Watch Everything That Happens Behind the Scenes of An Episode of SNL

One of the American institutions cherished almost as much as watching Saturday Night Live each weekend is the habit of spending the following days complaining about how awful Saturday Night Live was the previous weekend. The American public has a way of labeling every successive new cast as the worst in the show’s long history. Now-legendary casts like the one containing Farley and Sandler and Spade were even hated by many in their own time.

But whether you are an SNL lover or someone who loves to hate it, you can still marvel at the nearly impossible act of getting the show on the air every Saturday. Starting from scratch each week with a brand new guest host poses a ton of challenges, but the biggest stunt seems to be pulling off the breakneck speed required to move seamlessly from sketch to sketch to video to musical act to Weekend Update, all within the confines of a rather compressed studio in New York’s 30 Rock building. A backstage video shared a few years ago shows that the transitions aren't always so easy.

The video above was released yesterday on the SNL YouTube channel. It takes the recent Anna Kendrick episode and reduces it to a 2-plus minute time lapse that allows you to see just how quick and cramped things have to be in order to keep the show on-time and on-track. So, even if you don’t laugh at the show, you’ll probably respect the effort.