Live from New York: The Complete Uncensored History of “Saturday Night Live” as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests (2nd ed.) by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales (review)

When Live From New York first arrived in 2002, the sprawling oral history of Saturday Night Live quickly became the program’s de facto official record. Journalist James Andrew Miller and longtime Washington Post television critic Tom Shales had diligently interviewed just about everyone of note associated with SNL and compiled their commentaries on everything from drug use to network executive battles to misogyny to backstage shop talk. The volume remains an invaluable resource not only for fans, but also for scholars seeking a sustained case study in the evolution of and interdependencies among culture, comedy, and broadcast history.

There’s little in the book’s updated second edition, however, to compel anyone but the show’s most diehard loyalists and comedy geeks to seek it out. Its 2014 updating and re-release were conspicuously timed to coincide with SNL’s most recent 40th anniversary season and special, following in the robust tradition of countless hagiographic Best of … DVDs, cable specials, and retrospectives. That Live from New York is deeply invested in selling readers on Saturday Night Live’s continued cultural relevance is its least interesting offense, though. To be sure, myriad studies have made this case, particularly as the program soldiers on in a format and time-slot increasingly abandoned by whatever one wants to call “television” today.

The updated Live From New York’s principal shortcoming is its superfluousness, as well as its tacit insistence that it remains the truest chronicler of Saturday Night Live. This claim may have been true of the book’s first edition in 2002, but twelve years worth of online discussion, podcast-delivered “Lorne stories,” and websites tracking every intricacy of the show, including cast-member screen-time, have made the book’s dishy insider tone feel quaint. This is not to suggest that the “just add Internet” logic governing so many media industries today has made Miller and Shales’s approach to oral historiography obsolete. It is only fitting, though, that a show built on dialoguing with current events would spawn a cottage industry of contemporaneous commentary and, in doing so, increasingly make hulking tomes like Live From New York less important than they make themselves out to be.

Part of the problem arises from the fact that, unlike the show’s legendarily drug-addled and contentious early seasons, there isn’t much grist for gossip among SNL cast-members and writers of the last decade or so. With rare exceptions, interviewees repeatedly speak glowingly about one another or tiptoe around infighting that might come off as unseemly. By most accounts, those working at the show over the last decade are hyper-aware of and eager to avoid the extra-curricular activities that caused many earlier performers to burn out (Fred Armisen: “I’m not into drugs; I don’t drink”; writer Paula Pell: “Actors on the show now are more health-conscious”; producer Lindsay Shookus: “[Performers] seem to be a little bit more responsible about going home earlier and making sure they’re going to get their beauty sleep”).

Lack of behind-the-scenes controversy points to a broader shift in the relationship between the show and American comedy, one subtly captured by Miller and Shales in a chapter-closing reflection by rabble-rousing “Saturday TV Funhouse” creator Robert Smigel, who suggests that recent seasons of SNL have “defied that logic that you needed to have the hippest group of people for the show to succeed.” Indeed, Lorne Michaels has always positioned SNL as a big-tent program, one that relies on network-era conceptions of broad television audiences. One result of this strategy has been the steady procession of post-2002 cast-members being well-positioned to spread the show’s influence elsewhere in multiple...