[applause]

Tina Fey: This is probably as good a time as any to say a few words about an appealing new comedy program called Saturday Night, which is broadcast at 11:30 each Saturday night by NBC and is definitely not to be confused with Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which comes on earlier in the evening on ABC.

David Remnick: In 1975, The New Yorker reviewed a new television show that aimed pretty deliberately to redefine comedy, and it came to be called Saturday Night Live.

TV Host: NBC's Saturday Night starring the novelty for primetime players, Dan Aykroyd, John [crosstalk]--

David Remnick: The cast was a bunch of unknowns, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, but it became such an institution. You can barely think of a comedian in the last half century who didn't go through SNL as a writer or as a performer. Here's Tina Fey reading from the review by Michael Arlen, The New Yorker's television critic at the time, published just after the show's debut.

Tina Fey: The Cosell show and NBC's Saturday Night are both mainly live, but there is a crucial difference between the two programs. Cosell's show depends on that strange fantasy language of celebrity public relations which has been concocted by mass entertainment producers and stars. It is the language of "kisses blown," of "God bless yous," of "this wonderful human being," of "a sensational performer and my very dear personal friend," and of "you're just a beautiful audience." In short, the language of celebrity hype, perhaps a contemporary equivalent of dandyism and powdered wigs.

Much of the appeal of Saturday Night lies in its contrast with this ubiquitous show business language.

Host: Talking about a live show.

Tina Fey: Its format, like that of most comedy programs, consists of a familiar assembly of skits, songs, and monologues, but the spirit of the material is in opposition to conventional show business.

Host: Football's kind of nice. They changed it a little bit. They moved the hash marks in. Guys found them and smoked them anyway. [laughter]

Tina Fey: The hosts don't do very much in the way of hosting in the conventional TV manner of promoting themselves or the guests, but are content mainly to sit around providing a periodic focus for the loosely tied-together skits and sometimes telling a story or two. Skit humor usually defies cold description, so I won't try much of it here.

Candice Bergen: Good evening. This is Candice Bergen reporting from one of those little Third World countries, and I'm talking to the ruler of that country, his Royal Highness--

Tina Fey: On a recent Saturday with Candice Bergen as host, the show began with a not-very-brilliant takeoff of a presidential news conference which showed the actor impersonating President Ford, bumping his head on the lectern fumbling with his drinking water and repeatedly falling down.

President Ford Impersonator: I do have two major announcements to make. Oh, oh. [laughter] No problem, no problem.

Tina Fey: Then there was a crisply done parody of a TV news program, concluding with a lunatic News For the Hard of Hearing, which consisted of a newsman yelling items of news very loud.

Newsman 1: Our top story tonight.

Newsman 2: [yelling] Our top story tonight.

[laughter] [crosstalk]

Newsman 1: -is still dead.

Newsman 2: [yelling]-is still dead.

Newsman 1: Good night and have a--

Tina Fey: Also a takeoff of a Black perspective program with the Black host attempting to interview a harebrained white girl on the subject of a book she had just written about Black ghetto life. Also an amiable but fairly juvenile parody of Jaws. Also a skit by a fine young comedian, Andy Kaufman, about a TV guest who couldn't manage to perform properly or at all, and so forth.

Speaker 2: I would like to imitate Archie Bunker. You stupid. You are so stupid. Everybody stupid. [laughter] Get out of my chair, meathead. [laughter]

Tina Fey: For the most part in the past 20 years, commercial television has largely ignored the important new trends in modern comedy. Whether as a result of the caution of advertisers or of the personal prejudices of network bosses, mass entertainment television comedy has been firmly rooted in the past, a synthetic Hollywood-style show business past, despite the fact that the new forms of comedy have demonstrated a considerable popular appeal.

It's not a matter of wishing to replace Bob Hope with an elitist in-group kind of humor. The popular audience continues to adore Bob Hope, but it is also true that for years, substantial segments of this same popular audience have been sneaking away in droves from its hoopla show business comedy hours in order to commune with the rising number of lesser-known, more personal, more political, more sexual comedians.

