Lorne Michaels Has Reportedly Sold His Ownership Stake in Saturday Night Live

Tucked away among the many revelations in Susan Morrison‘s new biography of Lorne Michaels is a significant detail that doesn’t appear to have previously been reported.

As described in the book, Lorne Michaels sold his ownership stake in Saturday Night Live to NBC Universal for a number in the hundreds of millions of dollars—a decade ago.

Michaels had made an ownership deal as part of a 1997 negotiation with the network, when SNL Studios was created as a joint venture between Michaels and NBC to own the ancillary rights to SNL—repeats, spinoffs, commercial tie-ins and the like—as well as other productions of Broadway Video, the company Michaels founded in 1979.

The exact breakdown of the partnership was not spelled out at the time. But Morrison reports that in 2015, Michaels owned “half” of the show—presumably under the terms of the 1997 deal. It was then that Steve Burke, the former CEO and now Chairman of NBC Universal, is said to have approached Michaels with an offer to buy back his share worth “several hundred million dollars.”

Numerous attempts by LateNighter to get current NBC management to confirm these details were not successful.

In the book, the decision to sell the rights to the show at that time is attributed to Michaels himself, who told the author that he made the call based on consideration of what would be best for his family.

In the book’s account, Michaels understood that if he waited another ten years—as in, now—to make such a deal, the value of the franchise would likely have only increased. But he pushed the button then, based on a question he asked himself:

“Do I want to have the money to spend, or do I want my kids to have the money to spend?”

Was Michaels correct in guessing SNL would only be more valuable a decade later, despite the diminishing appeal of just about every kind of entertainment program left on broadcast television?

It is certainly true that as the rest of broadcast television has slowly crumbled around it, Saturday Night Live has maintained its status as one of the few elite non-sports programs able to attract both substantial ratings and premium advertising dollars.

The 50^th anniversary special Sunday night validated that position resoundingly, when almost 15 million viewers watched the show live, the biggest such number for an entertainment show on NBC in five years.

And that was only the live audience. Delayed viewing may add substantially more viewers. The current SNL season is up 13 percent in viewers over the previous one, and in terms of delayed viewing it is up an eye-popping 71%.

The reason for those bulging eyes: Almost nothing else the broadcast networks dish up these days ever shows improvement year-to-year as more and more viewers abandon the network viewing habit for streaming.

The several hundred million-dollar payday hardly represents how significantly Michaels has cashed in through the years on his iconic creation. His contracts as the executive producer and showrunner of SNL have grown massively in value since he threw together a 90-minute late-night show for a budget of chewing gum and peanuts in 1975.

Michaels’s opening contract called for a salary of $115,000, going up to $175,000 if the show lasted into a third season. (The budgets really were that modest. When Michaels comically offered the Beatles a chance to reunite on the show late in that first season, the joke was the puny $3,000 check he displayed on camera; but that was genuinely the amount NBC authorized him to offer for such a guest shot.)

Those salary numbers obviously exploded over the years.

Much of SNL‘s run took place during a golden age when ownership of a hit series—especially a comedy—could lead to vast riches. The creators of shows like Seinfeld and Modern Family have lived in the several hundred million dollars neighborhood for some time.

The back pages of SNL have had a smaller market because the shows are collections of sketches, not individual stories. But there are now fifty years of them.

And, as demonstrated last Sunday, the end is not in sight.

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