Ahead of the live SNL 40th anniversary special on February 15th, Lorne Michaels sat down for an interview with THR to talk about the history of the show, what we can expect from the big reunion, and what it’s like to be the leader of a 40-year television institution. When asked if there’s an SNL season he’d like to do over, Michaels picked his first season back as producer in 1985 after leaving the show in 1980: “I wanted to recapture [what we had] … We were just younger, and so I wanted to get back to that and I maybe went too young. I think it wasn’t thought through as much as I would have liked it to have been. But good things came out of that season, and then we adjusted the following year.†Michaels also made some easy choices when asked about talent he’s overlooked throughout his career, noting Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Lisa Kudrow, and Jim Carrey as performers who “you’d see how brilliant they were, but you know on some level that it wasn’t going to work.â€
THR also asked Michaels about the guest list for the reunion show and what we can expect from the special compared to the 25th anniversary show in 1999:
The rules we used were these: Every host was invited. Every musical guest was invited. Any castmember and writer who had been here longer than a year was invited. Not everybody is going to come. The other rule we used, which was just the simplest way to go, was if people sent back their RSVP, they were in the mix of people we could write for. On the 25th anniversary — which turned out remarkably well and was the first time I thought, “I could stop now and be good†— we did mostly live moments with tape and clips. This time, we have some of that, but we’re doing more performances.
Read the rest of the interview over at THR.