Lorne Michaels, right, and the cast and crew of SNL50: The Anniversary Special accepts the award for outstanding variety special during the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards on Sept. 14, 2025, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.Chris Pizzello/The Canadian Press
The journalist Richard Gwyn observed in the 1980s that Canadians had failed in their obvious destiny to become the prime interpreters of American culture. We are so similar to the U.S., but different enough to see its faults and faculties clearly. So, Gwyn asked, where was the great Canadian anthropologist of homo Americanus?
As it happens, when he wrote those words two of them were being minted. Lorne Michaels, of Toronto, was turning Saturday Night Live into one of the definitive platforms of American comedy and pop culture. Meanwhile, Graydon Carter, of Ottawa, was becoming arguably the most tastemaking magazine editor of his generation, first at Spy and then at Vanity Fair.
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Within the past year, both men have seen their narratives writ large, with an autobiography (Carter) and biography (Michaels) recounting how their icy Canadian eyes were able to pierce the U.S. psyche and entertain it for a profit. As the rest of us try to grasp the surreal spectacle south of the border threatening to swallow us whole, I wondered: What can we learn from our brethren Lorne and Graydon about what makes Americans tick?
Of course, Canadians have historically had a knack for producing quintessentially American entertainment, from the Saint John-raised Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer to the leading lights of the folk music boom, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
Graydon Carter, Canadian journalist, served as the editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 until 2017.DANA SCRUGGS/The New York Times News Service
But Michaels and Carter’s life stories in particular show why we’re so good at it. Both impresarios understood an essential hunger in the American soul, because they had felt it so acutely as outsiders: the hunger for democratized luxury, democratized glamour, democratized celebrity.
Both men grew up as eager students of all things American, enraptured by the version of the country they saw through the TV, but also in movies and on the magazine rack – a country as close as it was wondrously exotic.
“If you grew up in Canada,” Carter once said, “there was a glass wall along with the border, and it looked like they were having a lot more fun.”
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The glass wall was, in fact, quite literal, in the form of 21-inch screens spanning the living rooms of the nation. The astounding power of American TV over a mid-century Canadian kid is a leitmotif of Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good, and Lorne by long-time New Yorker editor Susan Morrison.
Carter’s early childhood was almost parodically Canadian. His grandfather was a fur trader and his dad was an RCAF pilot from Moose Jaw. He listened to Hockey Night in Canada on the radio, cheered for the Ottawa Rough Riders in the CFL and helped his father poach firewood from National Capital Commission forests on frozen winter nights.
Even a lot of the popular culture was more British than American. The movies Carter remembers seeing at the Capitol and the Elgin theatres were Bond films, David Lean epics and Ealing Studios comedies. The big department store, Ogilvy’s, sold clothes mostly in tartan.
Then the family got a TV set, and suddenly the U.S. was an inescapable spectacle beamed into his home every night. As Carter puts it in his droll and dry (and really very Canadian) way, “The addition of American programs like The Ed Sullivan Show and Bonanza sparkled up Sunday nights considerably.”
Michaels in his office in New York, Nov. 23, 1977.Marty Reichenthal/The Canadian Press
Lorne Michaels (born Lipowitz) had a slightly more worldly upbringing. His home away from home in Toronto’s upper-middle-class Forest Hill enclave was the Shuster household, presided over by one half of the Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster, who performed 67 times on The Ed Sullivan Show that so dazzled a young Carter.
As the high-school sweetheart of Frank Shuster’s daughter, Rosie, and a kind of surrogate son to the comedian, Michaels learned at the feet of a Canadian who had figured out almost uniquely how to make Americans laugh. As Morrison writes, Wayne and Shuster appeared on Sullivan’s show more often than any other act, specializing “in a distinctly Canadian type of highbrow sketch comedy.” They stubbornly refused to move to the U.S. despite repeated offers, and at one point had a CBC radio audience of three million – at the time roughly one-fifth of Canada’s population.
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Still, teenage Lorne couldn’t help but see the United States as the big time. American channels appeared on Canadian TV sets in the early 1950s, and from that point on even the most trivial aspects of U.S. culture came to seem hyperreal, inherently more interesting than the Canadian equivalent by virtue of ubiquity and production values.
“Everything about American television seemed more exciting than what the CBC offered,” Morrison writes. “When Lorne and his friends watched their favourite shows, they were captivated by the ads for American candy bars.”
Hockey star Wayne Gretzky, right, and Saturday Night Live producer Michaels study cue cards during a rehearsal in New York, on May 11, 1989.Susan Ragan/The Canadian Press
Later, as a student at the University of Toronto, Michaels was influenced on a more intellectual level by the ideas of professor Marshall McLuhan, who spoke about the power of television to knit together the global village. Here was another Canadian who understood American media better than Americans themselves, and who saw how television placed a vast audience on an equal plane, while elevating certain personalities to previously unimaginable heights of fame.
It was, in a way, a radical experiment in democracy.
Carter naturally came to his understanding of American culture through magazines, but regardless of the medium, both he and Michaels grasped that the American idea of democracy wasn’t like the levelling they had grown up with in Canada, where tall poppies were scythed down to size. Rather, it was an equality that said everyone was entitled to be a big shot, as captured in American phrases such as the “pursuit of happiness” and Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame.”
Both Vanity Fair and Saturday Night Live, in their own ways, catered to this American dream of democratic decadence. Carter’s magazine brought unfathomable glossiness and long photo spreads of socialites into the dentist’s office, while reserving the right to anoint Hollywood royalty and an annual New Establishment. In the case of SNL, lore about coke-fuelled parties where schlubby improv comics and Harvard Lampoon writers mingled with, and sometimes eventually married, movie stars and models was as much a part of the show’s appeal as its comedy.
Carter attends the 50th anniversary party and fashion show of Ralph Lauren in Central Park during New York Fashion Week, Sept. 7, 2018.Landon Nordeman/The New York Times News Service
Both Carter and Michaels had all but trembled with excitement when they made their first pilgrimages to New York, the city where they would launch their conquests of American pop culture. The bohemian funk of Greenwich Village, the art deco splendour of the 30 Rock lobby, the window displays at Tiffany’s – they all seemed more romantic to a pair of Ontarians than they possibly could have to young men visiting from Chicago or Washington.
Before long, Carter and Michaels had become big shots in their own right, Canadian kings of New York hobnobbing with Fran Lebowitz and Annie Leibovitz, Paul Simon and Paul McCartney. To celebrate the launch of Spy magazine, we learn in Carter’s memoir, Michaels took his fellow countryman in a limo to catch a Yankees game in the Bronx, a fitting mixture of the quintessentially American high and low that they blended so skilfully with their cold, gimlet, Canadian eyes.