Reading notes: 'Live from New York'

This is an oral history of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. I read the original 2002 edition, not the updated 2014 edition. It was a cheap used-book find, and SNL hasn't been much a part of my life since 2002 anyhow. There's a memorable Lorne Michaels quote near the beginning where he says, in effect, that it's hard to make a performance good and that many things end up being not good. Martin Short makes a similar point in Marty, Life is Short (roughly: "that's show business; most things don't work"). It's easy to idealize some of the old SNL seasons, and it's healthy to remember just how low the historical hit rate is. My formative experiences of SNL are renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster in the '90s. In a way this anticipated the modern practice of consuming television as packaged highlights. I still think of fake commercials as central to SNL, because (i) they make good VHS compilations and (ii) my 11-year-old self thought they were the absolute best. I…