Lorne: The Man Who Invented ‘Saturday Night Live’

Morrison (Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary) effectively provides readers with unprecedented access to the man behind the curtain of SNL—the original creator and current producer, Lorne Michaels, along with numerous cast members and collaborators—in this exhaustive history of Michaels’s private life and career, as well as the progression of the show itself. Michaels grew up in Toronto, a child of privilege whose defining moment came with the death of his father soon after an argument between the two. Michaels spends the rest of his life avoiding conflict and searching for a familial replacement, eventually becoming a withholding father figure to hundreds of talented comics. Writing for Laugh-In and Lily Tomlin and Flip Wilson led to Michaels’s idea for a show that looked like “kids crept into the studio and took over after the adults went home.” Morrison captures the chaos of SNL, from the bed-hopping and drug-taking to the highs of fame and fortune and the lows of poor reviews, overdoses, and inflated egos, while also revealing the true character of the show’s enigmatic, name-dropping creator.