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Neko Case is best known as a lead vocalist for the Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers and a solo career that doesn’t quite fit any genre (“country noir” and “odd rock” are two labels she has suggested). Her songs feature unusual protagonists, many of whom are animals, and critics and fans have been puzzling over her lyrics for years. Recently, Case published a memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which suggests possible source material for her vivid and sometimes alarming imagination. In the memoir, she writes mostly about her experience growing up as the child of teenage parents who, in her telling, never came around to wanting a child. And about finding an alternative home in the music scenes of the American Northwest and Canada.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Case about men, music, her own sliding sense of gender, the impossibility of being a musician in the age of streaming, and most important, how not to suffer for your art. After a lifetime of thinking about her parents, she also has good advice on when not to forgive.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Just a quick note: This episode contains some cursing that you might not usually hear on this show.

Neko Case is one of those musicians that people have really strong personal attachments to, especially indie music lovers of a certain generation. Like, I know two people who have named a child after her.

Neko Case is a lead vocalist of the indie-pop collective the New Pornographers, and she’s also had a long solo career. But what’s most distinct about her are her lyrics, which are often oblique. Like, a song seems to be about a car crash, but maybe it’s really about incomplete grief. You have to listen a few times before you get closer to it.

[“Star Witness,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then there are lots of times when Case seems to be writing about herself, but it’s not entirely clear.

[“Things That Scare Me,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Last month, Neko Case peeled back some of the mystery. She’s written a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which shares part of the same title as one of her albums from 2013.

She writes about growing up poor and neglected. Her parents were teenagers when they had her, and her guess is that neither of them ever wanted a child. By the end of her sophomore year in high school, she asked her mom for emancipation. She writes: “She couldn’t sign it quickly enough; she didn’t even have to think it over.”

And so Case hid a lot behind her music.

[Music]

Rosin: One of my favorite scenes is you as a kid in the school library. Like, you remembered that the beanbags were corduroy. The image was so perfect. It was such a perfect image from that era. And you were hiding out with your headphones on. I think you mentioned listening to “Atomic,” by Blondie.

Neko Case: Over and over and over and over, like only a neurodivergent ADHD kid can do.

Rosin: Right. Right. (Laughs.) Like, just a million times. Do you have words for what that was like for you? Because it felt like, Okay, that’s the moment that she discovers the power of music. In a movie, that would be the scene in which you discover what music is for and what it does to you.

Case: Music was always just there. And I took it for granted, but I also leaned really heavily into it. I did not make a connection that music was something I would want to do or I would do, because I was just a girl. And I did not make a connection between myself and Blondie, or myself and the Go-Go’s. I just knew I really loved them.

Rosin: So why did it take so long, do you think, for you to open your mouth and sing? You played in bands, but you didn’t really sing for a while.

Case: Well, I was raised to be female in the United States of America so, you know, I wasn’t raised with a lot of self-confidence.

Rosin: So what was the point where you were like, Oh I can do this?

Case: It wasn’t so much deciding I could do it. It was just that I couldn’t help but to do it, because the desire was so intense.

Rosin: Now, the desire is the desire to make music, to write music, to sing? What was the desire?

Case: Even just to sit near it. Anything. Anything I could have.

Rosin: In the book, you complain about your voice. You write that it was neither pretty nor powerful. And that’s—

Case: Oh that’s not a complaint.

Rosin: It’s not a complaint. Okay, okay, okay.

Case: No, no, no. It’s not powerful, and it’s not pretty. Like, those are things that—you know, I wish it were powerful. I don’t care that it’s not pretty. I very much enjoy hearing women singing in ways other than being pretty. And singing is an incredible physical feeling. It’s like your mouth is a fire hose, and you can twist your insides and make a powerful thing come out to the point where your feet levitate ever so slightly off the floor.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Case: It gets so physical. It is so athletic, and there’s nothing else like it.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Well, even in this just few minutes that we’ve been talking, you describe a little journey from a point where the world gives you a set of expectations and tells you, you can and can’t do things. And you seem to sort of find your way out of that, either through your voice or how you experience music, or even the way you write about institutions. Like, you write the country-music institution was limiting in some ways.

Case: Oh it’s straight up misogynist and racist and hateful. We don’t even have to sugarcoat that one. The current country-music scene of radio music in Nashville is absolutely heinous. And I watch young women try to get in there, and I love them so much, and they’re trying, and I’m like, Don’t even bother. Let that thing die. That thing is poison. Come over here. Let’s make the other thing.

