Little Spaceships
Grant McCracken in Culturematic:
The Lonely Island turns out to be a brilliant Culturematic. It’s good at testing the world, discovering meaning, and unleashing value. Traditionally, the SNL show runner, Lorne Michaels, expects a new comedian like Samberg to become part of the cast at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Even the likes of Bill Murray and Tina Fey were obliged to sign on. But Samberg was allowed to stay aloof. Why? It was to give SNL a little spaceship that could go places and do things out of the range of the SNL players. At 30 Rock, no one invests so much as a second in something that might not work. Because the clock is ticking. But The Lonely Island can try stuff until something works. Here, failure is acceptable, because, as Michaels puts it, it’s the guys, not the cast, who “take the risk.”
Pre-taped, off-format, shot somewhere else entirely.
They did not ask the show to change.
A chaos container is cheap to lose on purpose.
The point is not that the spaceship succeeds.
It is that it can fail on a Saturday and the show still goes out at 11:30.