Here’s me watching the movie on the plane.

If you’d have told me I’d write more about Saturday Night Live than most other things (like the Mets, say) so far in 2025, I would have a hard time believing you.

But I was flying back from South Carolina last week and it was the only Delta plane of the four legs of our journey (two flights down and two flights back) with a screen, and I felt like I had earned myself a movie.

So I watched Saturday Night, which I had wanted to see when it came out but it came and went quietly and I forgot about it.

But I’m glad I scrolled through the entire alphabet - there was something in the B’s or C’s that caught my eye that I almost selected before I figured I’d see what else was under two hours on the Atlanta-to-Boston route.

I would have been mad if I missed this movie - it was exactly what I hoped it would be.

Of course, me being me, I spent the whole movie wondering what parts of it were true and what parts were fictionalized, but even if the whole thing was fiction it would have been enjoyable.

The fact that any of that was real, actually, is pretty wild.

It was fun to catch the names here and there who were SNL mainstays - Al Franken, Alan Zweibel - and I thought the acting was great. Everyone almost exactly captured who they were playing,

I guess I don’t know a whole lot about John Belushi - his character was least like what I expected, but who am I to say how accurate that was.

Lamorne Morris was particularly good as Garrett Morris, I thought. (Oh, and shoutout to Matthew Rhys as George Carlin. I didn’t recognize him until the second time he came on screen.)

I was surprised to see a Billy Crystal character there - I didn’t know he was involved with the first episode of Saturday Night Live. (If the movie is to be believed. I guess I have some digging to do.)

I like when a movie can transport you to a particular moment in time that would have been cool to live through.

This is one of those times.

I think the biggest compliment I can offer this movie is I could have watched it for another 90 minutes.

The movie takes place from 10pm to 11:30pm on October 3, 1975, and it ends after the first sketch of the show.

I could have watched them re-enact the entire episode.

Maybe some day we’ll find out there’s a bonus scene to the movie where they filmed that.

I’ll make sure to catch that one a little more quickly after it comes out.