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The currently airing 50th season of Saturday Night Live has been greeted with as much pomp and circumstance as any broadcast network show can command in 2024. (By this, I mean I've seen a lot of ads for it at bus stops in LA.) We can only expect the hype to build as we approach the actual 50th anniversary of the series premiere on October 11, 2025. Yet the chaotic events surrounding the first episode of the show have been turned into a pretty okay Jason Reitman movie named Saturday Night (since the series didn't have the "Live" in its title for most of season one). Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan have heavily fictionalized the story of that first episode – Lorne Michaels didn't run off to a bar with less than half an hour to go before air – but the general sense of rambunctious youths running loose in the halls of Rockefeller Center gets the gist across. Also, J.K. Simmons turns up as Milton Berle, and there's a whole bit about how he has a huge dick. I love behind the scenes movies, and I love movies about TV, and I love true stories about the behind the scenes machinations that go into making TV, even when they're bad. So I'm in heaven right now. I didn't think Saturday Night was all that great, but I gobbled up every second of it. But, of course, I wouldn't be me if I didn't immediately start thinking of other stories from TV history worth adapting. So, forthwith, here are five different behind the scenes TV stories I'd love to see dramatized for film or TV, from most likely to get made to least likely. Michael Larson beats Press Your Luck: This one is so likely to get made into a movie that it already is being made into a movie. The story of Michael Larson, an unemployed Ohio ice cream truck driver who used all his free time to figure out how to rig daytime game show Press Your Luck in his favor, has everything going for it. It's bot an unlikely underdog hero! It's got some incredible backstage moments as the show's producers realize they've been bilked! And it features ample opportunity to flash back to Larson hatching his scheme with the help of the then state-of-the-art VCR. Even better, there's a natural built-in crisis point within the story where Larson realizes that he has no exit strategy built into his scheme – so he has to play the game for real. Libby and I kicked around a screenplay about these events many times over the years, and I am furious someone else got there first (though I'm sure the movie will be good – Paul Walter Hauser is perfect casting).
Want to read the other four pitches, including my take on how to make a "behind the scenes at Star Trek" movie? Well, you'll have to become a paid subscriber! Click that button!
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