During the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special, Fred Armisen and Vanessa Bayer performed a Weekend Update bit in which they played the childhood friends of the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels. The comic premise here is Armisen and Bayer play Canadian hosers who alternate between sharing happy memories of and effusive praise for Michaels, followed by whispered confessions of some of his less desirable qualities, exaggerated for comic effect. Curiously, original iterations of this bit focused upon international autocrats, including Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. By turning their attention to Michaels, Armisen and Bayer gently rib the show’s legendary leader while also acknowledging a certain elusiveness and omnipotence characteristic of his public persona.

The fiftieth anniversary of Saturday Night Live inspired NBC and its affiliated streaming service, Peacock, to produce a series of celebratory and mythos-reinforcing content. These tributes included a four-part behind-the-scenes documentary series, SNL 50 Beyond Saturday Night; the Questlove-co-directed survey of the show’s musical achievements, Ladies & Gentleman... 50 Years of SNL Music, and two three-hour prime time specials, The Homecoming Concert and The Anniversary Special. Collectively, they underscored Saturday Night Live as a well-oiled machine, a cultural barometer for comedy, music, and politics, and a formidable, indispensable American institution. An intermittent presence across these specials was Lorne Michaels, who rarely talks directly to the camera (aside from archival footage), yet is often alluded with a balance of admiration and trepidation. 

Lorne’s appearance in the wings during the Martin Short-led “good nights” portion of the anniversary special gestures toward the presence yet strategic inconspicuousness of the legendary producer. The paterfamilias of Saturday Night Live, Michaels stands unassumingly on the stage filled with the comedic talent he helped discover and promote. This image of a silent, stoic Michaels is almost a complete inversion of the anxious, yet persistent Lorne Michaels one finds in Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024), the dramatized retelling of the show’s first episode in 1975. But Armisen and Bayer’s bit along with Saturday Night help to reshape and maintain Lorne Michaels’ second greatest creation and his most beguiling: Lorne Michaels.