If it felt like “Saturday Night Live” took to the airwaves in 1975 with a renegade spirit, 50 years later it’s become not only a late-night tradition, but traditional. Hitting the half-century mark is a milestone. But a show doesn’t stick around that long because it’s willing to experiment or step on toes, but because it is fully embraced by the establishment.

That’s the (likely unintended) subtext throughout the various behind-the-scenes documentaries produced by NBC ahead of the show’s 50th anniversary special airing Sunday. These are in-house projects that stay on-message — warm and laudatory — but they are not without their fascinating moments. All can be streamed on Peacock.

An additional programming note: The first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which originally aired on Oct. 11, 1975, with host George Carlin and musical guests Billy Preston and Janis Ian, will air on NBC in “SNL’s” usual late-night timeslot this weekend, in place of a new episode.

“Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music”

Co-directed by Oz Rodriguez and Ahmir Thompson (aka Questlove), the two-hour documentary includes a remarkable 7-minute montage of “SNL’s” musical performances that opens the film. But it also puts a long-overdue focus on the show’s musical history, which tends to get sidelined, and it’s a good reminder of the sheer variety of music that has been featured over the years.

• The opening montage blends clips in a way that segues brilliantly from one to the next, as if the songs were sonic cousins that should have been considered in tandem all along. It’s the kind of creative musical gambit we rarely see on TV, put together by people who clearly love all genres of music and see how they’re interrelated.
• The show’s opening theme song is instantly recognizable — and in no way hummable. And yet it works. Here’s how Jack White describes it: There is no consistent melody, “it’s just a wailing saxophone of someone being taken out of the building playing saxophone, by the police, and the microphone’s still connected.”
• As someone points out, the similarities between music and comedy are many: Timing, cadence and misdirection. Not mentioned: The prolific use of drugs, especially in the ’70s. But this is a cleaned-up version of “SNL’s” past, so …
• In the show’s first two decades, it was more likely to expose lesser-known bands to a wider audience. Devo in 1978. Talking Heads in 1979. The B-52s in 1980. Funky Four Plus One in 1981 (the first hip hop group to perform on the show, thanks to host Debbie Harry using her clout to get them on). An appearance on national TV used to have a big effect. I wonder if that’s still true, but with fewer places for singers and musicians to perform on live TV, the show still holds relevance in that regard.
• As “SNL” increasingly became mainstream, the documentary is a reminder that the musical acts retained an unpredictable and rebellious edge for a bit longer.

“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night Live”

The four-part docuseries is hit-and-miss, but maybe that’s fitting since the unevenness mirrors the show itself. This should feel more momentous, especially in the streaming era when a long run might be seven seasons. (According to a recent report in Vulture, “SNL” remains “consistently profitable despite being incredibly expensive to produce” at $4 million an episode.)

Episode 1: “Five Minutes”: The show’s audition process is infamous by this point. Each person steps on an empty stage and performs for a small group of stone-faced decision-makers. The awkward silence is true in some cases, but other times you can hear off-camera guffaws.

• Cast members (mostly from the past 20 years) reminisce about the experience as they watch footage of their auditions. Some are cringe, but a handful are surprisingly good, including Will Ferrell, who was fully-formed from the start. There are the people who didn’t make the cut but went on to significant careers anyway: Jim Carrey, Jennifer Coolidge, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, Stephen Colbert. The Dick Ebersol years — when executive producer Lorne Michaels left the show from 1981 to 1985 — might as well not exist, and there are only brief snippets of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players, including Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. It’s such a weirdly recent assemblage who are featured. The ’70s, ’80s and most of the ’90s are elided, even though the whole point is that the show has been around for 50 years
• Of the show’s casting and talent staff interviewed, you notice the dearth of Black people and other people of color and it makes you wonder in what ways — subconscious or otherwise — that’s affected the show’s lineup over the years.
• Ego Nwodim, who joined the cast in 2018, offers some insight into that, albeit indirectly: “I felt like I could do the job in a way that would make it easier for the next Black woman. And I say this not to say that every day I’d go in thinking, ‘This is for Black women!’ — I wasn’t. But I wanted the audience to have a point of reference of a Black woman they felt had the skill set to do the job and their brains could go, ‘Oh yeah, she belongs.’ And then the next Black woman who comes after me, my hope is her time is 5% easier because of the work I did there.” She says she benefits from the Black women who came before her. There were just five. In 50 years.
• In case you were wondering if nepotism is part of the “SNL” fabric, of course it is! We learn that George Wendt called “SNL” about considering his nephew Jason Sudeikis.