Rosin: And is the other thing, like, you inventing your own genres? You’ve given them names over the years that are—“country noir” or “odd rock,” and things like that. Like, is that the way out? Is that what you tell women?

Case: I think that what it is, is the gatekeepers of country music are absolutely terrified that it might evolve, whereas the gatekeepers of rock and roll don’t have a problem with evolution. But there’s something very white supremacist about how country music works. And they’re really, really dialing down on it now.

Rosin: So you don’t mean just then. You’re talking about then, and now there’s a resurgence. Because there was a great moment—

Case: I think it’s worse now. I think it’s far worse now than it has been in a long time.

Rosin: I mean, there was a good moment for women—it was a brief good moment for women in country music.

Case: There have been a couple.

Rosin: Yeah.

Case: Sometimes, people are so talented that they’re undeniable, and not even the gatekeepers can keep them out.

Rosin: Well, it’s good Beyoncé made that country album then.

Case: We’re lucky to have Beyoncé doing a lot of things. That’s all I’m saying.

Rosin: That’s true. That’s true. (Laughs.) I think reading your memoir, for me, changed how I heard your music, and I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing or not the intended thing. Is that something you explicitly thought you were doing? At times, I almost read it like, Oh this is a key to some lyrics, and I wasn’t sure if that was correct or not correct.

Case: I tried to not give away the songs as much as possible. Like, there was a couple times where I kind of went into them, but I don’t like to ruin songs for people. You know how you will hear the lyrics of a song one way, and then you find out it’s not the lyric that you thought it was, and then you’re like, Oh. It’s not as good anymore?

If you think you know what a song’s about, and it makes you feel connected emotionally to it, and it becomes a little chapter heading in your life, you don’t want to ruin that for people.

Rosin: Yeah. But I don’t know if it’s ruin it. I think it’s just complicate it. I’ll give you an example—and maybe just indulge me, and you can walk me through the process. I’m the listener. You’re the singer. When I read the book title, of course, I immediately thought of your 2013 album—

Case: Yes.

Rosin: —The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, for obvious reasons. Because of the song “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” which has run in my head for 10 years—

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —which starts with the kid at the bus stop, and then the perspective is quickly shifting, so it’s hard to keep up with who’s the you and who’s the me.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then that kind of devastating line about, “My mother, she did not love me.”

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: In your mind, is that line related to the book in any way?

Case: Well, that song was a real event. I was really at a bus stop in Honolulu, fleeing Hawaii. And I saw it happen, and I just felt so helpless.

Rosin: You felt helpless to protect the kid?

Case: Yeah. But the kid, also, was being very resilient, and she was entertaining herself. She was very spunky and cute. And her mom was just an asshole.

Rosin: I mean, reading your book, I did think, Oh that line resonated with Neko for a reason, because of struggles with your own mother. Do you mean for people to read the memoir that way?

Case: Well, I mean, I told the story. I just—I’ve never written a book before, and I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I wanted to write fiction, but it was at the height of the pandemic, and Hachette said, We’ll pay you to write a memoir, though. And I was like, Okay. A memoir it is. And that’s not a complaint or, you know, they didn’t hold my heels to the fire or anything. I just thought, Okay, well, it’ll just be a little challenging, because, you know, talking about yourself or writing about yourself to yourself isn’t the most exciting thing ever.

You spend a lot of time with yourself. So I don’t think of myself as like, Oh people are really going to want to know this. So I mean, that’s one of the reasons I tried to pick more interesting stories from childhood that were scenes, maybe, of good things, too, because I didn’t want it to just be, Oh poor me, especially because it’s not unusual. It’s most people’s experience.

I mean, my situation with my mother is pretty bizarre. But neglect or abuse or things like that—those are most people’s experiences. Or growing up really poor—that is most people.

Rosin: I think your experience is actually pretty unusual.

Case: Yeah. It’s pretty damn weird.

[Music]

Rosin: “Pretty damn weird” it is.

When Case was in second grade, her father told her that her mother had died of cancer, which was surprising because Case didn’t even realize she was sick. And then a year and a half later, her dad said to her one day: I don’t want you to think your mom’s a ghost, but she came home.

As Case recalls in her memoir, the story was that her mother had had terminal cancer and gone to Hawaii to recover but didn’t want Case to see her so ill. And Case—who, remember, was a little kid—believed her. She had her mom back. She was happy.

It only occurred to her later—after many, many years and another disappearing act from her mother—that she might never have been sick in the first place.

