At 11:30pm on October 11th, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television forever. Find out what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live (1975).

Since it first debuted nearly 50 years ago, Saturday Night Live has became an American cultural staple, renowned for its impact on the American comedy scene and for launching the careers of an extensive list of comedians, actors and actresses. It hasn’t penetrated in the United Kingdom to anything like the same degree, so I was intrigued to see how ‘Saturday Night’ would land, given my experience of it is limited to a few sketch clips and musical performances on YouTube. That is certainly an issue for a British audience as the movie assumes its audience has a degree of familiarity with SNL, and that meant for me at least, there was a barrier to how much I was going to enjoy the movie.

The movie, directed by Jason Reitman, is set in the 90 minutes prior to the first ever live TV performance of ‘Saturday Night’, as the show was called then (hence the title of the movie), and it plays out with a ticking clock dynamic as Lorne Michaels (‘The Fabelmans’ Gabriel LaBelle) attempts to keep an unruly cast and crew under control while the NBC bigwigs plot ways to keep it from air. As Willem Dafoe’s character David Tebet says, “You haven’t locked the script, your crew is in open rebellion”, and he’s right, as most of the movie follows Michaels as he solves one issue after another, whether it be missing actors, dodgy sets or the variety of egos on display. The problem with this is I just didn’t buy it, and while yes, you expect a lot of dramatic licence to create an entertaining movie, it is just wholly improbable that they were THIS unprepared, not to mention the ludicrous throughline that the folks that greenlit the show are trying to kill it before its aired. It’s for dramatic tension but when it is not remotely credible, there is no dramatic tension.

This doesn’t mean the movie is all bad, and as an ensemble comedy movie a lot of it works pretty well in isolation. It has a good cast with LaBelle and Rachel Sennott as his partner/ex-partner Rosie Shuster both leading it well, and a lot of the fun comes from spotting who is playing which famous face, with the likes of John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd represented, and it does to an extent capture the anarchic spirit of what I assume was why SNL has became such an enduring hit in the United States. The extensive cast bounce off each other well, with the obvious downside that there’s just too many of them so we see too little of some of the better characters and too much of the others.

‘Saturday Night’ is a nostalgic movie made for people with a fondness for SNL or at least early SNL. For those that don’t, such as myself and I assume most Brits, it doesn’t quite transfer across nearly as well and on that basis, this strikes me as a movie very much for the fans and not really for anyone else.

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: Jason Reitman

Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, Kaia Gerber, Robert Wuhl, Tommy Dewey, Catherine Curtin, Jon Batiste, Paul Rust, Tracy Letts, Matthew Rhys, J. K. Simmons, Brad Garrett, Josh Brener and Willem Dafoe

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt27657135/