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‘The Midnight Show’ Is the Perfect Mix of Comedy, Mystery & ‘SNL’: Exclusive Excerpt

If you’re looking for a book to tear through in one night (and love Saturday Night Live), look no further than The Midnight Show, out April 7. The new page-turner from authors Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne dives into the history of the late-night comedy series, The Midnight Show, which catapulted a group of young improv comedians to stardom in the 1980s.

The breakout star, Lillian Martin, was on her way to becoming the next big thing in comedy when she disappeared without a trace in New York City. Forty years later, journalist Madeline Cohen seeks to solve the mystery of what happened to Lillian and sits down with her closest friends and colleagues from her time on TMS.

Over the course of countless interviews, Madeline uncovers long-held secrets. When addressing romance, jealousy, and misogyny, she stirs up decades-old drama. Check out Swooon’s exclusive excerpt of The Midnight Show below.

NOTES
Sam Petrosian—
May 12, 2:00 p.m. ET— Zoom call

BACKGROUND: Sam met Lillian in college and starred alongside her on The Midnight Show before moving on, in typical ’80s funny guy fashion, to write or act in nearly every major comedy blockbuster for the next two decades. Neighborhood Cops, Parent Pains I and II, all five of the Demon Squad movies.

Now he’s almost seventy—a little less aw-shucks “boy next door,” more “Get off my lawn.” The trademark floppy hair is pure gray, the dimples deepened by wrinkles, but he still has residual charm. Unlike some of the noted womanizers in the TMS first class (see: Kent Romero), Sam always came across as remarkably grounded despite his good looks. Of course, that could just be the image he’s best at selling.

Madeline: You and Lillian were close long before TMS. Did you two ever talk about her childhood?

Sam Petrosian (TMS cast member, 1980–1983): Not often, but, you know, over the years, Lillian did tell me enough to paint the most charmingly eccentric picture. She had a pantry, her own personal cubby, and she’d store herself in there as if it were an imagination chamber. She used to go on all the time about how much she missed that pantry, wished she had one in New York. I always pictured Canadian kitsch, Anne of Green Gables surrounded by jars of preserves, heavens to Betsy, gingham ribbons in her hair. Lillie was as stubborn as Anne Shirley, I’ll tell you that much. There were moments she’d have broken a slate or two over my head.

I know she held on to a lot of guilt about her parents. She was distant from them and blamed herself for it, like she needed to make more of an effort to pretend to be the sort of human being they would prefer to have as a daughter. Never a question of whether they could have been warmer human beings to her, but I never pressed her on it. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. I absorbed every word she said as holy writ and nodded along comfortingly. I suppose the more charitable description of that dynamic is that I gave her space. Maybe I should have questioned Lillian more over the years, now that I look back on everything. I don’t know.

I think despite not being particularly, let’s say, cherished by her family, Lillian did grow up sheltered. Wide-eyed, but not in some Christian Coalition way. She was more like a being from an alternate dimension who’d accidentally slipped into our world, and every single thing was new to her. The good and the bad. I’m not sure she was ever fully able to tell the difference between the two. But then it’s not exactly my strong suit either.

Glenn Martin: By the time college rolled around, Lillie was raring to get out of Bradville and never look back. I mean, she left the durn country, so that tells you something. She went to Boston University. I don’t think our folks necessarily knew that she’d even applied there, but she got a scholarship and went off to study French—that’s what she told us, anyway. She’d won a bunch of awards for her French in high school, didn’t do drama or anything like that. So when she’s down in Massachusetts for college and, you know, we find out that she’s in these comedy shows, it came a bit out of left field. We thought, “What? No. You’re talking about a different Lillian Martin!”

There was a big old disconnect, no doubt about it. We thought she wanted to become a professor. You know, after everything that happened, all the press about her lifestyle, the partying or what have you, Mom really beat herself up. She kept rehashing Lillian’s whole life over and over again, saying, “Was she lying to us, starting from when she was a kid?” Not just the acting but, you know, doing drugs, drinking? I don’t think that was the case back home, I really don’t, but . . . there was obviously this hidden side to her all along.

There’s a lot we’re never really gonna understand about Lillie. No chance of figuring it out now. Or maybe there is, if you’re writing this article. Who knows.

COMPILED TRANSCRIPTS—
LILLIAN’S “ TOWNIES” ERA

Madeline: So how did the Townies first start? Was Lillian there from the very beginning?

Sam Petrosian: No, not at all. It started with me and Stevie Doyle, who I assume you’ve spoken to as well?

Madeline: I wrote him a few times, but he hasn’t responded.

Sam Petrosian: I could see Stevie being a little wary of talking about Lillian.

Madeline: I’m sensitive to that. I know it’s a difficult subject.

Sam Petrosian: It’s not that, it’s . . . Stevie carries around so much baggage these days, he’s practically a bellhop. I’ll get him to write you back.