Episode 2: “More Cowbell”: The weakest of the episodes, it functions as an anatomy of a sketch. Specifically the “More Cowbell” sketch (technically called “Recording Session”) from 2000 starring Christopher Walken and envisioned by Will Ferrell as an absurdist version of Blue Öyster Cult recording the band’s 1976 hit “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” The sketch is fine. Funny even! I’m not sure it’s interesting enough to warrant a one-hour, semi-tongue-in-cheek episode about the making of it. Surely there were other sketches with better backstories.

Episode 3: “Written By: A Week Inside the ‘SNL’ Writers Room”: This would be compelling if James Franco hadn’t already made a documentary called “Saturday Night” documenting the same process. It’s embarrassing how alike the two projects are. For a more comprehensive, warts-and-all look at the show, you can check out the nonfiction book “Live from New York: An Uncensored Story of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests.”

There’s also a new biography about 80-year-old Michaels by Susan Morrison called “Lorne: The Man Who Invented ‘Saturday Night Live’” that broaches topics these documentaries studiously avoid, including staff pushback Michaels received when he booked Donald Trump to host during his campaign for president in 2015: Despite Michaels’ insistence that the show was non-partisan, the writers felt he was putting his thumb on the scale and “‘helping’ Trump — a sentiment that was only bolstered amongst staff who recalled to Morrison that Michaels had wanted to ‘tone down a harsh Trump sketch’ and allow him to show ‘some charm.’”

• The writers are droll about their second-tier status. “I believe our names roll by extremely fast over shots of the castmates hugging and meeting the famous people,” says head writer Streeter Seidell. A lot of famous people were writers on the show —  but only became famous once they left the show and found opportunities on camera, including Will Arnett, Larry David, John Mulaney, Sarah Silverman.

• The writers produce their own sketches, meaning they write the scripts but are also responsible for helping to shape the performances and working with the rest of the crew on the sets and costumes. Louie Zakarian, head of the makeup department, has been building prosthetics on the show for nearly 30 years. “We did a ‘Game of Thrones’ sketch and we had one night to build a dragon,” he says. I would have loved an episode focusing on how these art departments actually function on such a short timeframe, creating everything from scratch each week.
• “You are fully in charge of three to four minutes of live network television,” says Mulaney about the autonomy writers are given. “NBC had nothing to say about it. Nothing. And when they did, we’d tell them no. We’re like 25 and we’d go, ‘We’re doing it.’” It’s a weird framing considering the show isn’t in the business of controversy or boundary pushing.
• Writer Celeste Yim’s path to the show: “I went to NYU for playwriting and was like, ‘Great, this is it, I’m going to be a playwright and write about things that really matter.’ And then basically immediately got the most corporate comedy job in the world.” This is the first time someone actually names it instead of buying into the lore — “SNL” may be desperate to style itself as bold, but at the end of the day, it’s just corporate.
• More than anything, you feel a deep sympathy for the writers. They seem beaten down and miserable, in it for the rare adrenaline rush of a sketch getting big laughs, but also mostly because it’s the kind of resume item that can lead to other jobs down the line. There’s nothing easy about comedy and the pressure to write funny material on a short deadline is daunting. I think it’s OK that a lot of it doesn’t work. But you wonder if the environment fostered by Michaels is the only way to do it. (As the aforementioned Vulture piece points out: “His age has added an undercurrent of queasiness to the 50th anniversary victory lap as Michaels’s empire rolls on without a firm succession plan. For better or worse, the machinery of American comedy has built up around him, and no one knows how the laugh factory will function if Michaels retires — or what it means if he chooses to cling to the show into his twilight years.”)

Here’s Tina Fey: “The rewrite tables were tough. They were grouchy. People would take the rundown of the show and just go through it, sketch by sketch, and make fun of it. Make fun of the title. Goof on it, goof on it, goof on it. You would leave the room fully knowing that that writers room was taking a (dump) on it while you were gone, and it just was kind of the way it was.”

