Saturday Night Live Deserved Better Than Saturday Night

In this imagining of studio 8H, subplots abound. Will the
show’s affable but ineffectual network babysitter, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), allow himself to get on the right rabble-rousing wavelength or torpedo morale
by cluelessly shilling for more product placement? Will Lorne’s wife and
behind-the-scenes talent-whisperer, Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), assert
herself enough to be given credit for her contributions? Is the mercurial John
Belushi (Matt Wood) likely to finally sign his contract before the cameras
roll, or before he murders his narcissistic co-star Chevy Chase (Cory Michael
Smith)? How does Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) feel about being the only
African American member of an all-white cast? What about the mutual suspicions
of Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Gilda Radner
(Ella Hunt) that they’re distaff interlopers in a sexist boys’ club? Was
muppeteer Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) really a clueless, gormless naïf? And did
Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) really have a foot-long member?   

Never exactly a formalist by trade, Reitman works diligently
to replicate the virtuoso, whirligig schematism of films like
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman or
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, borrowing
their trademark repertoires of snaky tracking shots and staccato whip pans. In
theory, such gold-plated aspirations should be at odds with the underdog
storyline, but history is written by the winners, and Reitman—a showbiz kid who
once actually made a movie called The
Front Runner—isn’t remotely interested in subversion or, heaven knows,
critique. Rather, he’s a lapsed satirist whose mode of punching down and
sucking up first surfaced in Thank You for Smoking—a meditation on “moral flexibility” (executive produced by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel), which hinted that anybody
who falls for the silver-tongued sophistry of Big Tobacco deserves what’s
coming to them—and was fully
formed in Up in the Air, a heinous
post-bailout crowd-pleaser, in which documentary interviews with recently
unemployed civilians were used to lubricate a lament for the itinerant,
existential loneliness of the executive class.

In spite of its manipulativeness—or maybe because of it—Up in the Air raked in Oscar nominations
and momentarily positioned its maker as a potential twenty-first-century heir to Billy
Wilder. Fifteen years later, after a middling series of bids for indie and
festival-circuit credibility, Reitman has embraced a new role as a caretaker of
valuable and inherited intellectual properties. These include Ghostbusters—whose legacy sequels, Afterlife and Frozen Empire, are textbook exercises in profitable nostalgia (and
necrophilia, as it used CGI to resurrect deceased cast members)—and,
now, Saturday Night Live, which
served as an incubator for the comedians populating many of the early-’80s hits of his father, Ivan
Reitman. In Make My Day:
Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, J. Hoberman persuasively suggests that Ghostbusters—originally conceived by Dan
Aykroyd and John Belushi, and featuring Bill Murray in his signature hipster
role—permanently crossed the streams between blockbuster special effects
spectacle and hip countercultural cynicism. He doesn’t mean it as a
compliment: The trickle-down effect can still be felt in every meretricious
piece of franchise dreck leveraging sentimental fan service against smug
self-reflexivity.