Thus, what is noteworthy about Saturday Night and why I commend it is not the result of any spectacular star-studded brilliance on its part. Indeed, it has no real stars, though I hope that the ensemble of actor comics who perform most of the skits will make individual names for themselves. It is, as the saying goes, an uneven program with ups and downs and too many commercial breaks, but it is a direct and funny show which seems to speak out of the real non-show business world that most people inhabit and it exists.

One wonders without expecting an answer, what took it so long. One wonders too what simple human pleasures the simple human TV viewer might someday conceivably experience if network television that grinning, gun-toting, wisecracking, "you're just a beautiful audience, still youthful courtesan," should ever start peeling off the rest of the cosmetics.

[MUSIC - Kaptain: Catch you On the Flip Side]

David Remnick: Tina Fey, reading From The New Yorker's review of Saturday Night Live from 1975. that's an excerpt, and you can find Michael Arlen's piece at Newyorker.com.

Now, we don't normally know the producers of television shows, but Saturday Night Live is a real exception to that rule. Lorne Michaels was a Canadian who had been writing comedy shows in LA, and he had a very specific idea about what he wanted to do in comedy. He promised NBC executives that his show would be different, very different than anything else on television. Michaels has always been full of maxims and rules about comedy. Over the years he cultivated a kind of mystique on the show.

Lorne Michaels also doesn't like to talk to the press very much. A new book by Susan Morrison about Michaels sheds a lot of light on one of the most important people in show business in our time. Susan spent years talking to Michaels when she wasn't at her day job as an editor at The New Yorker. Susan, I don't want you to give away your age or mine, but what's your first memory of watching Saturday Night Live?

Susan Morrison: I definitely watched it in the first season, but my chief first memory is being at this show in the first season.

David Remnick: 50 years ago.

Susan Morrison: 50 years ago, we got in, we sat right next to the stage in Studio 8H, and it was Elliott Gould and Leon Redbone. What I really remembered was the strange thrill of sitting in a working television studio with sets being hustled by you, and cameras on cranes flying over your head. What really hit me was the strange, deconstructed aspect of it. I'm sure I didn't get most of the comedy.

David Remnick: Let's start from the beginning of the beginning. You've been an editor at The New Yorker for a long time. Why write about Lorne Michaels, somebody who people think they know who he is, but maybe they only see him as a kind of fleeting image once in a while on a show on a Saturday night?

Susan Morrison: My first job in New York City was working for Lorne on his one big public failure. It was a show called The New Show that was a primetime kind of quasi-version of SNL on NBC. The show flopped terribly, but it opened the world to me in a very interesting way. I would say hi to Lorne. I always was interested in the culture. Around the time of SNL's 40th anniversary 10 years ago, I was a new empty nester. I had the preposterous idea that I was suddenly going to have a lot of free time.

[laughter]

Susan Morrison: I went to Lorne, who knew me a bit, and told him, "I've signed a contract with Random House to write a book about you. I don't need anything from you because I'm familiar with your world and your friends and these people, but it would be a better book if you wanted to be involved." After looking like he was going to pass out for taking a few deep breaths-- He loves The New Yorker. He agreed to give me a lot of time and opened a lot of doors.

A lot of people don't know that in the very first season of SNL, The New Yorker's famous writer, Lillian Ross, and William Shawn, the editor of this magazine, showed up at the show one day because they were huge Richard Pryor fans, and they loved Lorne. They kind of took him under their wing and showed him around town. He didn't really know New York at the time.

David Remnick: He's Canadian.

Susan Morrison: He's Canadian. He had been in LA. He learned a lot from them, and they learned a lot from him. A lot of people don't know that William Shawn was a real comedy nerd. In his later years, his favorite film was This Is Spinal Tap.

David Remnick: Wait, I have to absorb that. The stereotype of him, or the caricature of him, was very buttoned up, let's just say. That was his favorite.

