SATURDAY NIGHT'S ALL RIGHT: Over the holiday I finally finished "Live From New York," the mammoth oral history of "Saturday Night Live" written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. Like all great showbiz books, it offers just the right amount of historical exposition, artistic analysis, and behind-the-scenes gossip. And the book is refreshingly honest about the show's ups and downs over the years- after reading it, it'll be hard to ever respect Chevy Chase (or Janeane Garofolo) again. Doing for SNL what Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" did for '70s Hollywood, the book sheds all sorts of light on pop cultural touchstones that we thought we knew all about- I can't recommend it enough.
Posted by Stephen Silver at December 27, 2002 12:20 AM