Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison

I’ve been a Saturday Night Live fan forever. I watched the very first episode, with George Carlin hosting, Janis Ian and Billy Preston performing, when it aired in 1975. In college, SNL wasn’t just a TV show; it was a weekly ritual. Everything stopped at 11:30 p.m. as our entire dorm piled into the lounge to watch together. I even own the complete Seasons 1–5 on DVD, and still revisit them, if only to re-experience moments like Patti Smith tearing through a blistering “Gloria.”

So, when I picked up Susan Morrison’s Lorne, a deep dive into the life of Lorne Michaels, I was already primed. Fortunately, the book delivered, big time.  (Emphasis on “big”.  It’s over 600 pages!)

Morrison starts with Michaels’s early years in Canada and follows him all the way to present-day Studio 8H. She has definitely done the work: hundreds of interviews with actors, writers, musicians, friends, frenemies, and the entire constellation of comedy talent that has orbited Michaels for five decades. The result is a portrait of a man who, depending on whom you ask, is either Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Wizard of Oz, or a very distant, vaguely intimidating comedy god.

The book covers everything—everything—about the SNL ecosystem: the birth of the show, the five years when Lorne left, its reinventions, its misfires, the legendary sketches, the budgets, the politics, the drug dealers who used to wander the halls, the egos (dear lord, the enormous egos), the miraculous recoveries during crisis weeks, and the difficulty of building a live show from scratch every seven days. It is, hands down, the most thorough chronicling of SNL’s inner machinery I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a bunch of books about the show.

What fascinated me most wasn’t the celebrity name-dropping (though there’s enough to fill a Rolodex the size of Rockefeller Center), but the glimpse into Michaels’s management style. He’s described as a “maternal” leader—someone who quietly creates the conditions for talent to flourish, even when he remains personally opaque. He’s calm amid chaos, reserved yet hyper-observant, and apparently has the uncanny ability to greet the visiting parents of cast members as if they were royalty.

Morrison also tracks the contradictions: the man revered as a mentor who can also be withholding; the creative visionary who admits the show matters most when you’re young; the icon who seems genuinely puzzled by his own mythology. Her access allows you to sit in on pitch meetings, witness Jonah Hill being Jonah Hill, and feel the adrenaline of dress rehearsal, where the final decisions are made.

Is the book long? Yes. Could 100 pages have been cut? Probably, but the length didn’t bother me, really. I enjoyed it all. It’s a fascinating, exhaustive, entertaining look at one of the most influential figures in modern comedy. If you’re an SNL fan—or even just someone curious about how a cultural institution stays alive for 50 years—Lorne is well worth the trip.