SNL50 - Behind the Scenes

 

There are only a couple more SNL lists. A friend of mine was curious how I put these lists together. He is nerdy like me and enjoys learning about the process. I thought you might be in this same boat. So, here’s how these lists came to pass.

Step One: The Idea
As I mentioned earlier, I am a huge fan of SNL and have been watching it since I was a teenager. It is appointment TV for me, I have to watch it on the Saturday night no matter when I get home. I have tried to get tickets for the show for the past 12 years but the lottery never works in my favour. I once stood in the standby line and was two people away from getting to see the show live in New York. Anyway, I wanted to share my love with SNL with others but I also like keeping track of what I watch. During Co-vid I released my favourite 20 episodes from multiple televisions series. It is what I do. Knowing that SNL would celebrate 50 years (and maybe end there – which it didn’t), I thought it would best to make these lists as a celebration of all thing Saturday Night Live.

Step Two: Get All the Episodes
SNL is coming up on one thousand episodes; that takes time to find them all. The weaker seasons were very difficult to locate. Luckily, some people had compiled full seasons for me to download as a group. I did lots of downloading. Don’t ask me what I used. Let’s just say I found every episode and my external hard drive was packed with SNL.

Step Three: Editing Down
Downloading was nothing compared to the time it took to edit down episodes. First off, not all of them were compatible with Adobe Premiere so I would need to first convert them to the right format. Then, I would put each episode into Premiere and pull out all the things that made me laugh. While doing so, I would categorize them like “Cold Open”, “Monologue”, “DS” for Digital Shorts or “Comm” for commercials and keep track of the season and episode number. Weekend Updates were separated so I could go through them later. Some SNL episodes, I only took out the Weekend Update because nothing made me laugh – those were brutal to watch. I also used an online SNL archive but I’ll talk about that later.

Step Four: Master List
Because I am a geek when it comes to this, I also kept an Excel spreadsheet with each season and episode broken down. I also made one that tallied the numbers so I would know which season had the best musical guests or commercial parodies.

Step Five: Narrowing Down Categories
I’ll use Cold Opens as an example for now. Next, I took all the Cold Opens from every season and put them into a separate folder. Since I don’t remember things from five years ago, I re-watched every Cold Open I edited out of the episodes and divided them into three folders. One folder was for definite favourites, one was really funny and third was not as funny. I also sometimes had a fourth folder for what was I thinking. Looking at the numbers in the first two folders, I would determine how long a list I would make. There were 83 monologues that were narrowed down to 20. There were 17 more that were in contention. I started this whole process a year ago. I also realized that I would have to do multiple categories when it came to the sketches.

Step Six: Weekend Updates
This past March, I started going through the Weekend Updates. I pulled out segments, characters and compiled my favourite jokes from each season. Unfortunately, I can’t share the best jokes from the various anchors because I would have to house them somewhere and then someone would get litigious and I’m just not in the mood for that. Anyway, this Weekend Update process was time consuming and I only finished it in early July a couple weeks ago.

Step Seven: Finding Links
Now with the lists completed, the next step was to find online links. It’s not enough to describe a sketch, you want to see them. Again, while I have all the videos on my computer, I can’t share them due to copyright issues and other legal stuff. It would also be a very full cloud. It was shocking to see that famous sketches like More Cowbell was not available on YouTube. I do have a VPN so I was able to find some American links. As I also mentioned just recently, I realized that YouTube was not the only game in town. There are full sketches on Reddit and Facebook and Vimeo and TikTok. I was relieved that I could now share some of my favourites with those who read the blog.

Step Eight: Capturing Images
While blogging about the sketches, I would watch the video online or on my VLC player. Then I would pause, PrintScreen and then edit it to the right size in Photoshop. This is a way to break up all the writing.

Step Nine: Blogging
I thought it would helpful to add things like airdates, hosts, musical guests and other information that geeky people like me would like to see. It was awesome to have the site snlarchives.net at my disposal. They have loads of information including sketch titles, airdates and how many times a character has appeared on Weekend Update. Not sure if I could have done all these blogs without this website. Thanks SNL Archives.

Step Ten: Posting
The order of the posts is kind of in tune with the average SNL episode. It starts with Cold Open, then Monologue, then Commercial Parody and so forth. Hence, things like Please Don’t Destroy being near the end as they sometimes get cut for time. After looking at my blog on my phone recently, I realized that the spacing is all weird. I narrowed the margins so that it would look better on a phone as I assume most people look at my stuff this way as opposed to a desktop computer. I may be wrong, but that’s just the way I did it. Sorry, if the spacing looks dumb.

I think that’s about it. If you have any questions about the process, feel free to comment or message me. There are two more lists to go: Best Hosts and Best Episodes. Thanks for joining me on this journey.