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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Marianne Faithfull, who died last week at 78, had her first brush with death in her early 20s. It was 1969, and the English singer had just arrived in Sydney, Australia, with her then-boyfriend, Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger. Reeling from a recent miscarriage and the gilded chaos of being a muse to the World’s Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band, she ingested more than 100 sleeping pills and didn’t rise from her coma until six days later. The times ahead brought more trouble: She survived a decade and a half of heroin dependency, homelessness, legal battles over songs she’d helped write, the loss of her son in custody proceedings, and a lover who threw himself from an apartment window on the morning she broke up with him.

Life hadn’t always been so bleak for Faithfull, and it would brighten in the future. While still a teenager, she had spun her cover of the rueful Jagger-Richards ballad “As Tears Go By”—about an older person lamenting the passing years—into a modern standard. She would never be a bigger star than she was on the heels of this hit, as a youthful beauty, a songwriting inspiration, and a swingin’ London stalwart—but she only became a better artist with age.

Faithfull’s greatest comebacks were musical, beginning with the glittery sleaze of Broken English in 1979, an album that reintroduced the former starlet as a 32-year-old pop veteran with a croaky, drug-scorched voice. “I feel guilt,” she proclaimed in “Guilt,” though it sounded like I feel good. Faithfull might have had regrets, but she was not one for redemption narratives or performative apologias. Guilt was just another feeling—pointed, painful, and part of being alive.

After Broken English, Faithfull was always making some sort of comeback. The Stones continued to sell out stadiums as their own recorded output grew boring. Faithfull, rounding the bases of midlife in a superficial industry, was forced to repeatedly reclaim her sense of dignity in public. During the ’90s, she resurrected classics by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, ushering a cabaret element into her performances that matched her equally sophisticated and bawdy persona. In the 2007 film Irina Palm, she played a 60-year-old who turns to sex work and finds it liberating. These comebacks bore no taint of compromise, resignation, or shame. Her spirit was proud and transgressive; she retained a sharp edge as many of her male counterparts embarked on toothless adventures in decadence, advertising car insurance and enjoying the perks of knighthood. Faithfull appeared in fashion ads later in life—dancing and ad-libbing to the Staples Singers in a 2002 Gap TV spot, looking elegant and posh in a Saint Laurent print campaign—but these commercial opportunities were at least of a piece with her past reputation as trendsetter who left a mark on ’60s couture. As she grew older, Faithfull kept finding ways to be herself in front of the media and her audience.

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Of all her late-career resurgences, Faithfull’s 2014 gem, Give My Love to London, might be the most lasting and unexpected. Made after a fight with cancer and debilitating back and hip problems, London captured a wistful air of retrospection in Faithfull’s voice that sounded rollicking, loose, and at times anxious. “The river’s running bloody / The Tower’s tumbling down,” she sang on the title track, responding with unease to an era marked by the tumultuous momentum of Brexit. “Sparrows Will Sing,” written by Roger Waters, imagined a future in which “the corridors of power will be / walked by thoughtful men,” but Faithfull took Waters’s Pollyannaish bent as a provocation: She once claimed that she chose to perform the track because its author had “a lot more hope than I do.” Throughout London, Faithfull sang with sorrow, but also fervency, and the balance felt wise. She might not have shared Waters’s apparently rosy outlook, but still she knew the social purpose of hope: not just a reaction elicited by good fortune, but a feeling that people tap into when prospects look rough.

Give My Love to London also reclaimed Faithfull’s biography, twisting her life into something theatrical and enigmatic. A stretch in the ’70s when she was unhoused and living in an abandoned lot seemed to reappear in the magnificent “Late Victorian Holocaust” as an image of a couple throwing up in a park, only to sleep sweetly in each other’s arms. The song was written by Nick Cave, another gifted songwriter who similarly surfaced from addiction with a more generous take on humanity. Faithfull could write wonderful lyrics, but she was unparalleled at filtering the words of others through her poignantly cracked voice, using a mixture of covers, collaborations, and originals as though to confuse any speculation about whether she was drawing from her life. In “Mother Wolf,” a collaboration with the songwriter and longtime Madonna associate Patrick Leonard, Faithfull sang about a canine with a cub in its mouth that isn’t hers, though still she must protect it from violence. The singer might have been thinking of her son, Nicholas, yet the point of this LP was not memoir. Faithfull seemed to be freeing her life story, shirking the songwriter’s prerogative toward confessionalism in order to find more clever ways of describing her experience.

