The Nov. 3 cover story of TV Guide Magazine takes a close look at how Saturday Night Live has helped drive America's obsession with this year's historic presidential campaign. Along the way, SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels shared some thoughts with us about the show's political hot streak.
TVGuide.com: Saturday Night Live has made a lot of noise in past presidential election years, but it feels much bigger in this cycle. Why do you think that is?
Lorne Michaels: When you get 70 million people watching a debate with rapt interest and you have the echo of it all on the Internet and the 24-hour news channels, almost everything gets seen. You don't need to worry about the straight line. On [the second] debate that we did on the Thursday show, Darrell [Hammond, as Sen. John McCain] wandering into the shot was an immediate laugh. There was no setup to it. You had to have ...
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A Sarah Palin-Tina Fey Saturday Night Live showdown will happen "all in good time," Lorne Michaels told The Associated Press.
The executive producer's tease comes after Seth Meyers asserted there was "no truth" to the slew of Palin rumors, but would love to have her on.
Michaels, though, shared that he wasn't ...
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Saturday Night Live is racking up ratings with its political satire this season, so why did NBC yank a popular sketch that skewered Democrats and subprime lenders off the Internet?
The sketch, which lampooned a C-SPAN news conference about the government’s economic bailout package, labeled a couple as "People who should be shot" for making $24 billion off the subprime bonanza. Funny, right? Not when the characters, Herb and Marion Sandler, are a real-life couple who built Golden West Financial into a super lender and sold out to Wachovia.
More details on the controversy after the jump.
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In case you hadn’t heard, AMC’s Mad Men is not only a hit with the Emmy voters (the most nominated drama this year, with 16) but it’s a bona fide critics’ darling, walking away with three Television Critics Association Awards over the weekend at the 24th annual ceremony in Beverly Hills. Mad Men won for new program, outstanding achievement in drama and program of the year, prompting Emmy-nominated co-star John Slattery to quip (during one of the show’s several acceptance speeches), “How glad I am that the message of smoking, drinking and whoring Mad Men puts across has registered with the TCAs.”Jon Hamm, also an Emmy nominee, thanked reality shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Flavor of Love, Rock of Love (all three seasons) and Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader “for pushing the envelope so far that way that there was a place kind of on this side for us to sneak in.”HBO’s epic John Adams miniseries won two awards, for Paul ...
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Saturday Night Live returns this weekend with not only its first fresh episode since the WGA strike hit, but the first of four consecutive weeks of new programming — something that hasn't happened since 1976. Explaining his decision to veer from his own never-more-than-three-straight rule, executive producer Lorne Michaels tells the New York Daily News, "When you don't show up when you're supposed to show up, people move on. And I think that by coming back in full force, and it's still primary season, there's still a lot of excitement."Michaels says that sitting out the major thrusts of this primary season (as well as the zany celebrity happenings SNL makes sport of spoofing), led to "frustration, occasionally turning to rage. It's the first time in the history of the show we hadn't been on during an election cycle."Related:• Blerg! Tina Fey to Host First New SNL • Saturday Night Live and Other Announced DVD Releases
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