Who’s Afraid of Lorne Michaels? – Longreads

Very rarely can we see an entire system reflected in one person. The creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live” is such a person.

via Longreads: http://longreads.com/2023/08/17/lorne-michaels-saturday-night-live/

Just as SNL’s maleness empowered its men to mistreat their female colleagues, the show’s whiteness made it an environment where, to name just a few examples: Black actors were given few and stereotypical characters by white writers; Michaels was unlikely to place two sketches about Black characters in succession; performers wore blackface well into the early 2000s, with Michaels defending the practice in 2008; and future The White Lotus and Insecure star Natasha Rothwell resorted to raising her hand in order to pitch jokes in the writers’ room less than a decade ago. The show’s poor record is difficult to divorce from its leadership: if SNL was ever a show by white men, for white men, it was because Michaels didn’t care to make it anything else.