For a Nearly 50 Year Old Show Saturday Night Live Still Inspires a Disconcertingly Intense Level of Passion and Intensity
One of the least favorite aspects of my old job as the head writer of The A.V. Club back when that meant something involved reviewing new episodes of Saturday Night Live.
It was a stressful and thankless gig. The live element was a big part of it. I had to write my review in the hours immediately following the show so that it would be timely and relevant because a Saturday Night Live review that wasn’t timely by definition wouldn’t be relevant.
I was exhausted by that point and nervous about the hurricane wave of criticism that would inevitably greet my review.
The commenters on my new Saturday Night Live pieces were extremely passionate about the show. Unfortunately this passion often took the form of taking reviews both seriously and personally.
If I panned a sketch that commenters found funny they seemed to take it as a personal insult. They were just as apoplectic and indignant if I praised a sketch that they found brutally unfunny.
In a heated online realm, commenters have an unfortunate tendency to see themselves as the sum of their opinions. Opinions aren’t something they have; it’s who they are on an existential level. They consequently seem to think a writer having a different opinion than their own is an implicit attack on them as a person.
To these enraged commenters, opinions are not something not terribly relevant and prone to changing with time. No, they seemed to think that opinions were, in fact, objective and that I expressed the wrong opinion roughly one hundred percent of the time.
I also benefit from a strong editor, so it did not improve my new Saturday Night Live reviews that they went live without going through a series of editing passes. My pieces here would also be a lot better if they went through a series of editing passes but this lemonade stand of a small business can’t afford that. Or anything else, for that matter! I’m broke. Busted. Devoid of funds. Not exactly exactly excelling where finance is concerned!
I didn’t read all of the comments on my new Saturday Night Live write ups. I’d skim the comment sections until it became too much to bear and I had to concede, “Jesus, people I don’t know HATE me because we disagree about individual Saturday Night Live sketches. That doesn’t seem fair or right.”
So it might seem counterintuitive that I have taken it upon myself to watch and write about EVERY EPISODE OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE for We’ve Got a Terrible Show for You Tonight and the Every Episode Ever Buttondown account and between zero and five books chronicling each decade of the show’s existence.
Why would I want to do something that has made me miserable in the past? The answer is that when I wrote new Saturday Night Live reviews for The A.V. Club I was writing for its readers and commenters.
Some of them didn’t know me and didn’t like me. Some of them did know me and that’s why they disliked me.
When I started writing for The A.V Club I felt a sense of pride and a sense of ownership. It was my site and reflected my sensibility and my aesthetic. Then at a certain point it felt like The A.V Club didn’t belong to be and also didn’t reflect my sensibility or who I was as a writer and human being.
That’s why I ultimately chose to quit and become a staff writer for The Dissolve. That was a much better fit but then things took a turn.
At The Dissolve I felt like I was writing for an audience that liked, respected and appreciated me. That felt great. They seemed to see me as a veteran writer of some note who was prolific and passionate and at times even mildly amusing.
That’s one of the reasons the end of The Dissolve hit me so hard and why Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place proved such a wonderful home for me and my writing.
At Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place I write for an audience and commenters that like, respect and appreciate me the way that the readers at The Dissolve did. That’s why I love this site and you beautiful people.
The people who read and comment on the ONE THOUSAND pieces I will be writing in the next four years won’t see me, as some commenters at The A.V. Club apparently did, as some random asshole thrusting his unwanted, incorrect opinions on them.
No, they will respect who I am and what I’ve done and what I’m doing. Also, if you pre-order my Saturday Night Live book or subscribe to my new Every Episode Ever Buttondown account you probably know that I’ve been writing about pop culture for nearly thirty years, have written a bunch of books and have devoted a whole lot of time to thinking about what makes things funny. Also, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to Saturday Night Live specifically and comedy in general.
The fact of the matter is that I’m too small for the assholes. I’m not nearly successful enough to attract the attention of beligerent jerks. That’s particularly true of my Every Episode Ever account at Buttondown. People barely seem to know that it exists. I get almost no comments. The feedback is non-existent. That’s both terrifying and weirdly comforting.
That’s why I’m excited about this crazy journey. I want to take you along with me because, if you’re reading this blog post on my personal website about a project that is extremely personal to me, you probably like and respect me and have thoughtful and considerate things to say about Saturday Night Live.
I want you to be passionate in the same way that passion is fueling this project, not passionate in the sense of personally attacking people you disagree with.
Because opinions, in the grand scheme of things, aren’t terribly important. It’s more important to be kind and empathetic and to realize that the byline at the top of an article isn’t some unpleasant abstraction but rather a human being with thoughts and feelings and, if anything, an excess of sensitivity.
I’m excited about writing about Saturday Night Live because I am going to do it my way—obsessive, personal, exhaustive and with an audience so small it’s downright microscopic—and THAT makes all the difference.
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