‘SNL’ Movie ‘Saturday Night’ Shamefully Fails Gilda Radner

Saturday Night has a compelling concept: Instead of a film tracking the history of Saturday Night Live, which is celebrating its 50th season this year, it’s a crazed behind-the-scenes comedy chronicling the night before the first episode ever aired, Oct. 11, 1975.

Directed by Jason Reitman, who wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan, the film is a zany whirlwind depicting the chaos, cast drama, and production issues on a night where anything you could imagine going wrong does. That whirlwind, however, does an enormous disservice: The film completely fails comedy legend Gilda Radner.

Radner made an immediate impact on Saturday Night Live with her now iconic characters Roseanne Roseannadanna, Lisa Loopner, and Emily Litella, and memorable impersonations of celebrities like Lucille Ball and Patti Smith. She even won an Emmy in 1978 for her work on the show. When Rolling Stone ranked every cast member in the show’s history, she placed ninth, with the magazine praising that “Radner was the prototype for the brainy city girl with a bundle of neuroses.” Watching Saturday Night, however, you’d be forgiven for thinking she wasn’t even a cast member.

Saturday Night sidelines Radner so egregiously that I find myself unable to pick out specific moments in which Radner makes a significant impact. The film fails to impress how integral Gilda Radner was to the launch of the sketch show. You’d certainly never know she was the first person to be cast on Saturday Night Live.

Radner exists entirely in relation to other characters in Saturday Night. You don’t get any sense of Gilda’s life story: who she is, where she came from, or her talents. How she felt in the 90 minutes before the show went on the air is a complete mystery. That’s not the fault of actress Ella Hunt, who impressively looks and sounds like Radner and does her best to infuse Radner’s charm and spirit into her brief appearance in the film. A script that refuses to recognize Radner’s value is to blame.

Radner’s name is mentioned maybe once or twice in Reitman’s film, and unless you’re a fan of Saturday Night Live’s history, you probably wouldn’t even register her as part of the show’s cast. And while I didn’t watch the movie with a timer in hand, I’d be willing to wager that the screen time of the brick flooring being built on the show’s set triples the length we see Radner on screen.

You may be thinking: This is a movie about the madcap evening of how Saturday Night Live came to be, and not necessarily about the cast itself. Wouldn’t it make sense that there isn’t much of a focus on Radner? Radner was, by all accounts, a cherished member of the ensemble, and not one to stir up trouble behind the scenes.

Yet every original male SNL cast member gets a significant plot of their own. Chevy Chase (Corey Michael Smith), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), and John Belushi (Matt Wood) all get ample time to flesh out their characters and comedic personas. Even Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), and first-episode host Geroge Carlin (Matthew Rhys) get more to do than Radner.

This is a problem that extends to the other women of Saturday Night. Fellow cast members Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) are also wildly underserved by the film. The woman who gets the most screen time is Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), SNL writer and Lorne Michaels’ wife. While Sennott gives a typically sparkling performance, the most interesting thing about Rosie’s character is whether or not she’ll be credited on the show with Lorne’s last name or her own.

It’s an infuriating decision to sideline all the women of SNL like this, but it stings especially for Radner, who reigns as one of the most impactful women in the history of comedy. When Tina Fey introduced the premiere of the documentary Love, Gilda in 2018 she called Radner “our equivalent to Michelle Obama. She was so lovely and also so authentically herself and so regular in so many ways.”

Fey also credited Radner as an inspiration not only for herself but other comedic greats like Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, and Amy Poehler. It’s devastating that despite Radner’s undeniable impact, Saturday Night treats her as mere set dressing.