Rosin: It’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard. I mean, it is a little shocking and hard to forget. And I’m not sure if you knew that or recognized it in that way.

Case: I didn’t know that until I was in my early 20s, and I told somebody I knew that my mom faked her death. And then they were like, That’s the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I was like, Oh yeah. That is actually pretty weird, isn’t it? But you know kids. Kids just think what’s happening to them is what happens. So it didn’t occur to me.

Rosin: So where did it register for you? Because now I see that what I am assuming about that song isn’t actually how you move through the process. I just assumed you had that in your head when you wrote the lyrics, “She did not love me.”

Because that lyric is haunting, even the way you sing it and the pacing of it. I just assumed you had that in your head, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just had it in your subconscious somewhere.

Case: It’s in me all the time. And, you know, it’s just not my fault.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Case: She didn’t love me. And it’s just the fact.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: When you work out memories and pains in song, is cathartic a banal word to use here? Does it do something for you to work it out and learn?

Case: Only in a super-nerdy, kind of neurodivergent-slash-Virgo way where I’m like, Oh! I’m taking all the things, and I’m organizing them in this box. And so now I can put this box over here like a hard drive, so my brain has more room in it. And it’s all color-coded, and I know where it is. That’s, like, Virgo organization.

Rosin: Interesting.

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Because I feel like one glib way to read a memoir like this is, Oh from family trauma and a mother who didn’t love you comes immense creativity. How wonderful! What’s wrong or right about that interpretation?

Case: Well, the mythology of people needing to suffer to make beautiful things or just art or creative things, in general, is not true.

Rosin: You mean they don’t need to suffer? Because it feels like, reading this book, your suffering is related to how you think and work through things and organize things.

Case: No. If I had had a supportive upbringing, I would be able to read music and play instruments and would probably be a lot further along. You don’t need that.

Rosin: So to you, it just feels like pure baggage. It’s, like, a thing you’ve had to tolerate, but you could have been a singer some other way.

Case: Oh it’s an absolute trunk of shit.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Case: The things that I admire about myself are despite those things. You know, like, I still am a trusting person. I still really want to see the good in people, and sometimes I will make mistakes and trust people I shouldn’t. And I could beat myself up about that, or I could just go, No. You still want to believe people are good. And I think that’s a more important quality than whether or not you’re wily enough to spot a jerk a mile away—you know what I mean?

Rosin: Yeah, I was more thinking, like, you had this life, and you had to escape this life and find your family elsewhere, and you had a huge, strong motivation to do that, and so you found music.

Case: Yes.

Rosin: But that’s just another way of saying trauma made you a great musician.

Case: No. Music is the only thing that never let me down. But trauma did not make me a great musician. I am a journeyman, at best, and, you know, I’m broke. I don’t know—I think great musicians do other things.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wait. Did you just say you were broke?

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Do you mean financially broke or personally broke?

Case: Financially broke.

Rosin: Really? How is that possible? I think your fans would be shocked.

Case: The confluence of my house burning down, COVID, and streaming—those three things together.

Rosin: Wow.

Case: And I cannot catch up.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back—more with Neko Case on politics, on forgiveness, and a recent experience with a friend’s death that she said felt like getting on the spaceship to go to the moon.

Case:  I felt absolutely unafraid. And I was seeing an actual moment of grace in life, and I couldn’t believe it.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: I wanted to ask you about gender, because the way you write and sing about gender is very much the way a lot of people talk about gender now. And I’m curious how you have watched the evolution of how people inhabit and think about gender, like in your lyrics to “Man”—

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —you don’t mean that literally. What do you mean by “I’m a man”?

Case: I do mean it literally.

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Case: I mean, I am of the species. I am a man. Like, whatever’s going on downstairs doesn’t matter. I have all my faculties. You can call a female or a male lion a lion, and they’re still a lion. I’m a man in that same way.

And I am so thrilled and proud and excited by generations younger than mine who are not backing down from who they think they are and the idea that they get to be who they are. That has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever witnessed, and it has given me so much more insight into myself because I never felt like a girl or totally a guy. I’m more of a gender-fluid person.

Rosin: And when you say it’s taught you so much about yourself, what do you mean? Because in the book, there is one way in which you very much inhabit the experience of a woman of that generation, just at the hands of careless and arrogant and brutal men, like a teacher, older brothers, fellow musicians. And then there’s a sense, I imagine, of being trapped in that.

So what have you learned about yourself in this era of gender fluidity? How do you think about yourself?