Susan Morrison: He loved it. Yes.

David Remnick: Incidentally, after Shawn was deposed in the mid-'80s, there was this thought that entered Lorne Michaels's head at some point that he would succeed William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker. I want to know everything about that.

Susan Morrison: Shawn was a mentor. If you think about our two enterprises 50 years apart-- The New Yorker's 100, SNL is now 50-- a lot of what these guys do is very similar. They're corralling a gang of needy egos, figuring out how to keep the thing afloat. Every week, once a week, they have to say no more than they can say yes. Sean talked a lot to Lorne about succession. It turned out that Sean didn't manage his own succession terribly well.

David Remnick: No, and was under the delusion that he would go on forever somehow.

Susan Morrison: Lorne, definitely, he got this idea that he would perhaps be asked to step into Shawn's shoes. I think when I came along, part of The New Yorker wanting to write this book, I think a penny dropped with Lorne. He felt there was a kind of a continuity.

David Remnick: What's been its cultural import and importance, and why has it been able to last this long?

Susan Morrison: Well, in the beginning, it really was renegade. It started at a time when television was the Brady Bunch and Lawrence Welk. Because it was on at 11:30, late night, that time slot was like a vacant lot at the edge of town. No executives paid attention to it. No one gave notes. They could do whatever they wanted. I think the reason it's lasted is that Lorne, he had a lot of really oddball jobs in LA writing for people from Phyllis Diller to Perry Como to Flip Wilson and a lot of schlock.

It was that strange period of the early '70s when some of television felt like the '60s, some felt like the '50s. It was Dean Martin would have the Stones on his variety show just almost out of obligation, and would introduce them in this disparaging way, saying, like, "I've been rolled and I've been stoned, but I've never seen any--"

David Remnick: [chuckles] Even Ed Sullivan didn't seem entirely comfortable with the Beatles and rock and roll on his Sunday night show.

Susan Morrison: Exactly. The reason I bring this up is that I think Lorne was a real student of what I call sort of the hinges between eras.

Lorne Michaels: When the music changes, you have to change. By 1968, you can't do Love Me, Do, which worked perfectly in 1965. It's Vietnam. We're in the writing offices when they raid Patty Hearst's synd q thing, gunfire and they kill. All of that chaos was '74. We're watching Watergate every day. It's like--

Susan Morrison: He noticed how one time slid into another. I think he was always determined to not be the grandmother with a hula hoop. He wanted the show to stay current. He paid attention to replenishing the casts in a seamless way so that it would never seem like an old guy trying to do an entertainment for young people.

David Remnick: In a way, the show which was replacing Dead Air on Saturday night, kind of replacing a Johnny Carson repeat on the weekend, was to become itself rock and roll as well as just the guests being rock and roll.

Susan Morrison: Yes, definitely. Lorne when he was toiling in LA at these kind of lame shows writing for Perry Como, a bunch of times he thought, "God, television is just a backwater." The movies, you had John Cassavetes and Terrence Malick, you're really pushing into new territory. Rock and roll was so exciting. Television, it was still the boob tube. He was determined to help television catch up.

David Remnick: Why did he want to have this be in our capital?

Susan Morrison: When he finally got an offer from NBC to come to New York and make this show, he almost said no. He didn't want to come to New York. He wanted to do it in California. NBC's president, Herb Schlosser, wanted to do this show out of Rockefeller Center, which was Deadsville. Lawrence said there were deer running in the halls back then.

At that time, New York was on the brink of bankruptcy. Crime everywhere, graffiti everywhere. It was very cold. Remember, this is a furrier son from Canada. He wasn't eager to get back into that climate. He considered New York the anxiety capital of the world, but he decided it was worth it to make this show that he'd always dreamed of.

David Remnick: What is the show that he always dreamed of? What was it based on, and how is it unique?

