Why I Did Not Watch Saturday Night Live's 50th Anniversary Special
Looking back, it’s ironic that timing was the catalyst for Every Episode Ever, my multi-media deep dive into the entirety of Saturday Night Live.
About a year and two months ago, when I was writing up a particularly dire episode of Saturday Night Live, I realized it was only twenty months away from its 50th anniversary.
I was convinced, not without cause, that this would be a huge deal. Saturday Night Live is among television's most important, influential, and long-running shows.
I figured that if I devoted pretty all of my time and energy to watching and writing about one thousand episodes of Saturday Night Live, I’d be able to write two books on the worst (We’ve Got a Terrible Show For You Tonight) and best (We’ve Got a Great Show For You Tonight) episodes/hosts and five massive tomes obsessively covering the show’s five decades.
In the original iteration of Every Episode Ever, I’d have lengthy tomes covering 1975 to 1985, 1985 to 1995, 1995 to 2005, 2005 to 2015, and 2015 to 2025.
Every Episode Ever would primarily be a literary endeavor, an epic exploration of an American cultural institution in seven unhealthily obsessive pop culture books, but there would also be an online component. I’d set up shop at Buttondown and post a meaty article about a classic episode of Saturday Night Live every weekday.
That was the plan. It was very ambitious, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, even by my masochistic standards. It’s now apparent that the original conception of Every Episode Ever wouldn’t just be challenging; it’d be impossible. I’d have to hit pause on the seven million other things I’m doing professionally and devote my entire career to binge-watching one of the longest and most uneven shows in American TV history.
I made a series of mistakes. I should have listened to my wife (my tombstone should read, “He Should Have Listened to His Wife More”), who has much better judgment than I do, when she politely suggested that my time and energy might be better used writing a book about being the autistic father or two autistic children rather than watching over a thousand hours of sketch comedy for a series of books even Saturday Night Live superfans might find excessive.
Out of neurodivergent neuroses, I stupidly did not check the status of the Indiegogo campaign for Every Episode Ever until my illustrator informed me that the campaign had ended, puzzlingly, without my final push.
As a result, I raised about ten percent of what I would need for the project to make any sense financially, or a little over five thousand dollars, on the campaign. That was not enough to put all my other work aside so I could concentrate on watching and writing about more Saturday Night Live than is at all sane or reasonable.
The mistakes continued when I set up shop at Buttondown rather than Substack because Substack had supposedly become a hive of scum and villainy. I did not want my beautiful project tainted by questionable politics, so I launched it on a site so small and obscure that it made everything much harder.
Before anyone else, I was obsessed with Saturday Night Live’s fiftieth anniversary. Looking back, I launched Every Episode Ever six months to a year too early.
I thought that the timing with Every Episode Ever was perfect, and if I could execute it satisfyingly, I could exploit the massive wave of press interest in the show’s 50th birthday.
I was wrong! Bad timing ended up being Every Episode Ever’s ruin. When articles about Saturday Night Live’s big birthday were ubiquitous, I associated Lorne Michaels’ satirical institution with failure, bad decisions, terrible judgment, and rejection.
I’m not terribly resilient. It takes me a long time to get over traumas and some trauma I’ve never gotten over.
That’s why I did not watch Saturday Night Live’s big 50th anniversary special. I still intend to write a book about the 50 worst and weirdest hosts and episodes in connection with the show’s 50th birthday on October 11th, but I have to squeeze an awful lot of research and writing into a schedule that’s already overloaded.
I’ll end up writing a fair amount about Saturday Night Live’s nadirs here because I don’t have the time to have unique content on the three sites that I currently operate: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, and Every Episode Ever.
I still think that writing about the history of Saturday Night Live is a good idea. I’ve written about a quarter of the book already. My articles on Saturday Night Live are among this site’s most popular, so there is definitely interest. That Louise Lasser piece is crazy popular, probably because I’m the first thing that comes up if you Google “Louise Lasser Saturday Night Live fiasco.”
Life has forced me to be pragmatic and realistic. It would have been impossible to execute my initial vision for Every Episode Ever, particularly with the deadline I’d set for myself.
I screwed up. I made a series of mistakes. I engaged in extensive self-sabotage, but I’m not going to beat myself up over my mistakes in part because they’re rooted inextricably in my ADHD, autism, and Bipolar.
When I was diagnosed with bipolar, I told the psychiatrist that I couldn’t be bipolar because I don’t have manic episodes. He then asked me if I regularly pursued impossibly ambitious, involved projects that I couldn’t finish. He explained that that was also a symptom of being bipolar. That certainly described me. Bipolar and ADHD give me lots of ideas, but I have difficulty delineating between good and bad ideas, as well as ideas that are ambitious yet achievable, like The Fractured Mirror book, or impossible, like the original vision for Every Episode Ever.
I will eventually watch Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary. But I’ll do so when I’m ready. I’m still committed to writing We’ve Got a Terrible Show For You Tonight, but it won’t be the end of the world if I miss my October 11th publication date.
From painful firsthand experience, I know that timing isn’t everything and that you inevitably end up writing the book you can write, not necessarily the one you initially set out to create.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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