Case: As neither. I am neither. I still call myself she/her. I’m used to it. It doesn’t bother me. And partly because the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it. I just won’t. But I also understand that the world hates gender-fluid people and trans people, LGBTQ people, and I understand the importance of not abandoning that, either.

Rosin: So you see the world as making some cultural progress and how we think of what’s a man and what’s a woman in some corners, but not a lot of progress politically or socially.

Case: Politically, we are fucked. Socially, I don’t think what the president and his people represent, represents the American people. I don’t believe that Americans, in general, have a hatred or a problem with people who are not white, who are LGBTQ, who are immigrants. I just don’t think they do.

Rosin: To shift away from politics, since we get a lot of it over here in D.C., although this is related, the thing—

Case: Well, I mean, a human being’s right to be is—I mean, that’s just everyday life. Like, politics and everyday life just—they just aren’t separate, not that I want to talk about politics, specifically. Because I just refuse to be afraid.

Rosin: Do you feel like that’s something you found at this age? Because you’ve said there are times in your life where you haven’t had self-confidence, you’ve been depressed, or you’ve kind of lost your mind, even, in one section of the book. Is it easier to not be afraid now?

Case: Well, I have really benefited from menopause. And a lot of people who menstruate who don’t anymore have said the same things about, you know, the hormone shift. Like, you don’t care anymore what people think of you.

And also, I just came from seeing one of my best friends die. And sitting with her body for four days as—you know, she was an organ donor, and she had a massive aneurysm. And her partner just heroically did CPR, and then the paramedics came and kept her pulse going and got her to the hospital, and they stabilized her, despite the fact that she had no brain activity.

And you cannot be an organ donor unless you die on a respirator in the hospital. Like, it’s very, very specific. And then you have to wait for all the tests. There are barrages of tests that happened to make sure that you’re healthy and that your organs can really save someone else’s life and not be rejected. And so we spent days just with her and talking about her life and what a selfless person she was. And we joked a lot about how she was going to work, even in death. She was all about service.

And then the day came. Right on the way to the OR, what they do is they do a thing called an “honor walk.” And we went down what seemed like miles of corridors behind her hospital bed, behind the doctors. And the corridors were lined with doctors and nurses and hospital staff honoring her. And it seemed like one of those movies where you see the people going down the corridor in slow motion to get into the spaceship to go to the moon or whatever, and everyone’s saluting them, and it seems so important. And I think I actually saw that in real life.

And I just thought, All those things that I worry about and the injustices—we are so right to fight for them. And I was there watching this incredible thing happen, and these beautiful people from all over the world—many of the doctors are immigrants—and it was a mix of people of all colors from all over the world and all different cultures. And I felt so utterly galvanized against the fear and so utterly galvanized in that joy is the way forward.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Case: Loud-ass, exuberant joy.

Rosin: I mean, one of the things I took most from your book is how you write about forgiveness. It’s related to this. I mean, you definitely acknowledge the beauty of forgiveness, but then you say this other thing, and you could read this in a lot of different ways, which is the “trust your contempt” paragraph. Do you remember that? You don’t have the book in front of you, right?

Case: I don’t. But I do talk about this, occasionally.

Rosin: Yeah. Dissect it if you can. If something doesn’t stir anything but contempt in you, then there’s a reason. Don’t canonize your contempt, but don’t ignore it.

This is the part that I love. It’s so good: “Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson.”

Where would you say you are—you know, you have a lifetime of songs; you have this memoir; it sounds like you have friends—on this path? Is it different for different people? Like, forgiving members of your family, people who have hurt you in the past?

Case: Oh yeah. I mean, relationships with people are all very different, and some are very complicated, and some are not.

Rosin: So you would say you’re at different places with different people?

Case: Oh yeah.

Rosin: What about your dad? I was curious about him because he plays a kind of shadow role in the book, not quite with the extravagant cruelty of your mother. Maybe neglectful—maybe—is the right way to read that.

Case: I have a lot of compassion for my dad and a lot of sadness because I feel like his development was arrested completely. And he had to be an adult man and head of the family and all these things, and he was just a kid inside. And he didn’t know how to handle it. He maintained it with drugs and drinking for a long time, but then it catches up with you.

And the kind of pain from that—he didn’t use what happened to him to manipulate anyone. His forward path was genuine. He wasn’t doing a great job, but he was also a 19-year-old kid when he had me. And he didn’t want me, but he ended up with me.

Rosin: Yeah. And ended up raising you.

Case: Not really.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. Ended up housing you under the same roof.

