Comcast’s plan to spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a separate public company has already kicked off the inevitable media parlor game: Who might want to buy NBCU once it’s no longer tethered to Comcast’s cable and broadband business?
Netflix is the obvious first name to toss out, if only because it recently chased Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and studios business before losing out to Paramount Skydance. NBCUniversal has some of the same theoretical attractions: a major studio, a deep TV library, a streaming service in Peacock, and a century-old broadcast network that still knows how to gather a live audience.
It also has something Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has made very clear he reveres: Lorne Michaels.
That doesn’t mean Netflix is about to buy NBCUniversal. Analysts have already offered plenty of reasons to be skeptical. NBCU would be a complicated package for Netflix—far messier than the Warner Bros. streaming-and-studios assets it recently pursued.
But as a comedy-world thought experiment? The Netflix-NBCU idea has one very interesting wrinkle.
Sarandos and Michaels have spent years sounding less like distant corporate figures than mutual admirers from opposite ends of the television timeline.
Sarandos, a well-known comedy obsessive, is reportedly a regular presence at SNL, attending the show multiple times a year, and has described Michaels as a mentor. He also landed one of the coveted seats at the show’s 50th anniversary celebration. In a 2025 New York Times profile of Michaels, the Netflix chief called the SNL creator “the most important and influential person in the history of television.”
Michaels, for his part, has shown a striking appreciation for what Netflix is trying to build. Back in 2015, as Netflix was aggressively expanding in stand-up and original comedy, Michaels said the streamer had “quickly become the biggest supporter of what’s new and exciting in comedy.” Nearly a decade later, while talking about cost-cutting across late night—including NBC’s decision to eliminate the 8G Band from Late Night With Seth Meyers—Michaels offered a more pointed observation: “I think the only person who really has faith in the network model right now is Ted Sarandos, who seems to be building one.”
That line may be the best explanation for why the Netflix-NBCU idea is more interesting culturally than it is financially.
For 50-plus years, Saturday Night Live has been the purest expression of the network model: live, weekly, topical, talent-driven, risky, and built around the belief that millions of people might still show up at the same time to watch the same thing. Netflix, meanwhile, spent years defined as the anti-network—the place where viewers watched whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, without affiliates, time slots, or the old broadcast machinery.
But Netflix has been inching toward its own version of network television: live comedy specials, live sports, appointment programming, and a deepening investment in talent ecosystems. Sarandos may not be rebuilding NBC. But Michaels seems to recognize that Netflix is trying to recreate some of the old network’s cultural utility without the old network’s infrastructure.
That is where SNL becomes an unusually seductive asset—not as the thing that would justify a mega-deal, but as the thing that would make the deal feel almost poetic.
If Netflix owned NBCUniversal, it would own the most durable live comedy franchise in American television. It would also own the institutional comedy pipeline Michaels has spent 50 years building: not just SNL itself, but the broader talent orbit that has fed late night, film, streaming, Broadway, podcasts, and just about every other corner of American comedy.
For Sarandos, that is not nothing. Netflix has already built a formidable stand-up business. It has experimented with live comedy. It has turned comedy festivals into content engines. What it has never had is an SNL—a weekly institution that doubles as a talent laboratory, political barometer, celebrity clubhouse, and archive of American comedy.
Of course, the case gets messier the moment the conversation leaves Studio 8H.
NBCUniversal is not just SNL, Universal Pictures, Illumination, and a shelf of beloved film and TV titles. It is also NBC News, local stations, Peacock, Sky, Universal theme parks, and all the regulatory and operational complexity that comes with them. Netflix’s Warner Bros. interest made a more obvious kind of strategic sense: Warner had the prestige-library argument, the HBO argument, and a cleaner studio-and-streaming appeal. NBCU may be attractive, but it is a much bigger, stranger bundle.
That does not make the Netflix-NBCU idea absurd. If anything, it makes the SNL piece of it more revealing. For Sarandos, owning NBCUniversal would mean owning not just another library or studio, but one of the last remaining institutions from the network era that still reliably produces live comedy, cultural moments, and new talent. For Michaels, Netflix may be the closest thing in the current media business to a company still trying to build a network-sized comedy ecosystem.
The better way to think about it may be this: If Sarandos were building a museum of American comedy, Lorne Michaels would get his own wing. If Netflix were building a modern network, SNL would be one of the few surviving pieces of the old network era still worth studying—and maybe worth owning.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
It’s another legacy property that goes with the boomers.
Blaming everyone but yourself for your sad, pathetic, miserable life!
You call everybody ‘zero’ because it’s your inner voice you creepy old lonely childless loser. You’re unmarried and elderly. You have no family or friends left, so you’re here stalking my comments hoping I respond let alone read them which I do not. You never post your own original comment because Yorker a creepy reply-guy. Look up what that means.
You know I am far more interesting and intelligent than you despite you being alive a lot longer. I know that grinds your gears, old man.
You spend your days scanning this site, not even reading articles. You just look for my comments. I’ve never seen anything like it. You live to find them and comment on every single one, even on ones that aren’t mine, but you consider that an opportunity cost you can’t afford to not make. You truly are something else. Is this what getting old amounts to?
Bull fucking shit you are, Zero! You’re a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti Semitic with a limited vocabulary! That, right there, is evidence that you’re in the bottom tier of intelligent humans!
All you do here is attack and smear your shit over everything! You add NOTHING to this site, because you think your offensive trolling is amusing and entertaining to everyone! You called Connie-luv ‘sugartits’ because it pleases your tiny lizard brain! If this site had actual moderators, your ass would have been banned a long time ago!
