This is the exhaustive and exhausting book of everything Lorne Michaels. If you’ve watched any of the shows, especially the opening skits, you must read this book and I’ll bet you even have some favorites.

4.5/5 stars Thank you to NetGalley, Random House, and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book is a true feat and masterclass in biographies. As someone who loves memoirs and biographies I’m truly impressed with Morrison’s ability to summarize the inception and history of the institution that is SNL, Michaels’ 50+ year career, and his personal life all in one book.

The writing is densely packed with insights, anecdotes, and humor. I’m extremely impressed with the amount of people involved in this project. There seems to be no detail spared around the creation of the show, and the early years of his illustrious career. This book is very well-research and clearly took years and an ineffable amount of hours information-seeking, interviewing, etc. to complete.

I also really enjoyed the way Morrison portrayed Lorne. It felt bipartisan and allowed the reader to take in the information as they pleased. Everyone has off days, less than pleasant moments, etc. and it was refreshing to feel as if she laid all that out on the table and allowed the reader to decide how they feel about him as a partner, boss, coworker, friend, etc.

It’s also no surprise Morrison is an editor, this book is so elevated which also really helped to capture the essence of Lorne. The vocabulary in this book is also exquisite and had me looking up new words left and right which I really enjoyed.

The structure and pacing of the book overall was interesting. I really enjoyed the splicing the chapters with a deeper look into the more modern day SNL but admittedly the Jonah episode felt dated at this point. I’m not sure when the manuscript was turned it, if this had to do with the cast/Lorne’s availability, etc. The pacing felt a bit choppy in-between those chapters as the beginning years are so heavily focused and written about and the last 20 years or so are almost glossed over. I understand the reasoning for this since it’s only a small section of his overall jam-packed career but as a fan in my 20s I personally would have loved to hear more about the cast and the show from the last 20+ years since it’s the most timely and relevant (especially to me).

Overall as an avid SNL fan this is a must read! The last chapter “Saturday” especially is a great behind-the-curtain look into the overall culture and reality of live production and show business.

Definitely would recommend!

You have to respect Lorne Michaels for having a successful comedy for so long but the quality of the show has declined quite a bit since its inception. Michaels had a knack for cherry picking comedians and writers from improv groups like Second City, but unfortunately quite a few them like John Belushi were self destructive. The book covers Michaels career prior to SNL when he was a writer for other comedy shows. Michaels strength was being a father figure to many young comedians, but the best of the show was when Belushi and Richard Pryor did Samurai Hotel Clerk and Drew Carey did the motivational speaker that warned kids they would be living in a van down by the river. He created an audience for this talent, but I rarely watch the show anymore. You can just watch YouTube videos of whatever skits you like so the whole TV weekly series is past its prime.

I don’t read them often, but I do like old behind-the-scenes showbiz stories. When an early review copy of this became available, I thought it might be a breezy, superficial cash-in of a book marketed to coincide with SNL’s 50th anniversary year. Since I’m not above a quick perusal of a breezy, superficial cash-in of a book, I figured it might be worth a look.

So I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this is a substantial, deeply-researched, fully-fleshed-out, definitive biography of one of television’s most influential producers and comedy pacesetters, which I only later found out has been nearly a decade in the making.

Few TV producers are famous in their own right, and most who are currently known by name (like, say, Chuck Lorre or Shonda Rhimes) are known for a prolific body of work. You have to go back to the likes of Rod Serling or Gene Roddenberry to find TV producers who are essentially known for one career-defining thing. Lorne Michaels, you could say, is as current as Lorre and Rhimes in his output and influence, and as old-school as Serling and Roddenberry in his connection to one definitive project.

And that bridge between the old and the new, between Michaels’ reverence for what has come before and his push to help define what comes next, is a major theme of the book. As mainstream as SNL is today, it’s easy to forget how subversive it was when it debuted. And yet even then, it had its roots in classic comedy, Morrison observes, as Michaels “was hoping to be able to recreate the Colgate Comedy Hour and the Sid Caesar Show” for a younger, modern audience.

