The New York-Centric Glamour and Romance of Saturday Night Live

[TMC]

https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-pl...day-night-live

There is tremendous romance and glamour to Saturday Night Live and its ever-revolving cast of talented, hungry youngsters. That romance and glamour is in no small part the romance and glamour of New York and, more specifically, Manhattan.

Saturday Night Live isn’t just a show taped in New York. It is New York. It certainly adds to the idea, particularly popular with denizens of the city, that New York is the epicenter of the universe, where important things happen and stars are made.

Lorne Michaels can get seemingly anyone to come to Manhattan for his show of shows. Part of the reason Michaels’ offer to pay The Beatles three thousand dollars to reunite on the show and play three songs became instant comedy legend is because if anyone could get the Beatles to reunite for an American television show it would be Lorne Michaels at the height of his hipness and cultural relevance.

The biggest music stars in the world play Saturday Night Live at the apex of their fame and infamy. Impossibly famous people spend a surreal week goofing around with talented young performers in an impossibly stressful, competitive, high stakes environment, a famous and fertile breeding ground for the biggest comedy stars of the past century.

When I think about the romance and glamour of Saturday Night Live I think about the opening photo montage, where Don Pardo and other, lesser announcers, read out the names of the cast in a big, booming, theatrical voice against images of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players in arty New York locales.

These gorgeous, evocative and iconic photographs serve two purposes: they capture something ineffable about a cast-member’s personality and persona and they make the Big Apple seem like the sexiest, most exciting and important place in the world.

At first the Not Ready for Prime Time Players were billed as a group but in the first season they figured out that the opening photo montage allowed each cast-member to get a stylish miniature showcase that worked for the Insufficiently Prepared for Evening Television Players and the audience alike.

Then there are the equally arty and bohemian pictures of the host. I know that I am similarly not alone in fantasizing about having some of those taken of me during my fantasy week on Saturday Night Live as a host or cast-member.

There’s something about Saturday Night Live’s grand gestalt that seems disarmingly achievable. Maybe it’s the fact that the cast is ostensibly playing themselves as well as an any number of wacky characters. That makes them seem realer and more accessible than fictional television characters or the actors playing them.

[Chocolate Moose]

that is a little bit overblown. IMO