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A review by thrifty_librarian
Live from New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales, James Andrew Miller
4.0
This is a fun, though large, book about SNL from its beginnings to the early 2000s. I read it in about five months, which is strange for me. I kept it under my bed and read it in snippets. It's largely interviews of cast members, writers, producers and hosts, with short transitional paragraphs written by the author every 10 pages or so.
If I were not such a fan of the show, this would've been boring and pointless. It's also helpful to note that it was published 10 years ago, so people interested in reading about Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Taran Killam, etc, won't find what they're looking for here.
By the end, I got a tired of how gushy the book was. Though there is some controversy that comes out through the interviews (Chevy Chase is a jerk, some people think Lorne is manipulative, women had trouble getting airtime in the early years), on the whole the message here is that SNL is groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind, generally amazing. And I mean that's the AUTHOR's point of view, not necessarily that of the people who actually work at SNL.
A fun read if you know enough about classic SNL to recognize the names.
If I were not such a fan of the show, this would've been boring and pointless. It's also helpful to note that it was published 10 years ago, so people interested in reading about Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Taran Killam, etc, won't find what they're looking for here.
By the end, I got a tired of how gushy the book was. Though there is some controversy that comes out through the interviews (Chevy Chase is a jerk, some people think Lorne is manipulative, women had trouble getting airtime in the early years), on the whole the message here is that SNL is groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind, generally amazing. And I mean that's the AUTHOR's point of view, not necessarily that of the people who actually work at SNL.
A fun read if you know enough about classic SNL to recognize the names.