I’m going to occasionally write a deep dive called Nobody Asked Me — where I pitch big ideas to companies that did not invite me into the room, have no obligation to listen, and possess more than enough success to tell me to f*ck off.
Still: the ground under all of us is moving.
Even the institutions that define American comedy face the innovator’s dilemma.
SNL clearly sees where the audience lives. This season’s adds—viral-native sketch makers Veronika Slowikowska and Jeremy Culhane, plus creators with built-in followings like Kam Patterson and Ben Marshall—nod to that center of gravity. But history says casting alone doesn’t import the internet; it buys awareness, not belonging.
The real work is wiring the show—and the world around it—to where those fans already are.
So how does a legendary company built to win inside TV’s walled gardens evolve for a borderless, creator-led future?
In SNL’s case, the Broadway Video (BV) machine that optimized for fans and infrastructure has to refit itself as an engine for community and participation.
Should we care about legacy brands moving into the future?
With SNL, absolutely.
It’s a living, breathing franchise in year fifty-one.
My father watches; my siblings twenty years younger watched; my two sons (11 and 13) watch with me. That’s five generations — Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha — sharing one weekly ritual. How many TV series can still claim that kind of real-time, cross-generational presence?
Nostalgia is part of it. But SNL’s weekly ritual — live, topical, hit-or-miss in public — has always functioned like a cultural heartbeat. And its clips do go viral. It is part of the cultural conversation, unlike so much legacy.
Another through-line in BV’s success is curation — spotting voices, pairing them well, and shaping where and how those voices show up. Hosts with writers, writers with formats, formats with platforms. That taste function is the real operating system.
Does it exist without Lorne?
He’s one of a kind and impossible to replace but empires like this don’t get built without deep bench strength: producers, head writers, casting, music, segment leads who’ve been apprenticing in that taste for years. The job now is to scale that curation — not swap it out.
Which is why it’s the perfect place to talk about a pivot from a broadcast era to a community era. The next fifty years need to look different than the first fifty.
So let’s start with how it became what it is today.
How Broadway Video Built a Machine (and What the Machine Couldn’t Do)
The Broadway Video origin story wasn’t a master plan. It was scrappier and smarter.
Lorne Michaels formed Broadway Video in 1979 not as a giant studio, but as a post-production shop cutting together “Best Of” specials. Repurposed what already existed; sold it again in prime time. Low cost, high margin. That little arbitrage established a pattern: take the live weekly chaos of SNL and translate it into other forms.
The film play started with movies like The Blues Brothers — a real act that could tour and sell records — which proved the brand could live off-air. But the jackpot came with 1992’s Wayne’s World, which convinced the industry that a three-minute bit could shoulder a feature.
That “rule” became the trap. Coneheads, It’s Pat, Stuart Saves His Family, The Ladies Man — cult favorites aside, the structural lesson held: sketch was the spark, not the spine, and the theatrical model buckled when you tried to backfill a world and an arc from a punchline.
Lesson learned: stop stretching single bits to feature length and back projects where the world and authorship already travel.
Exhibit A: Mean Girls — a story-world that moved from film to Broadway (with Michaels producing) and back to a new movie musical. That was the template: build on durable tone and IP that could re-express across formats, not on a punchline forced to 90 minutes.
Meanwhile, BV built something sturdier than the film pipeline: late night. Conan, Fallon, Meyers — SNL’s farm system became nightly franchises. Steady ad dollars, massive surface area for talent, a seven-day promo loop through 30 Rock. BV rode that format for several decades, and it now looks like it’s nearing its end due in no small part to the very changes that challenge SNL.
Across two decades, BV ran the TV playbook exactly when Hollywood wanted it — a scaffolding built for sharp niches. 30 Rock (meta-satire training the writers’ room voice), Portlandia (precision niche on cable/early streaming), Documentary Now! (form-forward comedy for obsessives), with A.P. Bio and assorted specials in the mix. It was the right portfolio at the right time: lots of shots, each tuned to a platform and a subculture.
