Live From New York! (2015; Bao Nguyen)

GRADE: C

By Daniel Barnes

WIFE: It’s a revolution!

HUSBAND: It’s an institution!

WIFE: It’s a revolution!

HUSBAND: It’s an institution!

WIFE: It’s a revolution, I’m telling you!

HUSBAND: It’s an institution, you cow!

SPOKESMAN: Hey, calm down, you two. Saturday Night Live is both a revolution and an institution!

Which really means that it’s neither. Even Lorne Michaels claims that the long-running TV sketch comedy is “nonpartisan.”  Ever heard of a nonpartisan revolution?  Meanwhile, the idea of Saturday Night Live as a flag-waving American institution only brings to mind the joke about aging prostitutes.

Bao Nguyen’s slick but surface-level documentary Live From New York! offers a bounty of rare behind-the-scenes material that should appease the show’s hardcore fans.  However, it’s just a smokescreen for the film’s timid, company-line approach.

The established narrative gets followed to the letter, and the only acknowledged down period in Saturday Night Live‘s forty-year history came in the early 1980s (when Michaels wasn’t involved, of course).  Despite this, the show is also described as being in a constant state of revitalization.

Superficial and self-serving Boomer insights abound (“The 70s was great! People used to go to New York to make it!”  Yeah, that’s been a thing since the late 1800s), while anti-establishment hepcats like Bill O’Reilly and Brian Williams and Al Gore attest to the show’s enduring satirical relevance.  At the same time, every hard-hitting question about institutionalized racism and sexism comes with its own readymade apologia and perfectly cherry-picked clip.  Also: 9/11, 9/11, the Twin Towers, 9/11, Rudy Giuliani, 9/11, and 9/11, and did we mention 9/11?

“It was a weird time to skewer American politics,” says Michaels.  So much for the revolution.

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