One of her best covers came near the album’s end: a treatment of Leonard Cohen’s elegiac masterwork “Going Home,” which he had released just two years earlier. The song’s first line is “I love to speak with Leonard”—which, as sung by Cohen himself, was a bit of self-referential solipsism. Performed by Faithfull, the song instead addressed an elderly contemporary and their shared sense of mortality, while reversing the persistent notion that her greatest legacy was as an inspiration for talented men. “He does say what I tell him … like a sage, a man of vision,” she sang. It was an elegant example of how Faithfull could imbue her mythology with new energy, recovering her life from society’s gaze, and reminding us that she and these so-called rock gods were headed to the same place, separately: to the grave.

Maybe we need new emotions. The human experience has changed a lot lately: Creativity can be outsourced to AI, culture lives in flickering fragments on screens, and we social animals are spending tons of time alone. Perhaps the words we use to describe basic, primordial feelings—joy, sadness, anger, and those other names for Inside Out characters—no longer suffice. Perhaps that’s why we’ve been bombarded with so many neologisms to describe mind states, like brain rot, or Eusexua.

What, you haven’t heard of Eusexua? It’s a Zoolanderian term coined by the art-pop singer FKA Twigs, and the title of her fantastic new album. It, as part of the marketing campaign, has been spammed across TikTok, spray-painted on New York City sidewalks, and used to refer to a $10.50 matcha latte at a fast-casual chain. Eusexua, the official materials say, is “the pinnacle of Human Experience.” More helpfully, Twigs has explained it to be an ecstatic flow state, the feeling you get when dancing or making a really good cup of tea. It’s perfect present-ness. It’s not thinking about the internet.

This is a rich idea for her to explore, given that, for more than a decade, Twigs has modeled how deliberately made, intellectually challenging music can connect in the digital era. Delving into her art can feel like putting together a puzzle, revealing a scene that’s shadowy, beautiful, and disturbing. Her voice channels the athletic excess of opera and the serene disassociation of an ASMR video. She and her producers like to pair soft, feathery sounds with harsh, arrhythmic beats; her excellent videography heightens the sense of mystique, showing off her talents for ballet, voguing, and swordfighting.

Eusexua, her third studio album, is all about immediacy. It was inspired by a stint in Prague, where she got really into raving. As is typical for new ravers, the high was epiphanic: Twigs came away wondering why we couldn’t try to feel that way—egoless, embodied, in the moment—all of the time. She came up with a system of 11 movements to keep herself in touch with the physical world (for example: rubbing her hands together in a pancaking motion to resist the impulse to look at her phone). And she made an album of dance-pop music.

Roll your eyes if you must. After all, dance pop’s supposedly liberating power has often been hijacked over the years for cynical ends, such as Target commercials and Katy Perry albums. What’s more, Eusexua isn’t afraid of cliché. Twigs and her lead producer, Koreless, tap into 1990s and early-2000s techno-futurism. Listeners will be reminded of the bright-eyed mood of Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger”; the glassy synths of Björk and Radiohead; even the chanted sass of the Spice Girls. A lot of the lyrics are bumper-sticker fare: “You’ve one life to live / do it freely.”

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Luckily, Twigs is still too strange to go generic. These songs hide surprises everywhere: interludes of mechanical scraping; yodels and chants; North West (daughter of Kanye) rapping in Japanese for some reason. Twigs’s vocals mutate between guttural and lithe, and her melodies tend to cut against the insistent grooves of the production. On the title track, a bleeping beat encircles the listener like the walls of a downward-spiraling tunnel, while Twigs seems to sing from miles above, somewhere in the sky. “Drums of Death” builds a battering-ram thump out of chopped-up bits of singing and talking. When something resembling a chorus finally enters the song, it’s like a movie star walking into a crowded café, dampening the noise but intensifying the mood.

Is she really expressing a new feeling? Maybe, kinda, but only when the tempo slackens for the album’s final two ballads. “24r Dog” conjures a musical moonscape, desolate and stark, from which Twigs delivers electronically filtered howls of desire into the void. “Wanderlust” blends hip-hop cadences and pensive guitar as Twigs sings about sitting alone in her bed, bitterly criticizing the world, while dreaming of escape. Both tracks move unsteadily between numbed exhaustion and transcendence in a way that feels fresh—and specific to now.

Really, though, Eusexua is just a new word for an old rush. She seems to acknowledge this when “Striptease” suddenly warps the listener to the early ’90s: a drum-and-bass beat erupts, and Twigs wails in the style of the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. Just as suddenly, the song then zooms to the 2020s by featuring the clicking, pumping “Jersey club” beat that’s in vogue today. The juxtaposition of styles is provocative, but also intuitive. With her own individual flair, Twigs is drawing a connection between party music past and present. The trancelike feeling she’s celebrating may well be music’s evolutionary purpose, and is in particular need lately.