First impressions of Saturday Night

Jason Reitman's controlled-chaos fantasy about the launch of SNL offers a good time with rowdy comedians at a turning point in TV history.

I’m apparently not the first to describe Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night as a Muppet movie — that is, its template is the same as many episodes of The Muppet Show, in which Kermit dashes about behind the scenes trying to wrangle his cast of colorful talents into putting on a live variety show.

But while I watched Daniel LaBelle’s performance as SNL’s creator and longtime director Lorne Michaels, I couldn’t stop wondering if Kermit the Frog had been his inspiration. Then I opened Letterboxd and found several critics making the same observation.

The future of television comedy gets captured in a Polaroid in Saturday Night. [Image from the Sony Pictures trailer.]

And there I learned that I’m not the only one who was distracted by the fact that, while so many young talents are impressively impersonating original SNL cast members, whenever Nicholas Braun showed up in the role of Jim Henson, he seemed to have been instructed to do a hatchet job on that beloved genius, misrepresenting him as a prudish and whiny wimp of a man. Jim Henson, easily offended by risqué humor? Jim Henson, who was famously directed by a studio to ditch his original Muppet Show title: Sex & Violence? What did Jim Henson ever do to upset Jason Reitman that would inspire him to give us this bizarre impostor?  

Anyway, I’m not here to condemn Saturday Night. Though I’ll always cringe at the memory of this exasperating injustice, I am, in fact, rather fond of the film. I enjoyed it more than any of Reitman’s work since 2007’s Juno.

Nicolas Braun plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. [Image from the Sony Pictures trailer.]

With the exception of the Henson misstep, I couldn’t care less about the film’s apparent lack of historical accuracy, which is apparently fueling widespread complaints from SNL superfans. Maybe the Aaron-Sorkin walking-and-talking frenzies that are Saturday Night’s primary mode are fabricating much of how that first episode went down. I’m not bothered. Maybe someone will write to me and persuade me that crimes have been committed here. But so many of the performances are strong, so much inspires my curiosity about What Really Happened, and so many scenes offer interesting tidbits about television history—I’m fascinated.