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A journey through the behind the scenes chaos of the 90 minutes prior to the broadcast of NBC’s first ever Saturday Night Live show – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

In the mid-1970s, US TV network NBC made a monumental change to its scheduled programming. For the best part of a decade, it had broadcast reruns of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on Saturdays and Sundays, and wanted something new which would capture the 19-34-year-old audience demographic, developing a replacement show with young, independent producer Lorne Michaels, the first episode of which was broadcast live on October 11, 1975. The show, which is still running on NBC today, became something of an institution in the US, kickstarting the careers of numerous comedy stars and writers who would go on to achieve considerable success in US film and TV.

Saturday Night is an attempt to put on the screen the chaos of that first night’s preparation, in which no-one quite knows if the show’s broadcast is going to go ahead, or whether the network will flip a switch and play the Carson rerun tape it has lined up in case Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) can’t get his show together.… Read the rest