From the moment Morgan Neville was approached about making a documentary tied to the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” he knew that he didn’t want to capture this comedy staple in a traditional way.
“The idea of doing 50 years of ‘SNL’ in 90 minutes, it’s going to be a greatest hits clip show, which is not interesting to me,” Neville, the executive producer behind Peacock’s ‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night,” told TheWrap. “I always feel like the fool’s errand of a lot of storytelling is trying to be completist. Everything is reductive, but filmmaking is particularly reductive.”
Instead of the predictable, Neville opted for a format that was “more irreverent and risk-taking,” an ethos that has always defined NBC’s crown jewel.