A new podcast from 60 Minutes is taking a deep dive into the newsmagazine’s 2004 story on Saturday Night Live, revisiting hours of interviews that were left on the cutting room floor.
Famously, the week 60 Minutes spent with Lorne Michaels and team happened to coincide with Ashlee Simpson’s SNL lip-sync incident. The latest episode of 60 Minutes: A Second Look, out today, revisits that fateful week, framing unaired interview footage with present-day discussion with the journalists and producers involved in covering the story.
As podcast host Seth Doane notes at the beginning of the episode, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl recorded hours of interviews with Michaels that week, but only about three and a half minutes worth made it into the show’s finished piece.
In the never-before-aired footage included in the podcast, Stahl can be heard prodding the SNL creator on touchy subjects like the show’s drug-heavy history. 60 Minutes producer Denise Cetta reflects in a present-day interview on one particularly tense moment when Stahl asked Michaels whether he had ignored drug use by cast members like John Belushi and Chris Farley, who both died of overdoses after leaving the show.
“I remember that moment very well, and how pressure-filled the room was, and how awkward,” Cetta recalls.
“You had alluded to, ‘It was live and let live,’” Stahl told Michaels during the exchange. “Was that your attitude?”
“No, I think my attitude was incredibly paternal,” Michaels responded.
In another sequence, Stahl can be heard confronting Michaels on his reported management style, noting that he’s been called everything from “aloof” to “tyrannical” to a father figure.
“I don’t know that he is that paternal to us, but I do think that the way you feel about him is often a reflection of the way you feel about your own father,” then-cast member Tina Fey said. “So if you have authority issues or daddy issues, they are going to come out here.”
“It’s like working for the Sphinx,” added Seth Meyers. “Because almost everything he tells you seems to be couched in riddle.”
The SNL-centric episode of A Second Look, titled “From Saturday Night Live to Sunday on 60 Minutes,” is out now on all podcast platforms.
