CHRISTIAN TOTO: Saturday Night – When Liberals Loved Free Speech.

There’s plenty to chew on during the film. The cast members do good-enough impressions of Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase and John Belushi. It’s fun to see comedy institutions like “Weekend Update” in their earliest forms.

Another takeaway? How much “SNL” has evolved over the years.

It’s gotten worse. Much worse. And the show’s political leanings are now to the Left of Stephen Colbert. And it shows.

They always were; Chevy Chase thought that hapless liberal Republican Gerald Ford was the antichrist. But in the beginning, Lorne Michaels was essentially making the weekly television version of National Lampoon magazine. (Chase, Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and original head writer Michael O’Donoghue were all originally with the Lampoon.) As a result, the show was hip and irreverent; decades on though, it now exists only to provide Sunday column fodder for Beltway journalists. As John Hinderaker wrote in 2017 at Power Line, political reporters and wire services love to recap SNL episodes, because it allows them to get their biases in print while still maintaining a thin veneer of objectivity. “‘Respectable’ news outlets like the AP can’t publish absurd comedy skits ripping President Trump, much as they might like to,” Hinderaker wrote. “But by covering Saturday Night Live, they turn such meaningless attacks into fake ‘news.’”