It is incredibly risky to make films or TV about people who make films or TV. The audience just doesn’t care.
The screen graveyard is littered with the corpses of those who tried, including Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to make the making of Saturday Night Live interesting.
Sorkin failed. Saturday Night gives it another go, focussing on the first episode in 1975 as Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) smoke weed, write sketches and battle the man.
It’s very difficult to care deeply about a plot in which the jeopardy is that a TV show might be cancelled.
It’s very difficult to care about obnoxious narcissists trying to outdo each other. If you’ve ever wanted to spend a couple of hours in a writer’s room, enjoy.
Otherwise, to paraphrase E.B. White, ‘explaining comedy is like dissecting a frog. You may learn something, but the frog dies.’