Susan Morrison: What it is, it's a combination of comedy sketches that reflect real-world 1970s preoccupations, politics, short films, rock music. If you were to compare it to, say, Carol Burnett, which was a popular huge hit show at the time, which I as a kid adored, that was for an older generation. Their pieces were about the PTA, and alcoholism, and parents in the suburbs getting the garage door to work. Lorne wanted the show to be about drugs, and romance, and sex, and just wanted it to be for his generation.

David Remnick: Susan, now when we see Lorne Michaels in those little snippets on Saturday Night Live, he's wearing an exquisite suit, and he's a guy of a certain age, but he did have one big moment in the show's first season. This is from 1975.

Lorne Michaels: [applause]Hi, I'm Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night. Right now, we're being seen by approximately 22 million viewers, but please allow me, if I may, to address myself to four very special people, John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the Beatles.

[laughter]

Lately, there have been a lot of rumors to the effect that the four of you might be getting back together. That would be great. In my book, the Beatles are the best thing that ever happened to music. Well, if it's money you want, there's no problem here. The National Broadcasting Company has authorized me to offer you a Certified check for $3,000. This check here is made out to the Beatles. You divide it any way you want. If you want to give Ringo less, that's up to you.

[laughter]

Susan Morrison: First of all, it's an incredibly funny bit, and it was Lorne's idea, but it was an example of what Lorne calls the show itself speaking. One of the things that was very unusual about early SNL, or SNL now, is the meta aspect, the sort of taking apart the show and looking behind the scenes of the show, be part of the action.

David Remnick: I'm talking with The New Yorker's Susan Morrison. Her new book is titled Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

SNL Host: Live from New York, it's Saturday night. [applause]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been Talking about the 50th anniversary this year of Saturday Night Live with Susan Morrison. Susan's my longtime colleague at The New Yorker and the author of a new book about the producer Lorne Michaels. Michaels launched Saturday Night Live in 1975 as a brash young man of 30. He's still running the show with an iron hand 50 years later. As a producer, Michael stays largely behind the scenes, but he's cultivated a character, a larger-than-life personality, which is catnip for the comedians who have worked for him over the years.

Susan Morrison: When I was researching this book, I remember asking Alec Baldwin, "Who do you think does the best Lorne?" As you say, a lot of the people on the show impersonate Lorne. Alex, said "Lorne." David, I hope I'm not the first to tell you that there are a lot of pretty good David Remnick impersonations around this place.

David Remnick: I have no doubt.

[laughter]

Susan Morrison: It's a way to blow off steam. It has to do with what you were saying before about people having this strange fascination with Lorne and trying to figure him out.

David Remnick: Well, let's listen. We grabbed a few Lorne imitations from Bill Hader, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Dana Carvey, and Mike Myers, too.

Jimmy Fallon: Yes, so Lorne would be like, "I went to Kansas City with Alec and Marcy to try to get BTK killer off death row. [laughter] [applause] They said, here comes BTK. I go 'His name is Dennis.' [laughter]

Seth Meyers: Just go into the room and just-- Somebody walks you out of the office.

Impersonator: I do the " No, no, no, no, no. I know." No matter what you tell him, he knows it already.

Impersonator: He's the authority.

Impersonator: No, no, no, no. I know, I know.

Impersonator: We're going to meditate after read-through. Your mantra will be Lorne. It'll be group then we'll face the Sun and ask for forgiveness of our sins.

Dr. Evil: We get the warhead, and we hold the world ransom for $1 million.

David Remnick: Now, I didn't know initially that Dr. Evil was based on Lorne Michaels.

Susan Morrison: Dr. Evil originated with an impression that Dana Carvey used to do sitting in the makeup chair at SNL wearing the bald wig while he was waiting his George Bush before he went out to do his George Bush impersonation. He used to do this funny impersonation of Lorne. He's a particular cadence. Sometimes it's kind of pretentious, bloviating.

Dana Carvey, the first time he saw Austin Powers, he saw his own Lorne impersonation when Dr. Evil appeared on the screen. He didn't know that Mike Myers did it. Mike Myers is one of the people who did not do Lorne impersonation around the office. Complete with the pinky to the lips, which--

David Remnick: That's a Lorne Michaels' things too? "A million dollars"?

