Jason Reitman’s new film, Saturday Night, dramatizes the behind-the-scenes chaos of the making of the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. The movie, timed to release shortly before the show’s 50th anniversary, is an odd, if entertaining, duck — a bit inside-baseball for SNL fans and a bit of nostalgia for a time when the famous comedy sketch show felt countercultural and revolutionary, rather than a milquetoast product of a certain kind of establishment liberalism. 

There have been a few of these not-quite-biopics in recent years — films or television shows that give “based on a true story”-style spins on the creative process that produced this or that cultural touchstone. 2012’s Hitchcock depicted the director and his wife Alma (Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren) as they defied studio execs to make the low-budget slasher Psycho. It was witty fun, if thin. Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos, in 2021, got a middling reception. The 2022 miniseries The Offer, about the making of The Godfather, was even more poorly received by audiences and critics. A friend of mine complained that it was “a lot of scenes of people casually saying things like, ‘Take the cannoli,’ then pausing to stare meaningfully at the camera.”