Long before SNL, though, a large part of the book is devoted to Michaels’ upbringing and his influences. We learn how the young Lorne Lipowitz grew up enchanted by comedy and entertainment, absorbing the lore of old showbiz from his neighbor/later first wife’s comedian father. Putting on SNL-like weekly shows at summer camp eventually led to putting on an SNL-like show on Canadian TV, which eventually led to… not SNL, but a career dead-end in Hollywood.

SNL would come, but not just yet. Michaels once again found himself straddling the old and the new, the hip and the hoary, embracing the counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s while making a living writing for a lot of schlocky old-fashioned variety shows of the era. As one who was “as much an old showbiz buff as he was a young man in a hurry,” he found himself “caught between feeling like he was going places and panicking that he had dead-ended.”

It was a combination of talent and serendipity that led to Saturday Night Live. This is the part of Michaels’ story that most readers have probably come for, while simultaneously being the part that’s most often told. But Morrison tells it with engaging writing and compelling detail. It was actually NBC executives who thought up much of the show’s structure - that it should be called Saturday Night, that it would be live, broadcast from NBC headquarters in Rockefeller Center, and have guest hosts. It all meshed with the ideas that Michaels himself had, for a youth-oriented comedy sketch show with live rock music, featuring a repertory company that often satirized television itself, with fake commercials, game shows, newscasts and the like.

The early years of the show are well-covered by other books, but Morrison differentiates her take by keeping the focus on Michaels, his theories and analysis of comedy, and how to generate a show from scratch every week, as she deconstructs early sketches and their influences instead of merely summarizing them. Complaints that the show wasn’t as good as it used to be started only a few years in, as “success made it seem mainstream” and Michaels found that “maintaining a hit was almost harder than creating one.”

Tensions with less creative-minded executives are a recurring theme, particularly during Michaels’ “wilderness years,” when he left the show after its fifth season and was lured back for its eleventh; during the rocky 1984-85 and 1994-95 seasons when the show was at risk of being cancelled; and in 1998, when humorless execs got Norm Macdonald and longtime writer Jim Downey fired. By this time, Michaels comes across as somewhat more detached, making decisions that weren’t always best for the show, inviting more executive interference. While every story seems to end with Michaels coming out ahead and outsmarting the suits, Morrison does manage to show that the one-time wunderkind is far from infallible in his approach to comedy and his management style.

With no real rocky periods to speak of in the show’s second quarter-century, this portion of the book is somewhat less interesting, as everything seems to coast along and the stories about how the show handled challenges like 9/11, recent presidential elections and Covid are much more familiar. At this point, the book is less about Michaels’ rise and the creative process, and more about the show itself, as the one-time counterculture darling developed into an old showbiz-style institution itself. I'm not sure it would have been realistic to do so, but I don't think the book would have lost anything had all of the past 25 years or so been truncated into a shorter summary rather than stretched into full chapters.

Over time, Michaels himself became a mogul, rich and well-connected beyond his wildest dreams. And yet some of his dreams, from becoming a successful filmmaker to becoming, improbably, editor of the New Yorker, never came to pass, as most of his successes are directly linked to SNL - overseeing the rest of NBC late night, with his hoped-for movie career largely limited to producing SNL spinoffs.

The book’s structure is unusual, in that it’s divided into “parts” named for days of the week, each one starting with a chapter describing a day in the production process leading up to a 2018 episode of SNL (it’s unclear why Morrison didn’t manage to get insider access to a more recent production week - 2018 was a long time ago, after all). Then, after each of these opening chapters, the book reverts to its original timeline right where it left off in the previous part. So it can be a little jarring, lurching back and forth in time - but it all comes together in the end, where the final chapter describes show day and you really get to see Michaels in action, making decisions large and small, being incredibly hands-on in some cases, surprisingly hands-off in others, and choreographing the entire process of turning what appears to be endless chaos into live television.