“I don’t know if it’s the same anymore,” she says (the documentary doesn’t bother providing an answer). “Maybe it should get that way again a little bit,” Fey adds, and it would have been enlightening to hear why she thinks that kind of backbiting is beneficial to creativity. The idea that people can only do their best work under those circumstances probably deserves to be challenged.

Episode 4: “Season 11: The Weird Year”: Finally, Ebersol’s existence is (barely!) acknowledged, if only because Season 11 marked Michaels’ return to “SNL” as executive producer, taking over for Ebersol. Michaels’ eye for talent has always been one of his strengths, but  you could say the same of Ebersol, who assembled casts that included Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal and Martin Short. Well, regardless, Michaels cleared house when he came back, hiring a number of performers — including Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr. — who had little or no previous sketch comedy experience.

• The episode is the only one that even vaguely criticizes Michaels, but you really have to read between the lines because he’s portrayed as a godlike figure. (Even at this point, he was already living a certain lifestyle; people remember being called out for meetings by the pool at his house in the Hamptons.)
• That Michaels failed to create an environment in which a talent like Damon Wayans could thrive is such a big mark against him (Michaels fired him that season).
• There’s a lot of emphasis on the show faltering during Season 11 (tensions between the writers and the cast are alluded to) but the documentary and its participants don’t analyze more deeply the why of it all. At any rate, the season ended with a sketch that literally envisioned the cast set on fire.
• I had forgotten that Michaels brought Francis Ford Coppola on to direct an episode that season, with Coppola on camera for some of it. It’s such a departure for the show and just the kind of experiment you wish the show had embraced in the years since.
• Jon Lovitz has the best observation about the show, then and now: “We’re live but we’re not taking advantage of it.”

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Network television would be unrecognizable without a lineup of hospital dramas. It’s a hardy genre for a reason. In the CBS series “Watson,” Morris Chestnut plays Dr. John Watson — that’s right, Sherlock Holmes’ old pal — but he is no longer the loyal sidekick of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, but at the forefront of his own medical procedural. On paper, these ingredients seem promising: A riff on the Sherlock template and a likable star in Chestnut. And yet neither is enough to make the show work.

Set in present-day Pittsburgh — why Pittsburgh? — Sherlock is presumed dead (somewhere at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls) and he’s left Watson a considerable inheritance. The money is for a clinic, allowing Watson to return to his original profession and assemble a small group of young physicians who help him solve medical mysteries. If only his colleagues were given the kind of qualities that suggest they’re people rather than dialogue-delivery machines. One character’s primary trait seems to be that she has a Texas accent. “Everyone who comes into this clinic is a puzzle,” Watson tells them. “They don’t need doctors — doctors are everywhere — our patients need detectives.”

Setting aside that “House” already did a fairly entertaining version of this, it’s a silly pronouncement: Many people have health conditions that aren’t easily diagnosable. This isn’t rare or unusual. In fact, it’s the basis of every medical show ever. But just in case you weren’t following along, when Watson details a patient’s ailments, he’s compelled to spell it out once again: “It sounds like a mystery and mysteries are what we do.”

Is it off-putting that one of the doctors complains about her boyfriend not proposing while they’re supposed to be diagnosing a little girl’s problems? I mean, yeah, because we have no investment in these people, so framing the moment as a funny bit of character banter fails to land. Everything is a posture. Nobody feels like a person, nor is there mention of cost or insurance until Episode 5. Considering this is one of the most consistently terrible experiences for anyone with health issues in America, it’s a conspicuous omission. Is Watson’s clinic footing the bill for every test, treatment and hospital stay? How much money did Sherlock leave him, anyway? Who knows.

Apparently no case-of-the-week show can exist in the 2020s without a serialized storyline ladled in to create a high-stakes threat to the protagonist, which is why there are also shadowy forces who want Watson dead. But if you can’t make the idea of medical detectives interesting enough to carry the series, this isn’t going to fill the gaps. Watson’s inner circle also includes an ex-wife who runs the hospital (if only the tension between them felt like it matters), plus a rough and tumble sort from England called Shinwell, whose presence amounts to little more than a few lines here and there: “Everything OK, guv?”