Susan Morrison: Well, Dana took the pinky thing. It's an exaggerated form of how Lorne, I think, sometimes would bite his nails at read-through. When I asked Lorne about this though, he said, well, in terms of fingers, I might be more thumb.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Wow.

Lorne Michaels: People go, well, how does it bother you that everybody does an impression, if you would? I go, no, because it's most American thing there is, which is people make fun of the boss.

Susan Morrison: They don't do that in Canada?

Lorne Michaels: I don't know. In Canada, I don't know, because nobody's ever that successful. I think that what happened with it is people tell stories about me, and then they take on a mythic thing, and then they become true.

David Remnick: He's got a mystique. What you're saying is that he's cultivated this mystique. What is the nature of it? What kind of hold does he have on the people he works with?

Susan Morrison: Anything that begins as a kind of anti-establishment renegade thing like SNL, and I'm thinking of Rolling Stone also, which began a little bit before that-

David Remnick: The magazine.

Susan Morrison: -as it gets successful it's tough to stay a renegade and be making gazillions of dollars. One of the ways Lorne, I think, dealt with that, consciously or not, was by playing into that with his character as this kind of bored, self-satisfied, Pasha kind of character.

He is, in some ways, plays his cards close to the vest. He is inscrutable. He can be aloof. People are always saying that he is stinting with sort of obvious praise. Like if you go out there and you kill in a sketch, he's not going to say at the Monday meeting, that was fantastic, but he would single out somebody who had, like, a tiny role and he'd say, "You were breathtaking as the third cop." He'd keep people off balance a little bit.

David Remnick: It seems like everybody there is, even years after starting to work with him, kind of terrified of him. He tells them how to live.

Lorne Michaels: I said, get yourself an apartment you don't believe you deserve. After you've worked 14, 15 hours, you get to your door and you go, "Who lives here? This is amazing." You go, "You do," and you feel good about yourself. The fear that it will all go away, which your parents are giving you, I'm telling you, it won't go away. I'm your boss. I can tell you that we'll be here next year or the year after, and the year after that. You will only make more money each year. Treat yourself well, because it's the beginning of how you can adjust to other levels of show business.

David Remnick: He also has rules for comedy itself. You get into this in the book, and I think it's absolutely fascinating. What are those rules?

Susan Morrison: One that a lot of people talk about is do it in sunshine. What that means is don't forget that comedy is supposed to be an entertainment. He's always warning, especially young people against going for a kind of a gritty indie vibe. If you think about the posters for the movies he produces, like Wayne's World and many, many others, they're very often the character standing against a bright blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. He, Lorne, says never have a coffin in a sketch. You don't want to bring people down.

David Remnick: Even while he's ostensibly being politically at least, oppositional to the moment, it's never that renegade.

Susan Morrison: One of the things that I think Lorne sometimes has difficulty with in our age is that from the beginning, his idea was that you wanted to be needling who's ever in power. The show would make fun of Jimmy Carter. The show made fun of Bill Clinton, all kinds of Democrats as well as Republicans. I think that's one way that he and the show think of themselves as differing from some other kind of political talk shows and comedy shows, certainly more [crosstalk]--

David Remnick: Do you think it's gotten more politically toothless over the years? That's been some of the critique of it.

Susan Morrison: I think that Lorne is always pushing his people to make fun of liberals as well as conservatives. In the current climate, which is something we say here all the time at The New Yorker about our own younger staff members, that's much harder to do. I don't think that the show has gotten more politically toothless.

I think, if anything, we live in this kind of cataclysmic time where I think people feel that if they're not just going after MAGA, Trump, Republicans, and treating--

David Remnick: That they're not doing right.

Susan Morrison: That they're going to go to hell. That kind of an attitude, that's oppositional to comedy, I think. There's a term, Seth Meyers coined it, called clapter. That means when you get an audience reaction, usually to a political joke, which isn't laughing, but it's more this kind of "I agree with that sentiment" kind of clapping. That's not really something a real comedy [crosstalk]-

David Remnick: It's not satisfying.

