Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live
Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad interviewed nearly everyone alive who worked on Saturday Night Live in its first ten years, then reconstructed the show week by week. They cover Lorne Michaels' arrival at NBC in 1975, the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, the John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd rise, and the disastrous Jean Doumanian season after Michaels left. The reporting captures cocaine binges, script room fights, network politics, and the birth of a comedic sensibility that reshaped American television. It is unsparing about Belushi's decline and honest about who actually wrote what. Long out of print in some editions, it remains the source book that every later SNL history draws on.
What you might want to know about Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The definitive backstage account of Saturday Night Live's chaotic first decade.
Simmons has called it one of the best pop culture books ever written, citing it constantly on his podcast as the ur text for anyone interested in SNL or the history of American comedy.
No. The book stops in the mid 1980s, which is exactly why fans consider it the definitive account of the original chaos.
Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live was written by Doug Hill, published in 1986 by Untreed Reads.
Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live is 528 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