There have been flops too. The foray into comic books in the mid-’90s tries to mint IP from scratch. Wrong market, wrong muscle group. The lesson again: the SNL superpower is talent development in public — capturing lightning and distributing it across formats where the format fits the lightning. But at the end of the day — they built the best machine for the infrastructure of legacy film and TV.
And they were even way ahead of the curve on digital.
Above Average: Early, Right… and Pointing at the Missing Piece
Broadway Video saw the web wave and jumped in with Above Average in 2012.
Not a vanity channel — a studio-within-a-studio designed to catch talent early and ship constantly. Dozens of series; billions of views; YouTube’s NYC studio before it was fashionable; partnerships with platforms and brands; a $15M raise led by Turner and Advance in 2016.
They incubated creators who later crossed into mainstream TV. They spun up The Kicker to chase sports comedy. They moved ideas from web to pilot. They sold into YouTube Red and Snapchat.
But look at the timing of the pivot.
In the late-teens, linear and streamer TV were booming — the sirens singing from the rocks. Budgets! Buyers! Vanity credits!
Above Average followed the money and morphed into a traditional production company just as digital was about to truly boom (pandemic-era creator explosion, short-form dominance, new revenue rails).
And even if they had stayed “digital,” it would have been challenging to ride this last wave. Why? Because Above Average wasn’t creator-driven. It was still studio-driven: casting and commissioning web shorts the old way, measured in views, not belonging.
Here’s the hard truth: Above Average was built for fans, not community.
An audience watched, laughed, maybe shared — but they didn’t have a place to live. No durable identity. No shared rituals. No membership fabric. No ladder of participation. It did what every studio did in the first decade of the web: chase viewership, not belonging.
And that’s the pivot in front of SNL now. Viewers are table stakes. Belonging is the moat.
The Teton Ridge Parallel (and Why SNL Needs Its Own Rodeo Grounds)
I wrote a few weeks ago about Teton Ridge: they didn’t just “do a rodeo”; they built a vertical media company around cowboy culture.
They bought the tentpole (The American Rodeo), signed the athletes, took over the pipes (The Cowboy Channel / Cowboy Channel+), and locked national/global windows (FOX, DAZN). Then they wrapped it in lifestyle and commerce (Cowboys & Indians, Hyer Boots) and fed it with story (doc series, podcasts, classic IP like Lonesome Dove and Louis L’Amour). Net effect: a closed-loop flywheel—events mint heroes, heroes power content, content gathers community, community buys tickets/boots/subs—and all of it lives inside one owned system.
The live event is the nucleus, but the flywheel spins because the community has places to gather daily, not just on game night. Everyone in the loop has a role: athletes, creators, fans, brands. Money flows because meaning flows.
SNL’s weekly live show is America’s rodeo. It’s already the nucleus. But it’s fan not community — still a one-way blast.
That needs to become a two-way conversation.
Yes, Broadway Video built an excellent distribution machine around SNL. They never built a community operating system. Time to build it now — and build it like Teton Ridge, but for sketch culture.
Big caveat before we continue— I have no idea what tethers SNL to Comcast. What obligations and restrictions they have, what regulations they might be bound by. But come with me on this magical inventive journey where we throw off all those shackles that are killing legacy media and build for the future.
The SNL OpenVerse: From Broadcast Slot to Living World
Strip away the NBC time slot and the black box stage. What is SNL? An open cultural playground with a recognizable DNA: topical satire + character comedy + live music + celebrity + the romance of “anything can go wrong.” That DNA can express as sketches, characters, musical performances, alumni vehicles, IRL experiences, podcasts, festivals, creator collabs, education. Treat that DNA as the IP core of a world, not a show.
The play is not to launch “more channels.” The play is to launch a home — a place where different generations of SNL people (cast, writers, hosts, band, crew, alumni, superfans, future creators) can coexist, contribute, and level up. A place with a membership spine and participation ladders.