“He is the real star of the show,” Morrison writes of Michaels early in the book. By the book’s end, that’s hard to dispute. After 50 years, the show may not always be funny, but it’s undoubtedly still influential, as a marriage of the old and the new, the hip and the hokey, the subversive and the institutional, the likes of which we’re unlikely ever to see again.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC for review.

I'm a long-time SNL fan who has read the definitive book on the series (Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests) as well as any shows, podcasts, and online stories about the show. This is a wonderful companion and a must-read for any SNL fan.

The structure was really interesting - each section begins with one day in the week of production for a specific episode. Unfortunately, this one feels a bit dated already, as it follows a Jonah Hill episode in 2018. Still, it was interesting to see the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating one night of television. The remaining part of each chapter follows Lorne's life from a child, through this rise in TV production, with a long section on the first few seasons, and then not as much detail on the other 40 years (I would have liked more insight here).

The 11+ hour read time was daunting to me, a speed reader who usually considers six hours a long read time. A casual fan may be reluctant to invest that much time. Despite the read time, the long amount of names that I would mix up, and the sheer amount of details, this was still an enjoyable, highly readable biography of the man behind an entertainment classic.

Random House provided an early galley for review.

This year marks the 50th anniversary for Saturday Night Live, so there is no better time for this biography to drop. As a fan of the show for much of my life, I was very excited to check this one out.

Morrison structures this memoir in an interesting way. With six sections, each starts with a day-in-the-life as the reader is walked through a weekly breakdown of how an SNL episode is created (which I found very enlightening). Then, within those sections, we get to see Lorne's life unfold from his youth in Canada to his start in television all the way up today.

As an entertainment sponge, I learned a lot from this one. His connections to earlier programs and specials were fascinating. It helped to show the evolution of his approach to programming. Of course, I enjoyed the section covering the creation of and first five years of SNL (a most infamous era). I had not realized that he had zero involvement for seasons 6 to 10, or that, when he returned for the 11th, that season's cast was all a one-and-done. The sections that focused on his work with The Kids in the Hall as well as the other late-night shows were also enlightening.

All in all, this was a solid look at the man who had major influence on American television for five decades.

Everyone has an SNL phase, I still revisit mine from time to time. And I'm still half convinced it would be the dream job, and could also still happen for me (ha!). This was a fascinating look at that man behind it, who has always been a bit of a mystery to lay people such as myself.

I loved this book. It was so interesting and gave me great insight on snl, a favorite of mine. I loved the mix of old stories and present day.

Lorne Michaels is a god in my house. Both my roommate and I grew up watching the show and still pepper our conversations with SNL references. We've been lucky to see the show live twice, and I had the honor of meeting Lorne many years ago, through my job in post-production.

Susan Morrison has written the book that so many who have failed at writing. Covering Lorne's childhood to now, everything in between is the good stuff. We learn about strengths and weaknesses. We learn about the popcorn. We learn everything we wanted to know while still keeping Lorne a bit of a mystery.

As the 50th anniversary of SNL is coming in the next few weeks, this was a perfect way to kick off my own celebration.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

A-MAZING!
Has anyone had a greater influence on American comedy than Lorne Michaels? For fifty years, he has been the driving force behind Saturday Night Live, shaping the landscape of sketch comedy and launching the careers of countless comedians. As SNL marks its 50th anniversary, Susan Morrison’s new biography offers an unprecedented look at the man behind the show—his vision, his creative process, and his relentless pursuit of excellence.

While past books about SNL have painted Michaels as an enigma, Morrison brings him into sharp focus. She traces his journey from a small town in Canada to the pinnacle of American television, exploring the dreams that fueled him and the battles he fought to to attain them. Particularly fascinating is his philosophy of infusing every sketch with a "taste of sunshine"—his belief in optimism, comedic timing, and the idea that the writers are the true stars.