Case: Sometimes.

Rosin: Sometimes. Yeah, there was that moment when you guys reconnect over a car. You speak car talk with each other—

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: —which is very familiar to me. I come from a family of mechanics and car people. And so I found that very peaceful. It was a tiny second of peace in a very rocky journey.

Case: Yeah, it was nice because when I was a little girl, I would have loved to have had him show me how to do things, because he was always fixing the car or the truck or whatever, and it would have been nice to have been included. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought he wanted a boy, and I thought he was really disappointed. But he just didn’t want any kid.

Rosin: You know, I’ve just been nonstop listening to your music to prepare to talk to you and sort of tuning into the different moods of different albums. And I wonder, from you: What’s the song you wrote when you were happiest? Or even when you listen to it now, it makes you happy. Like, it just makes you feel good.

Case: Probably “Hold On, Hold On.” It’s melancholy, but it feels very much like I am in charge of myself. And I make good decisions in it.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: So it’s, like, a song that makes you feel like all of this pain and trauma—like you can handle it.

Case: Partially. It’s a moment of actually seeing yourself clearly. It doesn’t mean the moment’s going to last.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Case: I think I also partly feel that way because I wrote it with the Sadies, and I have such a loving relationship with them. And it’s always made me feel good to play it. And my dear friend Dallas Good passed away a couple of years ago, way too young. And so now it takes on a new sort of heaviness, but it’s a heaviness that feels good to carry somehow.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Thanks again to my guest, Neko Case.

[Music]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

As Saturday Night Live nears its official 50th anniversary, the pageantry and buildup around the big event has reminded me of something fairly unfunny: a royal jubilee. It’s fascinating to consider how an anarchic weekly comedy show has developed the backstage air of a British royal drama, between the often-hagiographic retrospectives, the many “best of” lists appraising its hallowed cast and most revered sketches, and the constant speculation over who might succeed its 80-year-old creator, Lorne Michaels, as executive producer. But what occurred to me as I took in two recent examinations of SNL history—the four-part Peacock miniseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, and the music-focused special Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music—was that the show’s five-decades-deep lore is as important to its long-running success as the comedy itself.

Full credit to these undertakings; each one is an incredibly meticulous, self-reflective work that avoids an easy, by-the-numbers approach. Documentaries recounting the show’s famous moments and scandals have littered the airwaves over the years, and the book Live From New York already offers an authoritative history. But these new looks back delve into SNL’s greater legend in ways both whimsical and sometimes genuinely surprising, even for a devotee. Somehow, they mine new territory on what is possibly the most over-discussed TV series in American culture.

The common theme for all of these works? Just how impressive it is that the show gets made, week after week, year in and year out, despite the seeming impossibility of the enterprise. SNL50 does this by appealing to the highest rank of SNL lovers. The first level of the fandom is the simplest; it entails enjoying new episodes, glomming onto the stars of the current ensemble, and rewatching favorite sketches. The second involves plumbing the history and acknowledging the legendary cast members of yore, such as Phil Hartman, Gilda Radner, and Dana Carvey. But the level after that comprises studying the traditional, Rube Goldbergian process that creates everything behind the scenes. It’s a delicate dance of gathering material for a mix of cast members and celebrity guests while incorporating Michaels’s remote dispensations of wisdom. This sensitive practice accounts for the peaks and valleys of perceived quality that SNL has experienced throughout its tenure.

[Read: The unfunny man who believes in humor]

SNL50 cleverly lays out that cycle in its four distinct installments, which dig into a particular niche of how SNL has ticked along for half a century. The first, “Five Minutes,” is about the auditions; it’s particularly enamored with the show’s mythos, as any dedicated viewer (or aspiring cast member) might be with this peek behind the curtain. It takes advantage of an incredible archive of audition footage from cast members young and old, as well as some recognizable figures who inexplicably didn’t make the final cut—Stephen Colbert, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Coolidge. There are lovely, nostalgic moments in which current cast members watch their shaky, nervous first steps, but I was struck by how little “Five Minutes” actually explains why the people who make it through get picked.

The lack of definitive reasoning is where I felt the sphinxlike figure of Michaels looming. The placid Canadian has run SNL for 45 of its 50 years (he took a five-season break in the ’80s). He’s seen his reputation shift several times over the eras, from revolutionary shit-stirrer to staid comedy gatekeeper to the grandfatherly charmer he is today. But he’s also, somehow, kept himself and his machinations a little opaque; he’s largely absent from the various new documentaries. “Five Minutes” puts the spotlight on other crucial, less heralded names in the SNL production system over the years, such as the former longtime producers Marci Klein and Lindsay Shookus. But when discussing what makes for a good audition, many of their answers boiled down to something ineffable: It’s either an obvious yes, or it isn’t.

