Lorne

December 9, 2024
New Yorker editor Morrison (editor of Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary) provides an entertaining account of Lorne Michaels’s nearly half-century reign over Saturday Night Live. Chronicling Michaels’s comedic education, Morrison recounts how as a teenager at summer camp, he organized “freewheeling revues” that were written and rehearsed over the course of a week and performed on Saturday nights. Michaels spent his 20s writing jokes for several sketch and variety shows, but he “had a more cerebral, ambitious notion of what television could be.” In 1974, he pitched upstart NBC producer Dick Ebersol on Saturday Night (“Live” would come later), a sketch comedy series that would satirize the way TV “shrink-wrapped the culture.” Morrison meticulously chronicles Michaels’s leadership of the program, detailing how he maintained a “businesslike calm” while dealing with clashing egos and studio interference ahead of the premiere and how he outmaneuvered the network’s attempts to wrest control of the program away from him in the mid-1990s. Though Morrison focuses more on SNL’s first 25 years than its second, she offers intriguing tidbits about how Michaels steered the show through the aftermath of 9/11 and the first Trump administration (several writers and cast members accuse Michaels of going “criminally soft” on Trump). It’s an engrossing look at the man behind the curtain. Agent: David Kuhn, Aevitas Creative Management.

February 1, 2025

Michaels, the famous creator of Saturday Night Live, cooperated with this biography and allowed Morrison, an editor at the New Yorker, to shadow him for a week on the show. The biography is being published to coincide with SNL's 50th anniversary. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2025
Now in its unprecedented fiftieth season, Saturday Night Live is a veritable institution. New Yorker editor Morrison takes a gimlet-eyed look at the powerful man behind it all, a legend himself. Born Lorne Lipowitz in 1944, Michaels grew up in suburban Toronto, his childhood shaped by the sudden loss of his father when he was 14. After writing for comedy-variety shows in Canada and Los Angeles, Michaels' work for Lily Tomlin drew the attention of NBC executives hoping to program a late-evening Saturday variety show based in New York. Saturday Night (the Live was added later) debuted in 1975 and quickly became a hit. The show went through myriad peaks and valleys, with one notable low point in the early 1980s when NBC pushed Michaels out for several years before realizing how crucial he was to the show's success. Any biography of Michaels is bound to include a history of SNL, and Morrison goes a step further, shadowing Michaels during the week-long prep process for a show in 2018, revealing how much work, care, and jockeying goes into each production. Essential for SNL lovers and everyone interested in comedy and television, this is a deft and insightful look at one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in entertainment and the legacy he's built.

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Starred review from January 15, 2025
How a Canadian joke writer became American comedy royalty, and worked to keep his crown. Any book about Lorne Michaels is inevitably a book aboutSaturday Night Live, the comedy program he created and (excepting one disastrous hiatus) has led for 50 seasons. Few TV programs are better documented thanSNL--especially its brash and druggy early years--and Morrison, articles editor at theNew Yorker, covers the relevant highlights. But she also offers an engrossing story about Michaels' rise, celebrity, and philosophy of comedy. Raised in Toronto, he married into Canada's comedy scene--his first wife was the daughter of a top Canadian gag duo. Eager to escape the country's provincial scene, he headed for America but chafed at working for squares like Phyllis Diller; a fortuitous connection with a rising Lily Tomlin earned him a reputation as a judge of comic talent and an eager iconoclast. Each of the book's seven sections opens on one day in the manic life of a 2018 episode of the show, which reveals Michaels as being hands-on with every element of the show, from lighting to soothing cast members' egos. But it also reveals him as a sphinxlike figure, an inveterate name-dropper who never fires anybody directly and makes guest-host choices, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, that sometimes infuriate his left-leaning cast. (Michaels notes that as a national show, SNL needs to take a pox-on-all-their-houses posture.) Morrison soft-pedals some elements of Michaels' history--whether he might have intervened more when John Belushi and Chris Farley were spiraling, the show's weak record on diversity, his failed marriages--but the book isn't hagiography, chronicling his tussles with network execs and various film flops. Morrison does a fine job of revealing a leader who keeps his cards close to the vest, which is both a temperament and a survival tactic. A top-shelf showbiz biography.

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February 1, 2025

Morrison (Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary) effectively provides readers with unprecedented access to the man behind the curtain of SNL--the original creator and current producer, Lorne Michaels, along with numerous cast members and collaborators--in this exhaustive history of Michaels's private life and career, as well as the progression of the show itself. Michaels grew up in Toronto, a child of privilege whose defining moment came with the death of his father soon after an argument between the two. Michaels spends the rest of his life avoiding conflict and searching for a familial replacement, eventually becoming a withholding father figure to hundreds of talented comics. Writing for Laugh-In and Lily Tomlin and Flip Wilson led to Michaels's idea for a show that looked like "kids crept into the studio and took over after the adults went home." Morrison captures the chaos of SNL, from the bed-hopping and drug-taking to the highs of fame and fortune and the lows of poor reviews, overdoses, and inflated egos, while also revealing the true character of the show's enigmatic, name-dropping creator. VERDICT Add this to the top of the pile of SNL tomes, just in time for the show's 50th anniversary.--Lisa Henry

Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.