And the order matters:
Layer 1 — Superfan Spine (the oxygen)
Make membership the core product, not the accessory. How many superfans exist across 5 generations? Built right, I’m gonna say there are a million. That feels conservative.
$6.99/month base. A million members is ~$84M gross (before ads, merch, touring, rights— which is probably worth way more.)
But it only works if the offering feels like backstage citizenship, not “bonus clips”.
Live process windows: table reads, music rehearsals, quick-changes during commercial breaks, cue-card sessions, sketch blocking, Friday-night panic. Not 24/7. Enough to feel real and risky. (Yes, unions/privacy — design around them rather than default to “no.”)
The archive, unlocked: rehearsal pulls; script PDFs across eras; photo sets; cue-card galleries; writer drafts that never made it; let the internet have at it and iterate on all of it.
Conversations with the nearly-forgotten: the one-season cast oral history is the goldmine — Rob Riggle, Michaela Watkins, Jenny Slate, Brooks Wheelan, Noël Wells, Luke Null. Dignify the ephemera and expand the conversation. The super nerds love getting in the weeds.
Ticket priority + IRL rituals: not just the show itself — give them access others can’t have — watching rehearsals on Fridays. Or letting superfans be extras (SAG-AFTRA sanctioned). Or even letting some lucky fans go to the after party with cast. You’re selling rituals and proximity.
That’s why pay. But the lock-in is why stay.
Layer 2 — Second-Layer Fans via a Paid Creator Cohort (the bridge)
Before chasing the entire internet, cast a cohort of creators who orbit the show. Not the cast — an outer ring. Pay them to clip, to participate, to create auxiliary content, to meme, to annotate, to host after-show breakdowns, to teach “how that sketch actually got made,” to stage remixes inside guardrails.
This is the bridge between the legacy studio and the creator economy. This is part of your marketing budget. This drives CPMs, brand deals, and eyeballs. And it helps ensure SNL is part of the cultural conversation in a meaningful way. (And perhaps — its even early talent scouting for future cast members).
Don’t announce them on-air. Let them materialize online with their own rhythms, not as a corporate rollout. Make their work feel discovered — but fund it like a business.
Rev-share + IP structure: they keep their channels and voice; SNL gives tools, access, and bounties for coverage around new sketches and events. Clips carry a subtle SNL bug + content ID that routes back to canonical pages and membership.
This is how you convert the broader audience into fans. The orbit makes the show feel alive between Saturdays and gives civilians a path from “I saw a clip” to “I follow three orbit creators” to “I joined membership for rehearsal access.”
Yes, it means letting go of control. The smart brands are learning to do this. Legacy has to get into that mindset.
Layer 3 — Gen Alpha & the Next Generation (the on-ramp to 2035)
OK — I’m pushing it here, but you’re still reading so let’s go…
This is the first time a generation (Gen Alpha) is authoring content for its on audience at scale. Think about that— kids making content for kids. They pace differently. They write for the phone. They speak emoji-without-emoji. Don’t “adapt SNL to short form.” Build an autonomous unit that answers to the brand but speaks with its own mouth.
SNL Shorts Unit: staffed and led by 16–22-year-old sketch creators with +200k followings. Give them budget, a veteran mentor, a sandbox, and protection from legacy notes that sand off their grammar.
Weekly vertical drop: 3–5 shorts designed for phone-native storytelling — 9–45 seconds that compress SNL’s DNA to modern tempo.
Let the next generation build their own version of SNL on their terms, but support them with education and resources.
Micro-Content: Make SNL for the Micro-Consumer
There’s a cohort that only watches hyper-exaggerated novelas and bite-sized serials. For now. But that format is going to eat everything. Treat micro not as crumbs, but as a product line.
Atomize every sketch: for each broadcast sketch, ship a micro pack: cold-open sting, character entrance beat, prop gag, “host reaction face,” last-line tag — all mastered 9:16 with burned-in captions.