You can’t rattle me bitch! As long as you continue to behave like an anti-social sewer rat, I will be there to put the bitchslap on you, Zero! You don’t like it? I don’t care! You gonna grow the fuck up, one way or another, tittybabyboi!
You want my attention, you’ve got it.
I promise I can be a lot meaner than you.
You’re nothing but driftwood. You are a branch of a large tree that family to ramify. So you’re just dying as the rest of the branches and trees are lush. Then you fall off into the water and become what you were always destined to be: driftwood.
Moar pleeze, bitchboi! Yer teerz iz deelish!😋😈😈😈😈😈
I’ll never understand why people who clearly hate late-night TV post here. There are some late-night personalities I don’t like, but I post here because I grew up watching Carson, Letterman, Conan, and SNL. If you don’t even like the format, why waste your time here at all? I don’t get it.
If you Jews love Israel so much why don’t any of you want to live there? If whites are so so so terrible how come you all follow us everywhere we go?
Because you’re a fucking low IQ bigot that doesn’t like anyone who isn’t you! But, then again, what person with average intelligence wants to be like you, Zero?🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Your popular front doesn’t work. Nobody acknowledges you. Even the ones I have a go with dislike you more.
You’re just driftwood.
Get some fucking mental help now, child! You’re one disturbing person!
What does that say?
You’re dishonest in addition to being boring.
I’m honest and interesting.
It doesn’t matter how offensive I am because it doesn’t change that reality. You just give everybody the ick even though you agree with their stupid politics.
You’re just driftwood 🪵
In response to: “If you Jews love Israel so much why don’t any of you want to live there? If whites are so so so terrible how come you all follow us everywhere we go?”
What did I say about Israel or white people, other than the fact I referenced 3 white guys whose comedy I enjoy? What you just said is as ridiculous as me saying “If you love Palestinians so much, why don’t you move to the West Bank?”
Which, by the way, I have no beef with the Palestinian people. However, my family does have a claim to a rather modest home and parcel of land in the Gaza Strip, and as soon as it is safe to enter, I will be arriving to stake my claim. I’m not heartless though, so I’ll throw them a few shekels and pay for a moving van because that’s the kind of guy I am.
Considering how the likes of Connie-luv and Shlomo Goldberg respond to your batshit insanity shows you’re not the honest and interesting person you want everyone to think you are!
What you really are is obnoxious and disgusting, with your racist, bigoted bullshit, boi! Not to mention sad and pathetic, as your attempts to make yourself important around here falls flat like a lead balloon!
Quit, while you’re so far behind, Zero!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Connie and schlomo and I regularly exchange slight insults and yet we also have dialogue. They don’t take it personal like you do because you have no hobbies, families or friends. Nobody here but you takes this seriously because it’s an anonymous chat. I never killed anybody…yet. You’re just a gross person who doesn’t understand humor, ribbing or dialogue. 🪵
“ What did I say about Israel or white people, other than the fact I referenced 3 white guys whose comedy I enjoy? What you just said is as ridiculous as me saying “If you love Palestinians so much, why don’t you move to the West Bank?”
Virtually all Jews and neocons do in fact say this. ‘If Iran is so great why don’t you live there.’
They imply we are all Muslims one minute, Russian spies the next and also a Nazi in between.
It’s so low-IQ drivel designed to obfuscate. Thankfully it isn’t working anymore on the target audience, but it did for 25 years. Jews know very well that Iran is not the same as Qatar, yet they are counting on us cattle not knowing the difference.
It’s just a red herring because it’s a bad faith argument. I have no investment in Iran, which is precisely why I respect them now.
“Connie and schlomo and I regularly exchange slight insults and yet we also have dialogue. They don’t take it personal like you do because you have no hobbies, families or friends. Nobody here but you takes this seriously because it’s an anonymous chat. I never killed anybody…yet. You’re just a gross person who doesn’t understand humor, ribbing or dialogue. 🪵”
Same. I don’t take anything personally around here. In a fucked up way, we have a nice community forming. It’s possible to both like late night television/comedy, and be a troll who says truly despicable, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and downright genocidal things on the internet. In fact, I think the Venn Diagram has a pretty large overlap…
Also, I enjoy being insulted. Take that for what it’s worth.
Am Yisrael Chai! ✊
It’s what men do. We brawl and then get up and leave it all on the field and have a Motzo ball later (well maybe not that last part).
Even ‘terrible evil racists (insert endless woke synonyms)’ like me.
Guys like us get along better in cyberspace and real life than within our own communities, yet that doesn’t mean we change allegiances.
There are many sayings describing this…two Jews, three opinions; the narcissism of small differences.
Boomers don’t understand this because they lived in a literal Aryan utopia and still live a separatist life at our expense.
Shalom Aleichem
Because they’re not the type of people that would put up with your ignorance, your bigotry, and your pathetic hatred of everyone not like you!
Zero needs psychiatric help, instead of posting his hate on a late night site!
You’re alright in my book, even if you’re a little weird (so is everyone else on this website, myself included).
Your shitposting exposes you as a weak little boi who loves to dish it out, but refuses to take it! If you tried getting in a fistfight with me, you’d spend the rest of your days in debt from all the medical bills, caused by me beating the living daylights out of you!
Don’t sign checks your fat ass can’t cash, Zero you smelly turd boi!
After making the stand-up comedy special utterly worthless and meaningless, I look forward to Netflix doing the same to SNL