It goes on because it’s 11:30

One of the main challenges of building anything is the need to be able to balance two competing spirits.

Firstly, you need to be creative: exploring ideas, combining them with others, and seeing where the journey takes you.

But you also need routine: the ability to keep things moving, do the work, and stick to the reps.

It’s a hard balance - and very few teams (or people) manage to do both.

As they close out their 49th season, I’d like to reflect on a team that does: the team behind Saturday Night Live.

Why SNL?

They’re a great case study for two reasons.

First, SNL is the ultimate example of combining off-the-wall ideas with faultless execution.

The team has six days to create an hour and a half TV show from a blank page. And then bring it to life with a cast of eighteen.

This is a long way from the comedy we normally see on TV: refined and workshopped relentlessly, in and out of clubs, over months, if not years.

Plus, one of the team - the host - most likely has never performed sketch comedy in their life.

This is the second reason it’s useful. Because of the host, it’s a different team every week.

The host needs to be able to join on Monday, co-lead the creative process, and help deliver the finished product a few days later.

As a result the rubric has to be easily explainable to an outsider, who can follow it immediately.

What is this rubric?

One decision maker

First, have a single guiding mind. For SNL it’s Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, and its producer for almost fifty years.

He (alongside the host for the week) decides what’s in the show, what’s out. What’s good, what’s bad. Who’s in, who’s out.

It’s the approach of an auteur, and it’s one that works. There’s no democracy in quality.

Go wide

Second, open the ideas funnel as wide as possible. This begins on Monday with the pitches direct to Lorne and the host.

Over about two hours, idea after idea is pitched by the writers and cast. No effort involved, just turn up, and say what you want to write.

Even more importantly, there’s no stigma with re-pitching or recycling old ideas.

The breakout sketch of this season - Ryan Gosling and Mikey Day crash an AI debate dressed as Beavis and Butthead - had been pitched five years before it made it to air.

Narrow brutally

Third, after building your funnel wide, narrow it hard and fast.

After the initial pitch meeting, writers spend Tuesday drafting sketches for the Wednesday table-read, which is followed by a brutal round of cuts.

Even more cuts happen after Thursday rewrites and Saturday dress rehearsals.

Oh, and if the show overruns? The sketches before the end get cut too .

It’s a punishing process - many of the cast members will have less than two minutes of screen-time a week.

As mentioned above, most comedy we see has been either years in the making, or tested in club after club.

A good example is Nikki Glaser's breakout set at last week's Roast of Tom Brady: a set she performed 40 times in the two weeks running up to the show.

SNL hasn’t, so the brutal editing and cycle time is a necessity.

Embrace inefficiency

This process might seem ruthlessly optimised, but at heart it’s wildly inefficient.

Tuesday might be writing day, but it’s really writing night: with most of the heavy lifting done in the early hours of Wednesday morning (you either sleep in the office that night, or get a taxi home for two hours sleep before heading back in for rewrites before the table read).

What happens during Tuesday daytime? Hanging, chilling, karaoke, gaming, smoking, drinking. In other words, pretty much anything other than “work.”

It means ridiculous deadline pressures - as one host once put to Lorne: “I think you’re making this a lot harder than it needs to be,” but without it, I don’t think the show would work.

As Tyler Cowen once put it:

“There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.”

Just ship

Finally, SNL airs at the same time, every week. When the broadcast slot hits, they need to have a show.

Deadlines and constraints work - done is better than perfect.

From Lorne himself:

“The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30.”

aled@ashore.io