Shinwell was a minor character in one of Doyle’s short stories as a former criminal and Sherlock informant, and it’s fine that show creator Craig Sweeny decided to include him and expand on his relevance (“Elementary” did it, too) — but then Sweeny would have to actually do that, instead of whatever we get here. The show expects the viewer’s knowledge of the Sherlock stories to do a lot of work, instead of foregrounding and establishing these characters through good writing.

That extends to Watson himself, who is portrayed as a master of deductive reasoning, a swaggering know-it-all who has a genius-like understanding of human nature and the world itself. In other words, he’s written as just another version of Sherlock, instead of his own man. Chestnut has considerable screen charisma, but he can’t overcome the weak scripts. “The game’s afoot. We have a new case. Who wants to amaze us with their insights?” he says to his team, and it’s strangely perfunctory and underwhelming.

As Sherlock would say: “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself.”

“Watson” — 1.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: 8 p.m. Sundays on CBS (streaming on Paramount+)

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Taking the idea of work-life balance to extremes, the sardonic and surrealist thriller “Severance” on Apple TV+ envisions a dystopian corporate world in which employees of a company called Lumon Industries have a chip implanted in their brains that severs their memory in two. At work, their “innie” version has no knowledge of their life or even personal history outside the office; they are simply “at work” all the time. Their “outie” is just as clueless about anything that transpires under the fluorescent lights of their cubicles. They might as well be two different people.

What a premise! If half of your life is intolerable, simply free yourself from it.

It’s a trap, of course. Part of you is permanently stuck in an experience you hate. It’s especially pernicious because alarming things are happening in that basement at Lumon and each person’s outie is ignorant of the malevolence and misery their innies are living non-stop. Season 1 ended three years ago on a cliffhanger, with the innies staging a rebellion and discovering disturbing truths about their outies. Season 2 picks up in the aftermath.

The innies are still at Lumon. After some damage control, the company attempts to restore the status quo for Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro). These workers may have a smidge more information about their circumstances now, but most of it remains as fuzzy as the green carpet of their office space.

Mark initially sought out severance as a reprieve from the grief over his dead wife, but is she not dead at all but imprisoned somewhere at Lumon? Can the lovely and skeptical Helly, whose outie is Helena, the cold-blooded daughter of the company’s owner, be trusted once her backstory is relayed to the group? Will she and Mark act on their mutual attraction? What’s going on with their unnervingly serene manager Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and his new assistant Miss Wong (Sarah Bock), who is not an adult but a child in knee socks?

Their respective outies, who remain siloed off and unaware of one another, are flailing too, just as discombobulated by the slivers of information that have come to light about their innies.

At the core of it all is the biggest question: What is Lumon’s endgame?

“Severance” frames this last one to suggest a larger conspiracy. But I have doubts the show will be able to give a satisfying answer in the end. I could be wrong! But the exploitation of workers is so cynically and depressingly straightforward that it doesn’t need a complicated explanation. Regardless, both the innies and outies are seeking answers and, bit by bit, they hatch plans to uncover the truth.

A three-year pause between seasons is not how you build anticipation, but my frustration with the show lies in the format itself. Though “Severance” has a concept that’s equal parts creepy and compelling, boosted by terrific performances and distinctive production design, the core idea is a movie idea. There just isn’t enough story for a nine-episode series (bumped to 10 episodes for Season 2), which happens to be an issue with numerous other streaming shows as well, and increasingly some films (including “Wicked” and the decision to extend it into two parts).

So how do you stretch a movie-length premise into a series? Creator Dan Erickson slows the pacing way down and employs stall tactics that masquerade as world-building. “Severance” doubles down on this in Season 2, repeating the same beats and themes over and over again, such as the difficulty of imagining a different life for yourself. Or why people do things that go against their self-interest and are susceptible to the lure of a cult. How our perceptions of identity can be malleable depending on the surroundings or circumstances. Having a terrible job where empty, pandering nonsense is handed down by corporate headquarters. The pointless theater of workplace evaluations and workplace retreats. All interesting ideas! None of which are necessarily deepened over the show’s running time.

I’m sure plenty of viewers will say: I liked Season 1, so repeat away! Fair enough. But that’s not a story extending out because it has places to go. Atmosphere — of which “Severance” has plenty — will only take you so far. A show can not hinge on vibes alone, though “Severance” is giving it a try.

“Severance” Season 2 — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.