Book of the Week: Lorne by Susan Morrison

SNL is still, and will probably always be, appointment viewing in my household. It's a show I've watched regularly since childhood when I watched and rewatched those "Best of..." DVDs. I've read the books (Live From New York is an invaluable resource), I've watched the documentaries (James Franco's Saturday Night is probably still the best one), and I've been an acolyte of the show's 50th-anniversary celebrations as of late.

And what a nightmare that anniversary special was! What happened!

If you were also disappointed in SNL50 (the special itself, not the surrounding documentaries and such, which have been pretty strong), we have fortunately been given one of the most comprehensive and inside-baseball gifts perfectly timed for the celebration: Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, the definitive biography of the man behind it all, by Susan Morrison.

Lorne Michaels is an enigma, plain and simple. He inspired Dr. Evil and he's been compared to Darth Vader, but he's also the puppetmaster behind 45 of the show's 50 years, a remarkable run in television, comedy, or pop culture at large. What he does is hard to explain to someone outside of the show's day-to-day and week-to-week, but when everyone who has ever been asked if they're taking over his job says something like, "It's the hardest job of all time," it's clear that whatever the recipe for success is, Lorne knows the secret ingredient. Morrison tries to, and ultimately succeeds in, figuring out what exactly that is. The book parallels his life, from Canada to Los Angeles to Canada to New York, and a week at the show, the November 3, 2018 episode hosted by Jonah Hill and featuring musical guest Maggie Rogers.

For those of us interested in the "week in the life" stuff, Morrison's all-access account goes from the Monday writers' meeting to the Wednesday table read to dress rehearsal to air. And while all of that stuff is great, we have seen it before - again, Franco's documentary is a treat. It's the stuff we don't normally hear talked about, from the closed-door meetings to the last-minute rewrites of the cold open to the meetings with designers to the gifts for the Broadway cast of Mean Girls to his pop-in visits to Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show, that really make the book's reporting singular.

Meanwhile, Lorne's life story, his childhood interest in television, his beginnings in comedy, his failings in comedy, his brief success and continued failings in comedy, is a tale not often told. Morrison paints this portrait sincerely and honestly, finding the throughline from his earliest gigs to his current producing ethos. After 1975, of course, the story of Lorne becomes the story of Saturday Night Live, and unlike a certain movie, it doesn't treat him or the show like a deity or the gospel. Both the man and the empire are fallible, and those ups and downs are what weathered both institutions.  

As a result, the book is dense. It comes in at 656 pages (the audiobook clocks in at nearly 23 hours), but Morrison's writing and research abilities are so strong that I still wanted more. Once Lorne (and the show) makes it to the 21st century, the biography stuff zips along. It was the right call, but I could've easily devoured so much more of Morrison's words. Above all, she figures out and explains why there will never be another Lorne Michaels. At 80 years old, he's still going strong every week with the show, even if the show isn't strong. It's a formidable role. And the book, which I cannot suggest strongly enough for SNL fans, is up to the task.