B+

The Midnight Show

The Midnight Show is a ridiculously immersive and compelling celebrity mystery told through interview transcripts, email messages, texts, and articles as a Rolling Stone journalist and sketch comedy fan researches and compiles a history of a late-night program clearly based on SNL. The journalist, Madeline, interviews all the original surviving cast members, and is attempting to both investigate the history of the first seasons and establish a timeline for the central mystery: what happened to Lillian Martin, the very young breakout star who disappeared 40 years prior.

This format where the reader is peeking into the foundational research for a magazine article gives the entire story a very dishy, gossipy, almost transgressive feel, which I really loved. All these private conversations, including portions both on the record and off, and I get to be an observing witness to them all? I’m so in. It was delightful.

It was also a little stressful. I got this warning from my fitness ring while I was sitting in a chair reading this book:

An alert from Ringconn that reads: 3-28 4:30-5:00 pm: your stress level is 85! take a deep breath and relax!

Again, I was in a chair, legs up, reading The Midnight Show, and my stress level went up at some tense moments enough to get a warning from a device. I’m still laughing about this! The story isn’t scary, but it has the effect of a slow motion train wreck visible in the distance that is unstoppable as it approaches, and clearly I was emotionally connected to what was happening.

While it remains startling to me that a book set in the 80s is historical fiction, the extremely hard drugs, the decrepit grime of New York City, and the AIDS epidemic existing in some parallel world where people are dying by the dozens or more every day and no one is paying attention, form a backdrop that feels both distant, and immediately relevant.

Also immediate and relevant: the central themes of how women in comedy – in entertainment generally – are slotted into archetypes while their talents are mercilessly extracted, usually for the enrichment of the men around them, and then discarded. Shitty immature men blaming everyone around them for their problems and controlling anyone who threatens them are unfortunately perennial and not tied to one particular era.

To say this is a ‘character-driven’ novel is accurate, and kind of an understatement. Each character becomes distinct, even though I’m reading their interviews, or, essentially, monologues. Sometimes the transcripts are one entire conversation, and in other chapters, different transcripts are assembled together to give everyone’s take on a particular moment. Only a few times did I need to page backwards to remind myself who was talking; most of the time, I could tell instantly what perspective I was reading (often based on how much my stomach churned while reading their bullshit).

And of course everyone has a different, often contradictory take on the same moment. One character was constantly casting themselves as the victim, and waiting for their incipient martyrdom during their interviews was almost like playing BINGO: aaaaand…yup! There it is, poor thing, woe is you.

Other characters had a crackling energy brimming with the tension of desperately wanting to share every last sordid detail while holding themselves back from revealing too much. Some transcripts felt almost cathartic, as if the narrator was relieved: “Finally I get to tell the whole truth about these fuckos.” And some narrators are relentless in how they lie to protect themselves, blithely spewing falsehoods to prop up tired legends about themselves while refusing to give any credit to the women worked alongside them.

In the end, it’s mostly satisfying. I think the ambiguity around one piece of the story is a realistic choice, because no specific outcome would ever be satisfactory, and not knowing the particulars means I’m free to imagine the worst (which I did).

This is a book that’s broadly about celebrity and fame, about raw talent meeting unlimited resources, and most of all, about how terrible people weave mythologies around themselves to distract from their dreadful behavior and consolidate their power.

And specifically, it’s about a group of young, talented people who lived through an experience that made them extremely famous in an extremely short amount of time – another present and relevant aspect to the story. if you liked Daisy Jones and the Six, or if you like mysteries where the clefs are very roman, you’ll probably enjoy this as much as I did. Mind your stress levels.

– SB Sarah

In the 1980s, women were not supposed to be funny. But when a group of college improv comedians gets the chance to join a new late-night show, it’s Lillian Martin who stands out. The new show was called The Midnight Show and it would air every Friday night, live from New York, and change the landscape of TV and comedy forever.
But first it would change Lillian’s and her friends’ lives. When the show becomes a runaway hit, the cast is thrown into the spotlight. Suddenly, they’re skipping the line at the city’s hottest clubs and posing on the cover of Rolling Stone. Lillian, in particular, seems destined for bigger things—until one winter night in Lower Manhattan, she vanishes, leaving nothing behind but questions. Was Lillian a victim of her own excesses? Was it a mugging gone wrong? Or could she have been killed by someone in her own inner circle?
Forty years later, Lillian’s disappearance has still never been solved. But when a budding journalist looking to examine Lillian’s story from a modern lens begins asking questions, she stirs up decades-old drama—as well as tightly-held secrets some comedy legends would much rather stay buried.
A propulsive story of fame and friendship told through a variety of media—compiled interviews, articles, transcripts—The Midnight Show takes readers behind the scenes of the cutthroat world of comedy in 1980s New York and asks if the rush of getting a laugh is all it’s cracked up to be.