Not a Huge Fan of SNL, But a Huge Fan of the Process

I’ve spent the past few weeks in the new Lorne Michaels biography. I’m guessing it came out recently to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live on NBC.

A good portion of the biography focuses on what you might call the Zen of Lorne: his legendary calm, his cryptic koans tossed like lifelines to anxious writers and cast members. The personal stories are entertaining enough, but I’m not reading it to unlock the psychology of Chevy Chase or Tina Fey.

I wouldn’t call myself a die-hard SNL fan. I don’t have a deep catalog of sketches memorized at the ready, and I’ve never been especially taken with the Adam Sandler era or cowbells or anything like that.

What pulled me into this book wasn’t nostalgia but the creative process behind the machinery, and how something gets made from nothing, week after week.

There’s a regular deadline.

A phrase that comes up in the book — and that I’ve heard elsewhere — captures it perfectly:

“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30.”¹

I love that. Not just as a piece of lore, but as a working philosophy. At my day job, I send a newsletter every Wednesday. I used to send a personal one every Saturday morning. That rhythm matters. Not because the work is always perfect, but because it's done.

Even SNL has an offseason, which is part of what makes it click. You need a break. You need a Sabbath. You can’t keep going at that pace forever. You need time to recover. I don’t necessarily believe in writing every single day, but I do believe in writing every day for a season. In tech, this would be called a sprint: you focus deeply for two weeks, ship the thing, and then reset.

There’s a system.

SNL doesn’t start from scratch every week. They don’t audition a new cast, hire new writers, and reinvent their process. The infrastructure is there — refined over decades, tested by fire, and adaptable when needed. Monday is meeting the host and creating pitches, Tuesday is a huge writing day, Wednesday is a read through with sketches getting greenlit and then I don’t know I think they start building the sets on Thursday and Friday.

All the big changes happen during the offseason. The week-to-week work builds on a proven structure.

And then, there’s the madness in the system.

One of the most enduring lessons from a creative writing class I took was that constraints breed creativity. A poetic form or a metrical rule forces you to think differently. The same principle applies at SNL: the weekly sprint, the rigid deadline, the late nights. The show is famously created deep into the night — Tuesday into Wednesday — with some debate over whether this nocturnal rhythm helps the creative process or is just a holdover from Lorne’s early years.

There’s a certain logic to it. Staying up all night lowers your defenses, lets the weirdness in. But there’s also something undeniably juvenile , a kind of collegiate bravado embedded in the culture. Still, it’s part of what makes the system work.

The rhythm, the sprint, the madness all feeds the machine. There’s something deeply comforting and instructive about that, especially in creative work. You don’t need to feel inspired every day. Beyond the raw talent is funneling it into something. And that takes showing up, following the rhythm, and trusting the process.

1. Slight paraphrase probably