SNL50 went off with seemingly very few hitches given the myriad celebrities who were roped in (either willingly or unwillingly) and the many, many OG players who worked to punch up characters they maybe hadn’t played in years, if not decades. But just because things went off swimmingly doesn’t mean there weren’t a few things about the making of the special the cast found to be a little ridiculous.
For Andy Samberg (2005-2012) it was the tagline. You may have seen it prior to the release of the special anniversary episode: “A Special 50 Years In The Making.” It’s catchy, I’ll give you that. But Samberg just could not get over NBC's marketing campaign:
It was trippy being in New York and seeing like every cab and surface covered in ads while working on it. And also that the tagline was, ‘A special 50 years in the making’ knowing that everyone there had started working on it pretty much the week before or that week. I was like, ‘I mean, we’re pulling from the 50 years, but in terms of the actual making…’
Samberg and Seth Meyers (2001-2014) were chatting about the special during an episode of their podcast “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers” when the story about how the episode actually was thrown together (compared to how NBC was selling it) came up. While Samberg was amused by the tagline, Meyers pushed back a little. In fact, the longtime writer firmly believed that actually, the tagline’s fudging of the truth made it even more accurate. Or as he put it, it was “thrown together like the rest of the show.”
Hilarious. Samberg went on to explain how SNL50 came together, and it sounds like a bit of a sloppy mess, but for anyone who saw Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, this is just the way Lorne Michaels’ long-running sketch comedy series likes it.
The people that work on the show now [sic] also got drafted to work on the 50th. I feel like it’s been 18 months of talking about it while also not being able to start working on it because of the way the show is wired. And Lorne is wired. So there was just this building pressure with no way to actually release it, because the only way to have release was just getting within a week of the show.
It’s also not like everyone had a literal year to put the episode together, right? I’d imagine that some people, Lorne Michaels included, put thought into what people and sketches would be brought back months in advance, but it’s not like anything was finalized until the last minute, which is pretty typical for Saturday Night Live.
Andy Samberg also made the germane point that one major reason the special wasn’t literally “50 years” in the making was because so many people involved with the show were still doing regular SNL episodes every single week. The main Not Ready For Primetime Players, the writers, and all the BTS folks involved with the show had to put together an episode of brand new material for Timothèe Chalamet like three weeks before they busted out the star-studded affair.
We’d be here all day if I listed the long list of people who appeared onscreen during the episode, but they were not limited to the current cast. A sample? There was Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Tracy Morgan, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively (in a bit of a controversial cameo), Jason Momoa, Jenna Ortega, a tattoo-free-ish Pete Davidson, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler (who had one of the most poignant moments the whole night), Bill Murray (who ranked all the Weekend Update hosts), Scarlett Johansson, Kristin Wiig, Sabrina Carpenter, Maya Rudolph, Paul Rudd, John Mulaney, Chris Parnell, Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Bad Bunny, Tim Meadows, Kim Kardashian and I could go on and on. Suffice to say, a lot of spinning plates were involved.
There’s no doubt it was an epic night of television, but it still cracks me up that Andy Samberg could not get over how over-the-top the tagline was compared to the haphazard way it all came together. It's a pretty perfect story about a show that's never actually able to be perfect due to its live nature.
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