How can I miss you if you don’t go away? “Lorne” (2026) is the latest “Saturday Night Live” (“SNL”) related project, a documentary that leans more towards a glorified clip show with flashes of insight and fresh humor. It purports to have exclusive access to Lorne Michaels, the creator of the weekly late night sketch comedy that airs on NBC, and tell his story, but a lot of it consists of clips from the fifty plus year television series and Michaels’ produced movies (“Wayne’s World,” “Coneheads,” “Tommy Boy,” “Mean Girls”) and other television series (“30 Rock”). If you have a good time, it will be because you enjoy laughing down memory lane, but a documentary that truly focused on the man would be preferable for those short on time who feel that they have already consumed plenty of SNL related content from the scripted feature “Saturday Night” (2024), to films from SNL alum such as the documentary “Will & Harper” (2024) or the plethora of Peacock-era anniversary specials, which include “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” (2025), “SNL50: The Homecoming Concert” (2025), “Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music” (2025) or another documentary, “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” (2025). It is hard to justify the cost of a movie ticket for this one except for the most ardent SNL and Michaels fans. Wait until it streams on Peacock.
If you do decide to go, gird yourself for the lady doth protest too much confessionals about how much Michaels hates being the subject of a documentary, values his privacy and will not cooperate while simultaneously giving complete exclusive access. The story primarily depicts Michaels’ work routine because understanding the show means understanding Michaels. So “Lorne” chronicles an average work week down to the hour. For a year, cowriter and director Morgan Neville followed him around, including to his exclusive country home in Maine which most people, allegedly women according to Maya Rudolph, do not get to visit. If Neville sounds familiar, he usually makes entertaining documentaries that attract more attention than most documentarians: “20 Feet from Stardom” (2013), “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” (2018) and “Piece by Piece” (2024).
Neville breaks up the story in two ways: interspersing the routine with the chronological story of SNL and a thematic reflection on Michaels’ career and family life before SNL. Cue photograph montages, archived clips from other television shows, including in Canada where Michaels performed in front of the camera, previous interviews that he gave, and specials, which offered a nice segue to an interview with his only boss who appears on screen, Lily Tomlin. David Geffen, his first agent, makes a brief cameo. If none of the aforementioned are available, Neville gets creative with having an animation department make cartoons in the vein of Robert Smigel’s SNL animated sketch “Saturday TV Funhouse.” The movie jokes about finding Michaels’ Rosebud after showing it: a childhood camp that established his idea for the show.
His personal life remains personal, which means his three children and current wife never appear on screen. Yellow dots cover their photographs. His ex-first wife, a former SNL writer, Rosie Shuster, gives a couple of interviews. Even his dogs never make an appearance. Would you settle for his office goldfish and the animals on his Maine property, goats and geese? Fish guy Larry Liberstein gets in the act. There are exclusive interviews with all the celebrities in his life, which are either close personal friends like Paul Simon or Howard Shore, the original music director, former employees or colleagues. Is his close friend, John Alexander, famous? Because he works with mostly comedians, expect a lot of funny stories then them cracking up at their own jokes or each other. It is no. surprise that Conan O’Brien, Tina Fey and John Mulaney know how to balance the poignant with the punchline.
“Lorne” mostly does an excellent job of providing context regarding the identity and relationship of the interviewee with Michaels. There are exclusive interviews with present and former producers including Steve Higgins, Caroline Maroney, Erin Doyle, and Brian Candy. Writers Tom Schiller, Paula Pell, Alan Zweibel, Bruce McCulloch, Erik Kenward also get their sliver of spotlight. The lionshare of interviews go to current and past cast members, including Michael Che, Colin Jost, Kenan Thompson, Mike Myers, Seth Meyers, Chris Rock, Jimmy Fallon, Dana Carvey, Martin Short, Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Mark McKinney, Andy Samberg, Larraine Newman, Chevy Chase, Kristin Wiig, , Bowen Yang, Sarah Sherman, Chloe Fineman, and former Senator Al Franken. Adam Sandler was genuinely funny and offered an excellent, incisive business commentary about some of Michaels’ roughest years at NBC under NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer. Some former repeat hosts such as Alec Baldwin or Candace Bergen give their two cents, but nothing earth shattering. Steve Martin and Michaels play nice for the camera and pretend to have a normal dinner out that the camera captures perfectly complete with zero audio quality issues.
A lot of what makes SNL great is the idea of seeing big stars among the gang of more regular, quotidian stars, i.e. the SNL cast. It becomes a fantasy of imagining spending a workday with extremely talented people. The following hosts are featured organically with no interviews: Timothee Chalamet, Kate McKinnon, Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, Ayo Edebiri, and Jake Gyllenhaal.
There are even some interviews with authors of books related to SNL, which feels like an informercial embedded in an infomercial with the possibility that the documentary may be an adaptation of one of these books. The first of the two authors, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, credited with writing “Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” (2002), offers less commentary than Susan Morrison, author of the best-selling, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live” (2025).
If “Lorne” makes a rookie mistake, it is failing to identify some of the men behind the scenes who appears to know a great deal. Is it sloppiness, a deliberate effort to preserve privacy or one of the few that had a blink and miss it flash of writing on the screen that never repeated again unlike most of the other interviewees. In addition, because Neville may believe that some people are so well known that they need no introduction, which includes comedians Marcello Hernández and Mikey Day, they just mill around as part of the scenery. When making a documentary, a filmmaker needs to remember that people may watch the film when no one is alive who originally watched SNL. It does not happen often, but it should not happen at all.
Betzy Torres, Standard & Practices executive, appears briefly during the behind-the-scenes footage, and it would have been great to hear even one person who feels less than glowing about the titular producer. “Lorne” feels like another vanity project to keep the show relevant and in the ether. Less is more.
