"I feel like storytelling is a mix of trying to do something new and innovative, and also play[ing] with nostalgia," writer and director Jason Reitman tells Exclaim! in Toronto the day after the Canadian premiere of his latest film, Saturday Night, during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
"You're playing with what the audience knows, and then also you're trying to push them in directions they've never gone before," he continues.
Reitman recalls having to tackle a similar equation when joining the Ghostbusters franchise with 2021's Ghosbusters: Afterlife, knowing that some members of his audience be devoted fans of the earlier movies, and the person sitting next to them would be entering the world for the very first time.
With Saturday Night, Reitman's latest film which he also co-wrote with Gil Kenan, the Montreal-born director similarly knew that the Saturday Night Live faithful would come out ready to spot errors and Easter eggs, but also, many would be watching who only know the show from YouTube highlights and TikTok. For the former, Reitman has peppered the film with inside baseball references: the Bass-O-Matic, a box of Colon Blow, a bottle of Swill. It's a different group, however, who are on Reitman's radar.
"[The group] that wants to go on that roller coaster ride to feel what it's like when they start doing the countdown [and] you don't know what's going to happen," Reitman explains. "The audience who comes in, who really understands that SNL is a location to tell the story of a group of young people who rip television out of the hands of another generation."
It's easy to be complacent about SNL. For many of us, the sketch comedy series has simply just existed as a part of our television and pop culture fabric; considering the show began its 50th season this past weekend, we'd be forgiven to be unaware of the shift creator Lorne Michaels created in North America in particular.
It's the first television show made by the first generation who grew up with television, Gabriel Labelle as Michaels declares in Jason Reitman's Saturday Night. This single line that snaps SNL's significance into focus. A new generation's voice spoke so loudly it couldn't be ignored and turned the entertainment industry on its head.
By bringing us back to the beginning of this extraordinary run, Reitman considers the near-impossible odds the show faced, as network executives and the old guard threatened to sink the show even before it aired. As the clock races toward 11:30 p.m. ahead of its very first broadcast on October 11, 1975, Reitman shows how close that first episode came to failing, and how, eventually, the team came together to produce something that would change television forever.
Generally speaking, the longest standing television entities are soap operas and procedurals; live-action comedies, on the other hand, are a bit more difficult to sustain, making SNL's half-century run all the more impressive.
"Comedy is tough because it does not age well. Comedy is usually a reflection of the now," says Reitman, pointing to SNL's success in the political space. "[They've] always been reacting. By Episode 4, you have Gilda Radner and Candice Bergen talking about the Equal Rights Amendment. And then you can take that all the way through to Chevy [Chase] doing President Ford to Tina Fey, and what Maya Rudolph will be doing this season," he says with a grin.
"There's an irreverence to SNL that's inherent," Reitman asserts. Through his film, he pays homage to all those who laid the groundwork for that legacy to prosper.
Saturday Night isn't a biopic of the show itself; it doesn't take audiences from the creation of the show to its current form. Rather, Reitman's film pays homage to the work of Michaels, the original cast, the stagehands, the writers, the engineers — all those who believed in SNL, and even the ones who didn't. Reitman contextualizes the show as not only an enduring comedic space, but one that dared to be more than the status quo.