Morrison digs deep into Michaels’ influence, not just as a showrunner but as a mentor who has shaped generations of comedic talent. From his early days in television to the pressure-cooker environment of weekly live comedy, she examines how his experiences informed his leadership style and his uncanny ability to identify and nurture comedic brilliance.

For this book, Morrison was granted unprecedented access, even sitting in with Michaels for a full week of show prep (during a Jonah Hill-hosted episode). Alongside SNL legends like Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, John Mulaney, Chris Rock, Dan Aykroyd, Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon, and more, she captures the energy, chaos, and magic that have made SNL an institution.

For SNL fans, comedy lovers, and anyone fascinated by the mechanics of cultural influence, this biography is an essential read. Lorne Michaels didn’t just shape Saturday Night Live—he shaped comedy itself.

#RandomHouse #SNL #LorneMichaels #SusanMorrison

I really enjoyed getting to learn more about SNL and Lorne. There were a lot of interesting stories about his early career and beginnings at SNL that I didn't know. My only critique would be there is a lot of names thrown around that it is very hard to keep up with and I would have liked to know more about his personal life as an adult.

This biography of legendary Saturday Night Live creator and producer Lorne Michaels is literally all you would ever want it, or any other celebrity biography, to be.

Having read Tom Shales and Andrew Miller’s fabulously reported SNL oral history “Live From New York” several times, and having listened to every “WTF with Marc Maron” episode ever to feature a current or former SNL cast member while Marc asks them for all of their Lorne stories, and having watched what feels like every clip in existence of current and former cast members doing Lorne impressions, I wasn’t sure what more there was to learn about this enigmatic man.

But author Susan Morrison has clearly put in the work. Years of it. And she seems to have gotten unprecedented access to both Lorne and those who have been part of the last 50+ years of his life.

The story of Lorne’s life is split into six chronological segments and each segment is interwoven with the story of one day of the week during the production of a 2018 episode of SNL. So you get to go deep into Lorne’s history and psyche but also learn some behind-the-scenes tidbits about how the show works.

This book is a must read for any SNL fan, especially right now as the show celebrates its 50th anniversary and the country waits with bated breath to see if he’ll retire now that the show is 50 and he is 80!

Fabulously entertaining and informative. Filled with great quotes and stories from the first 50 years of SNL and from Lorne’s life. So well written - it moves fast and its fun but also provides a social history of the last 50 years through the life of Lorne a pivotal figure in the world of entertainment during the past half century. Indispensable. Read it.

Thank you Random House and NetGalley for the ARC!

Getting offered this book was an absolute win for me - I'm a bit of a showbiz junkie, so this book was right up my alley. While the origination of SNL was before my time, this remains a very interesting story that I couldn't wait to dive into. This book was exquisitely detailed and revealing, and I loved all of the anecdotes I would not have known otherwise. I could not put this one down!

Thank you again for the ARC!

I have read a lot of books about SNL and have to say this one is the best. Morrison has amazing access. She talks to EVERYONE. She even spends a week at Lorne's side during the making of a show one week, which provides the best depiction I've ever seen of what a week at SNL is really like. The pacing of the book is perfect. Morrison devotes the proper amount that each era deserves. You get lots of description of the great years while lesser years are breezed over.

A friend of Lily Tomlin's describes Lorne as someone who could get into a revolving door after you, but would still arrive before you. After reading the book, you'll agree that's a pretty great description of the guy.

If you're interested in TV, comedy or show biz, you need to read this book. It's outstanding.

I received a free e-galley of the book in return for an honest review.