Susan Morrison: -wants. It's not satisfying. A comedian really wants somebody to have this-- Laughing is- it's an uncontrollable physical reaction. That's really what you want.

David Remnick: Let's listen to Lorne Michaels talking about his culture that he established and his management style.

Lorne Michaels: There's an old Stanley Myron Handelman joke that I told the first time we got a Peabody. It used to be a straight line that you could take 50 monkeys, put them in a room with typewriters, sooner or later they'd write the word Shakespeare. His was, I left them in there and I checked. Then I came back and I realized they're just fooling around.

My point with it is that's what we do. It looks like we're not doing anything because they're just throwing jokes around or whatever and they don't look serious and they don't look that, but you create a culture with walls around them where they can be that.

David Remnick: He's describing a process, and it's a weekly process and it has a rhythm to it every week. How does it take shape? How does the fooling around take shape from Monday to Saturday?

Susan Morrison: Like putting together an issue of The New Yorker, every day of the week has a particular-- There's something that has to get done that day. Lorne says all the time we don't go on because we're ready. We go on because it's 11:30.

Jim Downey, one of the show's most long-term head writers, used to say that if you got a lot of Swiss engineers to try to look at everything that has to happen in a week in SNL and figure out how long it would take, they would say, oh, probably about 17 days to get these things done, but you have 6 days.

It is interesting that within that incredibly tight framework, there is just this amount of foolery, just goofing around. That is because that's the petri dish. That's a medium you need for comedy. That's a good portion of that is them just making fun of Lorne.

David Remnick: You've been watching Saturday Night Live and studying it to some degree for 50 years, as long as it's been on. A lot of people talk about their favorite season. What is yours? It seems axiomatic that your favorite season is when?

Susan Morrison: Well, Lorne always says people-- Everyone says that their favorite season is when they were in high school. When I was in high school, as same with you, was the first cast. My favorite cast is I love the Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig, Armisen cast. I think they worked really tightly together. I think it was, in a way, maybe as much as the original cast, like, kind of the coolest cast.

For somebody as old as he is, and people make fun of him for this, Lorne really cares about cool. I also thought that the Amy Poehler, Tina Fey cast, the Will Ferrell cast-- The thing is that, as you know, they all blend. Of course, the great Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, that period was incredible.

David Remnick: There was a period somewhat early on that Lorne Michaels left the show. Why did he leave the show and what effect did it have?

Susan Morrison: Well, he had been doing the show for five years. It was punishing. They did many more shows a year then, and I think they were all just completely out of gas. They had lost-- First they lost Chevy, then they lost Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and they were going on fumes.

Lorne, basically, he said, if I come back for the sixth season- it was just negotiation gone wrong- I need three or four months to regroup. I'm going to need to hire a lot more people. I need to rest up. The network said, we don't want to do that. In fact, the line was that they had sold the ads already in September and October.

The next thing Lorne knew, they had hired somebody else to take over the show, which was a shocker to him because even though he didn't own the show, I think he had this idea, it was his child. The idea that NBC felt that they could carry it on without him took him by surprise. That was Jean Demanian. She had been the talent coordinator for the show, and she did a disastrous partial year, which ended abruptly when one of her actors said "Fuck" on the air.

Then he was replaced by Dick Ebersol, who had been an NBC executive who had helped Lorne in the very beginning. That kind of sputtered along for a few years. In '85, Brandon Tartikoff asked Lorne to come back. He had had--

David Remnick: He was in good negotiating position.

Susan Morrison: [chuckles] Yes, well, they were going to pull the show off the air. At that point, it was really like, save your baby. Come back and save it, or it's going nowhere.

David Remnick: What's the difference in his level of engagement and the way he lives his work life? Now, 80, thing's been on for 50 years as opposed to 30, 40 years ago.

