SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night review: legitimately needs more cowbell

America’s greatest live sketch show is turning 50, and everyone’s invited. A new docu-series produced by SNL creator Lorne Michaels and filmmaker Morgan Neville is out on Binge today, and it’s a well constructed deep-dive into the various creative gears that make this cultural institution tick.

Despite growing up through a time and place where Saturday Night Live was only available if you had a Foxtel cable subscription (or old ‘Best Of’ DVDs), most Aussie kids I knew recognised SNL via The Lonely Island’s viral digital shorts, e.g. ‘Jizz In My Pants‘.

Full episodes and even clips of newer sketches were always region-locked on YouTube (that lifted several years ago though), so exploring the complete catalogue was always tough – but the more internet-savvy teens among us figured it out.

To cut to the chase, I’m a long-time SNL fan, so I was very keen to see the show’s body being dissected in the four part series SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night.

SNL: breaking in

The first episode of the series, titled ‘Five Minutes’, looks at the audition and casting process for SNL. Mostly, this episode is a predictable series of talking heads from famous cast members like Tracy Morgan, Amy Poehler, Kenan Thompson, Jason Sudeikis, Bowen Yang, Andy Samberg and Bill Hader, each of them watching their original five-minute audition sets and cringing, crying and/or laughing.

It’s a nice trip down memory lane, but the parts I latched onto were all about how someone actually gets onto a show like Saturday Night Live. Do you need to know someone, or be miraculously ‘discovered’? Do you bring props, or just yourself?

Is it okay if no-one laughs? Is your career over if you don’t get cast? All these questions are answered in great detail, and then you get to see all of the famous faces who never made it onto SNL, which is both surprising and, if you’re a burgeoning comedian who faces a lot of rejection, extremely comforting.

It’s a good starting point for the series, considering its primary audience will be die-hard SNL fans and emerging comedians who have often wondered what it’s like to to be in a show like Saturday Night Live.

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Episode two, ‘Written By: A Week Inside The SNL Writers’ Room’, moves behind the curtain and into the writers’ room. Here, we spend a week with the documentary crew as the often unsung heroes of SNL brainstorm, spitball, write, rewrite, edit, trash, and polish the script that will guide the entire show.

The madness that happens in the writer’s room is 100 times more chaotic than whatever makes it to air, so getting a VIP pass into that process is quite special. The tragedy of a sketch making it all the way to cast read through, and even having sets and costumes made, only to be cut for time at the last minute makes for compelling drama.

Still, it’s not like it hasn’t been explored in docos, books and articles before.

I’ve got a fever

Then we come to episode three – by far the highlight of the series – that deep dives into the DNA of a single sketch. ‘More Cowbell’ is precisely what it says on the tin: a 60 minute documentary about the More Cowbell sketch (which, oddly enough, I can’t find on YouTube right now).

This episode is not only a fascinating breakdown of how a hit sketch is made, it’s a delightfully silly construction of meta comedy that brings in docos-within-docos about the history of Blue Oyster Cult, the true identity of Don’t Fear The Reaper‘s producer, and the origin of the cowbell.

It took me to unexpected places, and left me wishing the entire series had been a series of these ridiculously in-depth forensic studies of individual sketches. Where’s my history of The Alan? of David S. Pumpkins? of Liza Minelli Tries to Turn Off a Lamp?

Episode four chooses an odd subject in trying to dissect the ‘weird year’ of SNL, 1985’s Season 11. While being a fascinating study of what makes the show work and what otherwise makes it fail spectacularly, it’s still a bizarre note to end this celebratory series on.

You might be surprised, like I was, to see Robert Downey Jr’s stint on the show, and to learn how it made history by casting the first openly gay sketch player (Terry Sweeney) on live TV.

Alas, the rest of the episode is simply cringe-inducing, as talking heads (this time including Lorne Michaels himself) attempt to explain what made that season so bad. Even though it supposedly ‘reset’ the show, it still made me mourn for the cast members that were underused, mistreated, and cast aside by the end of it.

At times uneven, though nonetheless competently made and entertaining, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is a must watch for the die-hards and a worthy use of four hours for comedy nerds.

SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is out on Binge now. It will also air on Fox8 on Monday 20 January at 8.30pm.