That’s the tricky balance these new anniversary specials have struck: going behind the scenes without fully puncturing the mystique. SNL50’s third chapter, “Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room,” assumes a fly-on-the-wall position to reveal a single episode’s genesis. It portrays the ideation and writing process for the actor Ayo Edebiri’s debut hosting gig in February 2024. Any deep fan knows some of the stressful basics here, but it’s fun to see them play out—writers throwing concepts to the guest while they squat on the carpet in Michaels’s cavernous office; Tuesday’s maddening, all-night scripting rush; and then the miraculous alchemy that somehow turns their grab bag of notions into full-fledged pieces for TV, some rewritten just before airing.

[Read: Saturday Night Live’s endearing mediocity]

Edebiri’s appearance was, in my memory, a perfectly ordinary edition of SNL—a couple of good sketches, others more forgettable, with the actress an energetic and game emcee. Watching the herculean, possessed frenzy of making it was much more entrancing, like producing it seems to be. It was hard not to get swept up in the mythmaking on display: The institution’s survival seems to hinge on the staff’s belief in its fabled scrappiness, compelling it to keep doing an absurd amount of work. Sure, the chaos seems like a bizarre way to put together a live TV show, but can you come up with a better method?

The most fascinating section of SNL50 is “Season 11: The Weird Year,” which lays bare how easily the flow can be disrupted. It focuses on what’s regarded as one of the oddest and worst runs in SNL history, so bizarre that Madonna opened Season 12 by reading a statement purportedly from NBC: “It was all a dream—a horrible, horrible dream.” Somewhat tellingly, it’s the only entry of the miniseries with much on-screen involvement from Michaels himself. He recounts returning to SNL in 1985 after a half-decade hiatus and deciding to completely overhaul the cast with young, buzzy talent; he brought on actors such as Robert Downey Jr., Randy Quaid, and Joan Cusack, along with the cast’s first openly gay performer, Terry Sweeney, and the first Black woman to star, Danitra Vance.

A few of the new hires worked: Michaels retained Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn, and Dennis Miller for Season 12, which was otherwise a total teardown. But overall, what’s interesting about Season 11 is how the producer deviated from his established formula—of drawing unknown talent from the stand-up circuit and the country’s best improv and sketch groups—to go bigger and bolder, only to be left with a cast that lacked chemistry and was tougher to mold. Once more, I realized that the miniseries is, inadvertently or not, arguing for the cloistered way Michaels and company operate. It’s a noble and in-depth examination of one of the series’ biggest failures, which saw Michaels fire two cast members halfway through and the writers undermine the season on-screen before it had even ended. Yet for all the dysfunction it lays bare, “The Weird Year” also makes a stealthy case for what keeps SNL otherwise stable.

[Read: SNL’s new kings of bizarro buddy comedy]

The remaining installment further breaks down the show’s humor, as opposed to just its creation, by fleshing out in wonderful detail the famous “More Cowbell” sketch—in which Will Ferrell and the guest host Christopher Walken crack up their castmates during an absurd recording session of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” Meanwhile, 50 Years of SNL Music is a gorgeously edited repository of SNL’s music history. Interviewees discuss major moments in-depth, such as Sinead O’Connor’s shocking protest of the Catholic Church, Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching, and the punk band Fear bringing a group of moshers onstage. Better still, the co-directors Questlove and Oz Rodriguez also illuminate how the musical guests have broken ground. Avant-garde musicians appeared early on, including Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, along with the first rap group to perform on national TV (Funky 4 + 1, in 1981). Even segments as seemingly divorced from the comedy as the musical acts can become part of the lore—just as a one-off routine can have an hour-long backstory.

There’s an underlying triumphalism to all this watchable, well-done anniversary media. They’re a procession of clips, interviews, and behind-the-scenes tidbits that assure the viewer that SNL is not going anywhere. Yes, the auditions are hell, the schedule is exasperating, and sometimes whole episodes don’t connect. But I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s oft-mangled quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. SNL is a beautiful, if strangely shaped, comedic edifice. But after 50 years, it’s still standing.

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*Illustration sources:
Alan Singer / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty; Will Heath / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty; Dana Edelson / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty; Yvonne Hemsey / Getty; Alison Hale / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty

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