In the very first minutes of Peacock’s new docuseries about NBC’s Saturday Night Live, former cast member Joe Piscopo describes it as “the biggest show ever, the biggest thing to happen to television.” And while reasonable minds could quibble over whether that’s a bit of an overstatement, it is indeed difficult to deny the series’ lasting cultural impact. And not just because it’d be churlish to nitpick a compliment on the occasion of someone’s 50th birthday, even if that “someone” is a TV program.
That attitude, self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory but perhaps justifiably so, prevails throughout SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night. Despite the “unprecedented access” promised in marketing materials, the documentary is the exact opposite of a warts-and-all portrait; it is, instead, a glossy love letter to a hallowed institution. But it’s at least a pleasantly watchable one, thanks to its genuine enthusiasm for its subject matter, as well as to the
...
Keep reading this article on Hollywood Reporter.