Susan Morrison: These days he's in the office every day, but the really key, there's a Monday meeting where everybody meets the host. There is read read-through on Wednesday. That's key. He's there. He listens to everything, and then he picks the sketches that they're going to proceed with the help of a handful of deputies.

Then it really is just Saturday night. That's the crucible. He watches the dress rehearsal with the writers and his key deputies. He barks commands, notes, and changes all kinds of things that need to be fixed. Then just an hour before air, gathers the whole group and pretty much rips the show apart. We occasionally do this here at the magazine, but not that often.

David Remnick: Yes, but it doesn't come on live for an hour and a half.

Susan Morrison: Right. Something that's really important that a lot of people don't understand is that because it's a live show, everything there can't be any surprises. When something unscripted happens, like Sinead O'Connor tearing up a picture of the Pope on camera, or when Elvis Costello decides-

David Remnick: To switch songs.

Susan Morrison: -two bars in to switch songs, the myth out there is that those people are banned from the show because they did something without telling Lorne, but it's really about deference to the camera operators and the tech guys and everything--

David Remnick: To discipline.

Susan Morrison: Yes, discipline, just because everything has to be a certain number of seconds, because then you have a commercial slot. It's live television. In the first five years, Milton Berle was on the show and had all these ideas about just going off script and improvising, drove everybody nuts, because even though improv is a big part of at least comedy as we know it in 2025, this is a very tightly scripted show. It has to be because it's live.

David Remnick: You've reached this point, 50 years of the show. Lorne Michaels is 80, and we wish him nothing but good health going forward. At some point, the discussion of retirement succession has to come up. Where is this discussion now?

Susan Morrison: Last year, there was a flurry of rumors of people who would take over. Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Colin Jost. I just don't think he'll ever leave until he has to-

David Remnick: In a box.

Susan Morrison: -until he's carried out of there in a stretcher. He describes the show as the TV equivalent of a David Lean epic. It's very expensive. It's very wasteful. Cutting all these sketches at the last minute means scrapping very expensive sets and costumes. It's really hard for me to even think that NBC would keep it going without him.

David Remnick: Is it still profitable?

Susan Morrison: Oh, I think it is, yes.

David Remnick: Then why wouldn't they keep it going if they could?

Susan Morrison: I think his personality is just a huge part of it.

David Remnick: How many people are watching it now? Or are they watching it in bits the next morning?

Susan Morrison: Amy Poehler famously said at the 40th anniversary, SNL is the show that your parents used to have sex to and now you watch on your computer at work the next day.

David Remnick: Yes.

Susan Morrison: People consume it. You watch a sketch on the phone, on the subway, you watch it.

David Remnick: He must hate that.

Susan Morrison: Well, I don't know. I think he likes it if people watch it live. It's the same way recording artists still make LPs, and they think that someone's going to sit down and listen to--

David Remnick: Put the style in song [crosstalk]--

Susan Morrison: They pay attention to the sequencing. We'll sit around and talk about, oh, should this be a column or should it be a well piece? We all know that to the average reader, this means nothing.

David Remnick: Zippity do.

Susan Morrison: I think that for us and for Lorne Michaels, the fact that what we do, these things are so modular-- People can read Talk of the Town piece on the subway and then switch to the fantastic Alice Munro piece in the same way that somebody can sit on their phone and watch a Cold Open and then watch the musical act. It's actually beneficial to all of us.

David Remnick: Just for the record, you think that he'll go as long as he possibly can physically, and then when he ends, it ends?

Susan Morrison: I think that's not an impossible idea. The other thing I would think of is that I could imagine a kind of coalition of a handful of people taking it over.

David Remnick: Like after the death of Stalin, they had a few people, and then finally Khrushchev prevailed.

Susan Morrison: Good analogy.

David Remnick: Susan Morrison, thank you.

Susan Morrison: Thank you, David. It was great to walk down the hall and sit here and talk to you.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Susan Morrison's new book is Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. You can read an excerpt of the book, which ran in the magazine at newyorker.com. You can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com.

 

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