If I’m guessing at Lorne’s psychology, he still feels like he’s in the trenches, fighting. I asked everybody I interviewed: At what point do you thin
If I’m guessing at Lorne’s psychology, he still feels like he’s in the trenches, fighting. I asked everybody I interviewed: At what point do you think SNL became an institution that wasn’t going to go away? People gave me different answers, but when I asked Lorne, he said, “Maybe this year?”
YouTube and TikTok and streaming have upended legacy media, so he probably does have to struggle to keep SNL relevant, even now.
The great, fortunate accident of SNL is that it works perfectly on social media. Because it can be bite-size-able, I think most people watch SNL in the sketches that get shared the morning after. Aside from sports, SNL is the last best vestige of monoculture that we have in our country. It can still be part of the cultural conversation for that week, and so for that reason, it has value.
You talked about Lorne wanting people to understand what he does. He has created this universe where he and his team find talent, give them a platform on SNL, and then offer some of them opportunities in movies and sitcoms and talk shows through his production company.
Lorne has his hand in so many things. He produces The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers’s show, he does a number of sitcoms and comedy specials and things. But I still think that 98% of his attention is SNL. That’s the engine for all this other stuff. He sees cast members becoming stars or sees writers with talent, and rather than losing them, he says, “Well, why don’t we develop something together, and I’ll help you?” But he’s not telling them what to do. What he’s really doing is saying, “I’m going to find money and fight the big battles, but the creative is up to you.” I talked to people working on some of those shows, and they said that a Lorne appearance on the set of those shows is incredibly uncommon.
Lorne’s idea that “if you’re a good producer you leave no fingerprints” suggests a certain egolessness—but doesn’t the way he name-drops suggest a fit ego?
He has enough of an ego to agree to make a documentary, right? But not enough of an ego to want to be in it all the time. Lorne is a man of contradictions, and I think if it was ego first, the show wouldn’t have lasted, because it’s not about his taste or his humor. It’s really about building a machine. It’s about power. And how does he spend his power? He spends his power protecting SNL.
Lorne started out as a performer, and Lorne has some fun clips from the Canadian comedy show he starred in. When he moved behind the scenes, do you think the performer in him felt a little frustrated?
In the very beginning, there was a moment when they thought that maybe Lorne would host Weekend Update, because he had hosted something like it on his Canadian show. He says the main reason he didn’t do that is he felt like he couldn’t tell people that their sketches were being cut when his was still on—he couldn’t both be a performer and a boss at the same time. And I do think one of Lorne’s real strengths is his sense of fairness and meritocracy. If something’s entertaining, it goes on; he doesn’t care where it came from. He doesn’t want to have to put something on because of somebody’s feelings. And that’s also a very lonely place to be, being a boss who has to cut things written by your friends.
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