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.
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