CHRISTIAN TOTO: Lorne Michaels Has Second Chance to Do the Right Thing.
Now is the time for Michaels to take a public stand for both [Shane] Gillis and comedy. Michaels’ cultural gravitas remains sky high. He’s won the Mark Twain Prize for American humor and is beloved within Hollywood circles. His tentacles are stretched across the industry, from feature films to TV beyond “SNL.”
Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers both became stars under his tutelage and are key players in the late-night landscape.
So will Michaels do the right thing? Remember how Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos stood up for Dave Chappelle when his controversial special, “The Closer,” nearly got him cancelled?
Michaels did no such thing.
Why does it matter? Woke 2.0 is revving up and ready to go. Just ask the arts worker fired for wearing cornrows at the Burning Man festival. Or the sports announcer canned for Tweets he posted when he was 15. Or the BBC cancelling classic comedy sketches for being “problematic.”
If no one stands up to the woke bullies, it’ll only get worse. Did we not learn anything from the last decade?
It matters. But will the second time be the charm for Michaels? The Vegas odds suggest otherwise.
Indeed. In their 1986 history of Saturday Night Live’s first decade, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote that when Chevy Chase began to head for the exits with the goal of making bank near the end of SNL’s blazing first season, Michaels used a sports analogy to try to convince him to stay onboard:
[Michaels’] theory was that it took three years’ exposure to make a superstar on TV. Saturday Night was a big hit in the industry, but the public hadn’t really caught on yet. He told Chevy he was like a great pitcher for a championship baseball team. If he left, the team would lose a few games, but they’d keep winning. “Think how rare it is to play with a championship team,” Lorne said. “You think it’s going to happen all the time, especially when you’re young, but it doesn’t happen that often.… Play another season, then decide.”
To use another sports analogy, Michaels at this point is the equivalent of an aging NFL coach with some enormous past successes, but the game is rapidly passing him by. Think Chuck Noll and Tom Landry in the 1980s or Don Shula in the 1990s. The minute Michaels retires from NBC, SNL’s terrible past quarter century will quickly be forgotten, and he will only be remembered for the show’s first five years, and its late ‘80s comeback when he somehow reassembled a funny cast with great chemistry. Why publicly stick his neck out now?