When it began 50 (yikes) years ago, Saturday Night Live relished in its image of gonzo television, and helmed by Lorne Michaels has somehow retained that aura while gaining respect. This heavily researched biography does a great job of telling Michaels's story and how he shaped the show featuring the kind of humor that he appreciates. The most interesting parts to me were of how the show is crafted, the creative forces necessary to go live from New York at precisely 11:30 on Saturday nights. He has remarked that they go on not because they are ready, but because it's time. Fascinating but not a perfect 5 because it could have used a bit of trimming.

When I saw a biography of longtime SNL producer, Lorne Michaels, available as an ARC from Random House and NetGalley, I speedily requested a chance to read it.

Growing up my mom was always an SNL fan and I remember the first night I was allowed to watch it when we had to stay up late to pick someone up from the airport. Rather than miss watching my mom allowed me to lay on the couch and watch when it came on. Then as I got older I stayed up with her to watch and caught all the reruns on Comedy Central. In the late 2000’s I transformed my now husband from a sporadic viewer to a regular watcher and now we share age appropriate skits with our kids. Our family has multiple SNL quotes that infuse our family vernacular.

The author, Susan Morrison, structured this book in such a great way. Each section corresponds to a day of the week of an SNL production week. Monday, when the production for an episode first begins, started with a section following a modern Monday on SNL and then explored Lorne’s early years. This continues on, section by section with each SNL day corresponding to a period in Lorne’s life until Saturday when we get a glimpse of a show day, followed by an epilogue to the book.

Ms Morrison did a great job presenting Lorne as a real person with both strengths and weaknesses. I laughed out loud multiple times and learned a number of things I didn’t already know, both about Lorne and the show. She also did a great job curating quotes to go along with her story telling and choosing anecdotes around SNL that painted a picture even if they didn’t directly reference Lorne.

This biography could easily appeal to fans of biographies, fans of SNL, or anyone looking at a glimpse behind the curtain of one of Hollywoods most well known producers. It was well timed for the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live and makes a worthy add to anyone considering an SNL deep dive to commemorate the occasion.

Thank you Random House and NetGalley for this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

SNL has been on my Saturday plans since I was old enough to watch. For me, that has been 45 years! This book was delightful. The author, Morrison, is a New Yorker editor and the amount of research and insight was incredible - well-written, well-organized and well-paced. It's a whopper of a book and I enjoyed all of it. I loved the inside baseball of it all and the stories in and out of Rockefeller Center. This one is a blast. Take your time and enjoy it. I did. Thanks to the publisher for the advanced copy. I'm grateful.

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
By Susan Morrison

Completely fascinating– I could talk about this book all day! If you’re a comedy nerd, a lifelong SNL fan, or intrigued by Lorne Michaels lore, you need to pick up this biography. At almost 700 pages, the book is long but I ate it up and loved how it was arranged.

Morrison takes us through a week in present day leading up to the air date of a show on Saturday night, then cuts to Lorne’s history beginning long before he created SNL. We get a detailed history of SNL full of quotes from cast members from the beginning of SNL to current day. The author digs into the behind the scenes not only of SNL but television production and politics. It is so interesting to learn about all the ways SNL is connected to tons of pop culture moments.

Reading about the early days of SNL gave me anxiety- we’ve all heard the stories but the detailed writing made me feel like I was experiencing it. Lorne is quite the character and I’ve always wanted to know more about him and this book delivers. Lorne has undoubtedly changed comedy, discovered many of my all-time favorite comedians and writers, and he seems like such a unique person. I also laughed out loud at the many quips and jokes throughout and especially enjoyed reminiscing on bits that were cut from the show.

Thank you Penguin Randomhouse and NetGalley for the early read!

This was my first non-fiction book of the year and what a way to start! I have always loved SNL and have watched it with my family for years. When the movie Saturday Night came out I was so excited and I got to learn about the shows birth which was very stressful to watch to say the least but very good. This book is like that movie 10x. It dives deep into Lorne’s life from his roots in Toronto all the way until he ended up starting SNL. It was so motivating to see his drive for the craft and to see what happens behind the scenes in the writers room with different celebrities every week.