It’s not easy to render 40 years of history into a feature-length documentary. To do that, it’s often important to provide an underlying path through history, one that can guide the viewer and the material in a purposeful way. With a path established, it’s possible to diverge and return so that even the tangents along this path don’t seem quite so tangential.
Bao Nguyen attempts to bring four decades of Saturday Night Live to life with Live from New York!, but the results are unfocused, sort of like the last half hour of sketches in most SNL episodes. A cohesive narrative throughline never emerges, so the history of the show is a shapeless mass of talking heads and best-of clips. We don’t really arrive anywhere at the end because the film doesn’t know where it’s going.
Live From New York!
Director: Bao Nguyen
Rating: N/A
Release Date: April 15, 2015 (Tribeca)
This isn’t like Saturday Night by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, or Tom Shales’ oral history Live From New York. The documentary is more like a DVD extra for the interminable Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special. Whenever an interesting topic is raised that might guide the film—SNL‘s diversity problems, the show’s place in the lineage of sketch comedy and late-night programming—it’s summarily dropped to move on to something else. The film even buttresses its moments of critical self-reflection with a sense of intrinsic self-importance, that the institution of Saturday Night Live turning 40 is sufficient to warrant a film to celebrate the occasion.
Interviewees claim that everyone tunes in to Saturday Night Live to see what they’ll say about a given cultural moment. I’m not sure SNL is the nation’s most esteemed pulse-taker anymore. The Daily Show probably inherited that mantle in the last decade, and ditto its progeny, The Colbert Report and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. These shows and their creative teams have become the nation’s conscience as well as its reflecting pool and funhouse mirror. Stewart’s voice appears in the intro to Live from New York!, yet he never appears on camera to discuss the new keepers of the late night flame. Colbert had auditioned for SNL at one time, but he’s not present in the documentary either.
There’s a slew of other gaps that the SNL documentary doesn’t delve into. For instance, there’s no mention of SNL‘s live improv roots via Second City, the Groundlings, the Upright Citizens Brigade, etc. Sinead O’Connor rips up a picture of Pope John Paul II, but where’s Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio” transgression that got him banned for 12 years, or the mayhem that caused $20,000 of damage when Fear was the musical guest? There’s also a hodgepodge of interviewees, which probably came down to a question of availability. There’s no Bill Murray interview or even Dan Akroyd, but Bill O’Reilly is in there for some reason.
I wonder if SNL in its current state remains on the air simply because it’s been on television so long. It’s a question a lot of others have probably wondered, and it would be fascinating to consider if longevity is its own kind of life support.
Just don’t expect to find answers to that in Live from New York!