Distribution: public firehose (TikTok/Shorts/Reels/Snap) + owned membership feed where micro chapters land early. Members have an SNL app. The app has the capability to swipe up.
Cast Autonomy — The New Rules
This isn’t a side project. It’s policy. Treat the current cast and writers as partners, not just performers, and codify their freedom inside the system.
Launch owned channels (under the SNL umbrella). Each cast member/writer runs a personal channel with SNL-sanctioned assets and access. They set tone and cadence; SNL supplies toolkits, brand marks, distribution lifts.
Make the off-season an engine, not a void. Keep fans engaged through summer breaks with sanctioned check-ins, mini-projects, AMAs, and live digital moments. Keep the dialogue alive; keep the community warm.
Build downstream participation, not just promotion. Those channels grow audiences the talent can carry for life—and BV should participate in the upside. Structure it so BV co-owns the rails (membership, commerce, clipping tools) and shares in revenue from channel growth, brand integrations, and spin-offs that originate on these tracks. If a cast member explodes and becomes the next Adam Sandler, BV doesn’t just applaud from the rafters; it has a seat on the cap table of that universe because the community and monetization stack were built together.
IRL: Take the Rodeo to the People
If the NFL can kick off in Brazil, SNL can tape on the road. Not every week — once a season. Toronto, Austin, London, Dublin? Mexico City? Local music headliner. City-specific cameo. The logistics are a nightmare. The cultural signal is massive. Geography becomes story.
Membership becomes passport: first crack at travel tapings, rehearsal passes, prop-dept meet-ups, local alumni pop-ups.
Add a three-day SNL World in summer: table reads on stage, sketch labs, alumni live shows, music acts, prop exhibitions, a timeline museum, “dress vs. air” screenings, and a pitch gauntlet where one member short gets greenlit live. Not Comic-Con. Inside the show, outdoors.
Why Now (and Why This Isn’t Optional)
Because the audience’s behavior already changed.
Because Gen Alpha is already teaching the generation behind them how to communicate in moving pictures. Because a broadcast slot — even 11:30pm Saturday — is a stage inside a bigger world, not the world itself. Because the people who will carry SNL into its next half-century need to belong to it, not just tune in.
Also because the business is sitting there: a membership core that throws off reliable cash; event layers that deepen the bond; a digital-first unit that recruits the future; a clipping economy that points back home; a commerce layer that turns inside jokes into rituals; and a data layer that makes the programming smarter.
The Teton Ridge lesson: once the flywheel spins, each spoke feeds the rest. In SNL terms: live show leads to membership rituals leads to Orbit cohort leads to Gen-Alpha shorts leads to IRL tours/festival leads to brand-safe open-source sketches leads to alumni/storytelling verticals leads to back to live.
Round and round.
Okay, But What Breaks?
Legal will say “no”.
Unions will have spirit-of-the-deal concerns. Music clearances will choke clips. Some hosts won’t want behind-the-scenes cameras. Some alumni will overshare. A Gen-Alpha unit will post something that rattles a sponsor. The SNL road show will be prohibitively expensive.
Design for it. Give hosts vetoes on specific areas and sell the upside (their promotion runs through membership too). Set conservative expectations, then over-deliver.
The point is not to televise the sausage factory. It’s to invite people into the craft without wrecking the kitchen.
Get in the creator mindset. Experiment. Fail. Experiment again.
The Closing Beat
SNL was built on fans and an infrastructure that delivered a miracle every Saturday. That got you fifty years.
The next fifty require community with tools. A living world where the audience clips, pitches, attends, learns, argues, collects, votes on tags, meets the cue-card department, travels with the show, builds commerce with talent, collaborates with brands in the open, and yes — pays to be part of it.
I can think of creator-led businesses who could partner with BV and build this.
But nobody asked me.
This was a really interesting read. I feel like I could even apply this to my own journey in content creation. And I agree, if SNL could become more community focused it could greatly benefit them but studios are hard to change.