'm in the wrong room." The cucumber sandwiches and champagne with such guests as Tina Brown and Rupert Murdoch had been a reprieve from a savage couple of weeks. Just hours before the party, he'd huddled at 30 Rock with FBI agents, who had paid a visit to Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show offices on the sixth floor because Fallon's name turned up on a list of targets of a Florida man arrested for mailing pipe bombs to a dozen people who had been critical of President Donald Trump. On top of the death threat, Fallon was being attacked for having performed in blackface on SNL decades earlier; Michaels advised him not to engage—doing so would only feed the internet trolls. Michaels had been blasted in the press, too: Taran Killam, a former cast member who used to play Donald Trump, had recently complained on a podcast that Michaels always insisted that he make Trump "likable," and the story wouldn't go away. (One of Michaels's core comedy tenets is that every impersonation should contain a speck of humanity or charm, to make the character relatable. Playing a character "from hate," he'll say, isn't funny; he often quotes Elaine May: "When in doubt, seduce.")