Saturday Night Live‘s 50th anniversary celebration is set to kick into high-gear month with Peacock releasing a new Morgan Neville-produced docuseries about the show.
Promising rare behind-the-scenes footage, celebrity interviews, and more, all four episodes of SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night are set to drop on January 16th.
The long-gestating series of docs is expansive, with more than 60 contributors—primarily former cast members and writers—sharing their thoughts about working on the flagship comedy franchise.
Each of the four parts are set to cover different elements of the show. The first two episodes cover areas you might expect—”Five Minutes,” an exploration of the audition process featuring unseen audition footage, and “Written By: A Week Inside The SNL Writers Room.”
Episode three is where the docuseries puts the “deep” in “deep dive,” though. It’s an entire episode on the making of the infamous “More Cowbell” sketch featuring and written by Will Ferrell.
Finally, in its fourth episode, Beyond Saturday Night takes a drip back in time to a hinge point in the show’s evolution with “Season 11: The Weird Year.” That was when creator Lorne Michaels returned to the show after a five-year absence.
Season 11 was considered a failure, with Michaels casting a star-studded company that never connected with the audience and brought the show close to cancelation. But Michaels’ return and the pivot back to formula with Season 12 built the SNL we know today.
SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is executive-produced by Oscar and Emmy-winning documentarian Morgan Neville . He’s best known for directing music doc 20 Feet From Stardom and most recently the Pharrell Williams Lego biopic, Piece by Piece.
He’s also the filmmaker behind several other late-night adjacent projects, including 2024’s two-part Apple TV+ mini-series Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces and 2023’s Bono & Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with Dave Letterman for Disney+.
“I’ve been obsessed with Saturday Night Live as long as I can remember,” Neville said in a statement. “For SNL50, I’ve been lucky to collaborate with some of my favorite independent filmmakers to tell some deeper stories of SNL. Taken together, these standalone episodes give a new perspective of SNL and what makes it work.”
That all-star set of directors includes Robert Alexander (Kid Cudi doc A Man Named Scott), Marshall Curry (Cory Booker doc Street Fight), Neil Berkeley (Gilbert, Harmontown), and Jason Zeldes (Neville’s longtime editor). The series was produced under Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video banner.
Notably, a previously discussed doc about the show’s impact on music and culture being co-produced by The Roots co-founder and Tonight Show bandleader Questlove (an Academy Award winner for his documentary Summer of Soul) will not be a part of the Peacock docuseries.
Another doc about legendary writer Jim Downey with the working title Downey Wrote That has also been in the works for sometime now. It’s not clear whether those docs have been shelved or will see their own separate releases at some other point.
All four episodes of SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night premiere on Peacock on Jan. 16, 2025, ahead of the peak celebration with its primetime special a month later on Sunday, Feb. 16.
