When Lorne Michaels and Jeff Zucker Fought It Out Over ‘30 Rock’ (Exclusive Excerpt) – Hollywood Reporter
Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterIn ‘Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,’ Susan Morrison goes behind the scenes of a tense meeting just days before the 2006 upfronts.
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Ahead of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th anniversary, New Yorker writer Susan Morrison was granted unprecedented access to Lorne Michaels and his impressively large web of creative collaborators and powerful friends. After conducting hundreds of interviews with everyone from Will Ferrell to Tina Fey to Dan Aykroyd, as well as Michaels himself, she compiled what has become the definitive Lorne Michaels biography. Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live follows the comedy impresario from childhood through to modern-day SNL, exposing fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of one of our most famous television institutions. Below, in this exclusive excerpt, Morrison takes us inside the beginnings of 30 Rock, one of Michaels’ many offshoots — and, as it turned out, it started out eerily similar to the famous tumult of that first-ever SNL episode.
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On a Saturday night in May 2006 — hours before an episode of SNL was to start and two days before the upfronts, at which NBC was to announce its new sitcom 30 Rock — the president of NBC television, Jeff Zucker, was standing in Michaels’ ninth-floor office yelling at him. Zucker’s face was red. Michaels was 30 Rock’s executive producer, and Alec Baldwin, its star, had not signed a contract for more episodes beyond the pilot. The program, a behind-the-scenes take on a variety show much like SNL, was created by and starred Tina Fey, one of Michaels’ protégés who’d quietly studied his management style for years. She was in the room when Zucker lost his temper; she recalled the dynamic as “appalling.” “In that moment, I had no idea how crazy it was that we were asking NBC to announce the show without having the lead actor locked up,” she said. “But Lorne was so calm. He just went, ‘Hmmmm.’ ”
It was a replay of the night in October 1975, when, just before the premiere episode of SNL, John Belushi alarmed NBC by refusing to sign his contract. But Michaels felt confident that Baldwin would sign, and he was happy to wait it out. Pushing talent and being a scold, he believes, are the wrong ways to deal with creative people; it makes them dig in. “Alec will get there,” he told Zucker. “He’ll sign up for more. You’ll see.” Baldwin did eventually sign (and he won a couple of Emmys for his role), but Zucker never warmed to the show. A critical favorite, it failed to get big ratings and always hovered near cancellation.
Fey had originally set 30 Rock in a cable TV newsroom, but NBC had urged her to write what she knew, which was SNL, and the show’s enigmatically unflappable leader. When she began writing, she had no idea that NBC was developing another pilot set behind the scenes at a show like SNL. This was Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, his follow-up to The West Wing.
The idea that Michaels’ show had become an institution worthy of fictionalizing wasn’t a complete surprise to him. Around this time, as The Apprentice was becoming a hit on NBC, the network triedto persuade Michaels to host his own reality show, broadcasting the competitive scrum behind the scenes at SNL. “They wanted me to do a Trump thing,” he said. “I would have liked the money, but Ididn’t want to be that.” And he would never let a film crew regularly shoot his fulminations between dress rehearsal and air.
Ordering pilots for 30 Rock and Studio 60, NBC had created a bizarre horse race, and it seemed unlikely that the network would pick up two different shows about one of its other shows. Fey’s was the dark horse, and she and her showrunner Robert Carlock got queasy every time they walked by the huge Studio 60 billboard looming over Times Square. Their project felt dinkier. The fuss about the Sorkin show didn’t worry Michaels, who always preferred setting low expectations. Still, when Sorkin called Michaels and asked if he could spend a week at SNL observing how the show worked, theanswer was no.
Studio 60 debuted a few weeks before 30 Rock and was a disappointment despite its starry cast —Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet. The show focused on fights with the evil, meddlingnetwork; it was worthy rather than funny, more interested in First Amendment speechifying than laughs. It was “sweaty,” to use a Michaels word. “The reality is that the network isn’t that powerful anymore,” he said. “Talent is.” That’s why he felt confident that, the night that Zucker was yelling, he would do just fine staying in Baldwin’s corner. Sorkin’s Studio 60 was canceled after one season.
Although Fey’s show didn’t do much better in the ratings, it was cheaper to produce and the critics loved it. She got the last laugh, slipping jabs at Sorkin’s turkey into her show. In 30 Rock’s fifth season, Sorkin made a cameo as himself, prickly about his Studio 60 failure and barking his West Wing catchphrase, “Walk with me.”
The character Alec Baldwin plays — Fey’s boss, the bluff GE executive Jack Donaghy, “VP of East Coast television and microwave oven programming” — has more than a passing resemblance to Lorne Michaels. A good chunk of Donaghy’s character — the Catholic guilt, the Republicanism, the Princeton football background — has nothing to do with Michaels. “But Jack’s mentorship — the idea that you canlive a better life, that you should take better care of yourself,” Fey told me, “those things are inspired by Lorne, for sure.” Writing the character, Fey and Carlock would ask themselves: What would Lorne do?Some of Donaghy’s precepts are Michaels-esque in the extreme: “Never go with a hippie to a second location.” Also: Donaghy often appears in black tie (“It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?”). Baldwinlikes to say that Michaels keeps a tuxedo in his glove compartment.
Michaels didn’t involve himself much in the day-to-day running of 30 Rock, although he relished having Fey and Baldwin and other SNL alums under his big tent. “He wisely knows what he didn’t like, which is sitting in the edit room,” Fey said. But his imprint was everywhere. Her 2011 book, Bossypants, contains a section called “Things I Learned From Lorne Michaels.” Among them: Don’t overthink the comedy, “never cut to a closed door,” “don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.” She appreciated the way he knew how to manage by deflection but considers herself more direct, a quality that makes some colleagues say that Michaels can be afraid of her. Like his mother, Florence Lipowitz, Fey didn’t rely on coded conversation to make herself understood, and at SNL she was fearless about pushing an idea through. Michaels’ own take, as he told me, is that he is “susceptible to strong women because they’re more apt to fight and stand up for themselves than I am. I think women see more clearly.” (Fey observed, “He probably likes me and David Spade best.There, I said it.”)
In the guise of management advice, Michaels would talk to Fey about the James Garner pool-hustler character in the late-‘50s TV series Maverick: “The guy’s a coward — but he realizes that he’s a genius for being a coward,” Fey said. “It’s a natural instinct for self-preservation.” He avoids confrontation and rides things out. She compared it to the way, when Michaels’ daughter wanted to get her ears pierced, he never forbade her outright but strung out the negotiation with a series of stall tactics (“You have to have it done by a doctor,” etc.). Fey said, “After a year of this, I asked, ‘Why don’t you just tell her no?’ He said, ‘You’ll notice, she still doesn’t have her ears pierced.’ ”
From LORNE by Susan Morrison. Copyright © 2025 by Susan Morrison. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSend us a tip using our anonymous form.
