Morgan Neville recalls watching SNL 'way too young,' but it helped prepare him for SNL50 doc

five-minuteSaturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary is a big deal, as over these last five decades the sketch show has become a cultural touchstone responsible for countless moments and catchphrases that we can all recall instantly. But how can you truly examine the different facets, successes and struggles of 50 years of SNL? Having one of the best documentary filmmakers around, Morgan Neville, overseeing a docuseries is a pretty good strategy.

Neville, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind 20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Steve! (Martin) and Piece by Piece, is the executive producer of SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, a four-part docuseries now streaming exclusively on Peacock, in which each episode focuses on a different component of SNL and its history. “Five Minutes” has many SNL greats recall their five minute auditions to be on the show; “Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room” is an embedded look at the process of creating a show each week; “More Cowbell” is a deep dive into one of SNL’s most iconic sketches; and “Season 11: The Weird Year” is an examination of the season that nearly brought SNL to an end.

While Neville didn’t direct any of these episodes himself, he was heavily involved in the process of determining the areas of focus, something he says he has been preparing for practically all his life after he started watching the show, admittedly “way too young.”

“My dad, who loved comedy, started watching SNL right at the beginning. And not that long after, when I was a tiny kid, he would have me stay up and watch it,” Neville told WTW in an interview.

For reference, Neville was born in 1967, so when SNL premiered in 1975 he was eight years old. And of course, watching SNL at that time meant staying up to 11:30 at night, as catching up with the sketches on YouTube the next morning was several decades away.

“I felt like I was cool and mature… because this is something that adults loved but I also enjoyed it, too.”

Read on below for our full conversation with Neville about SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night (editor’s note: the interview has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness).

When did you first get introduced to Saturday Night Live?

Morgan Neville: "When I was way too young. My dad, who loved comedy, started watching SNL right at the beginning. And not that long after, when I was a tiny kid, he would have me stay up and watch it. I think as a little kid, you know, things like the Samurai sketch and Mr. Bill, you know those original things — and Steve Martin on SNL in the 1970s — was something I, even as a little kid, totally connected to even though most of it went over my head. But then in high school it was more the Eddie Murphy years and then on and on. But I’ve always paid attention to SNL, I’ve always followed it. I feel like I’ve actually been working on this project for 40 years because that’s how long I’ve been studying SNL."

In the audition episode, Amy Poehler says people often identify “[their] cast.” Who do you consider to be your SNL cast?

MN: "I still feel like that first — [John] Belushi, [Dan] Aykroyd, [Bill] Murray and Gilda [Radner] and Laraine [Newman] and everybody — like that cast. It was just all new and I didn’t know what it was and if felt like it was over my head, but I felt like I was cool and mature, even as a seven year old [sic], because this is something that adults loved but I also enjoyed it too. So I bonded with that cast in a way.

"But I’ve come back to the show again and again. And now that you don’t necessarily have to be sitting in front of your TV at 11:30 on Saturday night. … I’ve always watched the show and now there’s this whole Sunday morning quarterbacking that goes on where you read all the articles where people break down this week’s episode, which sketches killed and which didn’t and the debate about it. That says so much to me about what SNL is in our culture, which is it’s like the utility company that we all have opinions about and we complain about but we all feel like we have ownership over it, in a way. There’s nothing else like that in, trying to think of media, really, barely. It’s one of the few bits of actual broadcasting left that people around the country — not just on the coasts or in the middle of the country — all still connect to."

I really liked how the focus of the episodes hit different steps of the process — from the auditions to getting the script ready, a specific scene to an entire season. How did you settle on those topics?

MN: "From the beginning, I said, as a comedy fan, rather than seeing another survey of SNL through the years, why don’t we do specific stories and do like deep dives, more in like a 30 for 30 kind of way. Let’s have different filmmakers — and some of my favorite filmmakers like Marshall Curry and Rob Alexander and Jason Zeldes and Neil Berkeley — come in and take ownership and make little movies about some specific story. But I wanted those collectively to give you some sense of 50 years of SNL because this is the 50th anniversary year. So we brainstormed up a bunch of ideas, but these four felt like they fit together so you’re not going to feel like 'but you never talked about anything. You never talked about the early 1980s,' or whatever.

"I felt like with this group of films we could touch a little bit on everything but we could still be really specific. So auditioning is really talking about performing and writing is the mechanics of how the show is made. But then like the cowbell idea was the idea I had at the very beginning, which is like can we just get super specific into one sketch, because when you get into that micro detail suddenly it opens up all this other kind of knowledge. And I loved them talking to the costume people and the props people and the sets people and understanding that part of the machinery that makes the show work."

You are a very well known documentary filmmaker, were you tempted at all to direct one of these episodes?

MN: "Oh yeah. And I’m still working on some big comedy projects, which I can’t talk about yet, but this definitely spurred me on to do more work that I’m working on now. I felt like I opened up a door with this project and I’m excited to see what’s going to come."

SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is now streaming exclusively on Peacock. Saturday Night Live season 50 returns with new episodes on NBC on January 18.