Yes, it’s back. Saturday Night Live returns this week, for a not-round number but still mighty impressive 52nd season.
Most of the cast is back, including the “Weekend Update” team of Colin Jost and Michael Che for a record 13th season together, as well as the show’s newest breakout star, Ashley Padilla. The show will also welcome a pair of new featured players.
Those people will be getting most of the attention Saturday night, while the show’s most notable return will likely be getting none.
At least no special attention, because by now Lorne Michaels’ return barely registers as news: he is back, once again to run the show he created more than 50 years ago, a show still imprinting endless memorable moments on the national culture.
How many artistic endeavors have lasted and thrived for the last quarter of one century and the first quarter of another? Was any feature of theater, music, art, or comedy from the year 1875 still wowing the crowds in 1925?
SNL, at its advanced age, is the most important and valuable entertainment property on network television in the year 2026. That’s partly because the rest of network television has shrunk toward irrelevance and partly because SNL still generates more buzz than virtually anything being offered on any streaming service.
But mostly it’s because the guy who built it is still operating it. That’s rare. Henry Ford was not supervising the assembly line in 1955, 52 years after he set up shop. (He was deceased, for one thing.)
Lorne Michaels is still at it, performing the weekly ritual of dinner with the host, table read, sketch selection, late-week blocking and rehearsals, Saturday evening dress rehearsal, then live on the air.
And as we start Season 52, one strain of recent SNL chatter has gone strikingly quiet. The hoopla about the 50th anniversary, with its fire hose of celebrations, has died down, and so has the loud, incessant speculation that this might be the moment for Lorne Michaels to take a laurel-strewn ride into the retirement sunset. Not even a whisper, as this season starts, of the “who’s going to replace Lorne?” guessing game.
The recent definitive word on that front came from Michaels himself, in the Morgan Neville doc-bio that hit theaters last March, when he was seen dining at Orso with Steve Martin, whose question, “So, ya gonna retire?” got a quick, jokey, funny but utterly convincing answer: “No.”
That “no” seems to have settled the issue for the foreseeable future, which is remarkable because Michaels will be 82 in November and he isn’t a United States senator.
What is not remarkable about it is that Michaels is not tired of doing the job. He isn’t jaded, fed up with doing the same old thing, restless for another artistic mountain to climb. He doesn’t want to direct or do drama. He’s doing what he wants to do, what he has apparently always wanted to do: produce shows that make people laugh.
The only real career change he’s made since his 40s is doing more producing of shows that make people laugh. You don’t add on the rest of NBC’s late-night oeuvre—The Tonight Show and Late Night—if you’re worn out, used up, or bored.
Nobody should be surprised that Michaels resisted the urge to go for the medal associated with the 50th anniversaries—i.e., gold—and call it a career. He was never the gold-watch type.
He’s been telling people for years that he learned his lesson in 1979, when he found himself unhappy and exhausted over battling with the network over his five-year-old, celebrated but not yet venerated, creation.
He walked away at that point and watched from the sidelines while that creation almost deteriorated to a dusty memory.
After he came back and eventually elevated SNL to irreplaceable status, he not only never considered walking away again but also talked about the incredible privilege of spending his entire career inside a temple of American entertainment like NBC’s home, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He would often say he wanted to be the guy who shut off the last light in 30 Rock.
Many big show business names loved the fact they worked in that building. David Letterman talked about it. So did Conan O’Brien. They knew Carson had started there, and before him Jack Paar.
Almost no one has had as long and deep a connection to 30 Rock as Lorne Michaels. It didn’t start in 1975. He told me a story once about his first trip to New York City. He was about 16 or 17 years old, already devoted to comedy and an enormous fan of Paar, then probably the biggest star on television as the Tonight host.
Lorne and a friend took a bus ride from Toronto to Manhattan during their school holiday break, hoping to score tickets to see Paar. They crashed at an apartment of a Toronto friend, an aspiring actor who was in the cast of a show with a girl then dating a Paar writer. The writer was kind enough to arrange for two tickets for the kids from Canada.
They ventured to Rockefeller Center, took in the Christmas decorations, the big tree, and then entered through the revolving doors into the famous Art Deco lobby. They went up the elevator to the sixth floor. They sat in the seats, absorbed the famous set in person, and were thrilled by Paar’s live performance.
Michaels revealed how kismet-ish the whole experience was. That was the first of thousands of times he would walk into 30 Rock and ride its elevators. The actress who knew the Paar writer was Carrie Nye, and her boyfriend, later her husband, was a writer named Dick Cavett.
And the studio was 6B, where Johnny Carson later began his 30-year run hosting The Tonight Show and where Jimmy Fallon now hosts the show, produced by Lorne Michaels.
At this point, if not history by himself, Michaels is the most prominent link to just about the full history of show business. He connects in some fashion to Hope and Groucho and Lucille Ball and endless other icons of the business. He towers over Kevin Bacon in that “degrees of separation” thing. With him, it’s usually one link to just about everybody.
So the show is back; Lorne is back; and the assignment is the same: be funny, be relevant, be live. Fifty-two seasons—and counting.
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