Susan Morrison didn’t plan to spend ten years completing her Lorne Michaels biography, but its hard to imagine a more optimally-timed book release, and the book’s initial sales would seem to bear that out.
Hitting bookstores just two days after SNL‘s 50th anniversary special drove record viewership for NBC, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live is officially a New York Times Bestseller its first week of release, coming in at No. 4 both among all hardcover nonfiction books and on the combined print and e-book nonfiction bestsellers list.
Morrison’s book was the best-selling biography of the week overall, supplanting last week’s top-seller, Melania Trump, and moving more units than Bill Gates’s new memoir and Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography.
Although it was written with Michaels’ cooperation, Morrison’s 600 page biography is not—as LateNighter’s Bill Carter pointed out in his review—a hagliography, with some interview subjects offering less than flattering assessments of the SNL creator.
Included among the book’s many revelations are new details surrounding the internal revolt at Saturday Night Live over Michaels tapping Donald Trump to host the show in 2016, and Michaels’ unreported 2015 sale of his reported 50% stake in SNL.
Although Lorne Michaels himself has yet to offer any comment on the book (it’s not clear whether he’s read it), Morrison set to guest on the Michaels-produced Late Night with Seth Meyers next week, which would seem to suggest that she remains in his good graces.
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