But you asked about the Townies! Without boring you with too many personal details, I grew up outside Boston, went to middle school and high school with Stevie. At first, we were more what the kids call “frenemies.” We competed to be the preeminent class clown, which our teachers did not appreciate at the time. Later, we worked on the school paper together, and very quickly grew bored, so on the weekends, we put together a satirical alternate newspaper lampooning the teachers and administration. We nearly got expelled over that one.

Stevie was the better student of the two of us, but I was the one who could actually get a date, believe it or not. Now, Kent [Romero] likes to paint me and Stevie as working-class heroes, just so he can seem more “of the people” by association, but the truth is, we’re both from middle-class households. We went to college with minimal financial
aid, let’s put it that way. We just weren’t international jet-setter children like Kent “We’re Not Rich, We’re Comfortable” Romero.

Anyway, Stevie got into Harvard. I didn’t even apply—you kidding? It was a big win for me to get into BU. But we kept palling around. We’d go to a bar midway between our campuses, drink cheap beer, and scheme. At first we talked about doing a wider version of our newspaper, but then Stevie met this older kid in his dorm freshman year, wouldn’t stop talking about how hip he was, how brilliant. I got pretty sick of hearing about this guy, to be honest, suggested Stevie invite him out with us just so he’d finally shut up about him, and one night, in through the door walks this absolute mannequin, just white teeth, bronze skin, thick dark hair, jawline of a god, so tall he nearly beans his head on the bar light. Kent’s first-generation Venezuelan American, obviously, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought he was from Olympus. As in Mount.

So now I’m thinking, “Gosh, this is it, Stevie’s gonna come out of the closet and this is his boyfriend and damn, good for you, Stevie, what a score!” I was wrong about that, just to be clear.

Madeline: Duly noted.

Sam Petrosian: You know, Kent always had an almost toxic level of charisma. You could see girls turning to look at him, just about falling off their barstools to gawk at this, what, nineteen-year-old kid. And Kent walks up to me, slings an arm around my shoulder like he’s known me all my life, and goes, “So, what are the townies drinking tonight?” Meaning us.

I wasn’t sure whether to smack him in his stupid pretty face at that point, but then he started buying us rounds, so I figured he could hang out with us again. And that, by the way, is how we wound up coming up with the name of our little improv group.

And it was improv. People say “sketch” about the Townies, even though to this day, they still teach improv, not sketch, all over the country.

Madeline: I was briefly a Townie before I moved to New York. I took classes at the Hollywood branch, on Sunset.

Sam Petrosian: Oh wow, look at that! Gosh, I hope you got something out of it. I’ve heard mixed things over the years.

Madeline: Mixed is fair. I mean, it’s definitely expensive. And it’s tough to move up the levels and actually get a place in any shows. For me, anyway. I was trying to get staffed as a comedy writer at the time, and I thought improv might help. I think if I learned anything, honestly, it was that I am not a performer.

Sam Petrosian: That can happen! And hey, now you’re at Rolling Stone, so that’s nothing to sneeze at. Anyway, we sold the rights a long time ago. Me, Kent, and Stevie. We do still own a share in the franchise, but when we founded it, it was . . .

[He laughs, recollecting.]

It was literally in Kent’s living room, with random chairs and sofas lined up like rows of seats in a theater. Like we were little kids performing for their parents. We were way too broke to rent a space, so that was our solution.

Madeline: Including Kent? I thought his family came from money.

Sam Petrosian: Well, Kent was given a very rudimentary spending allowance by his parents—that Latin American immigrant-made- good heritage, trying to give him a strong backbone, which is a terrifying prospect if you’ve ever met Kent. Have you met him?

Madeline: Not yet.

Sam Petrosian: He’s a battering ram with arms and legs. Anyway, for all practical purposes, we were beyond broke. Stevie worked at a pizza place far enough off campus to avoid it having a ripple effect on his Harvard reputation. Kent and I used to sneak in the back during his shifts and eat the slices nobody wanted with ancient oil puddles on top. We were the human equivalent of wharf rats. But when we weren’t scrounging for survival, attending the bare minimum of college classes, waking up still wasted from dorm parties, we’d meet up at one of our places—usually Kent’s, because he had a room in an actual townhouse— and we’d talk about comedy. What we liked, what we were sick of, what we thought was the next wave, what was exciting, and to us, that was improv, not sketch. Obviously, we got less snooty about it all when The Midnight Show came calling, but at the time, we were artistes. We talked it all to death before ever stepping onstage—and still, still, we were leagues behind somebody like Lillian Martin, who understood improv at her core, despite having had no experience with it prior to joining us.

Madeline: So when did Lillian enter the picture?

Sam Petrosian: You know, it’s hard for me to pinpoint when and where I first saw Lillian. She was there in my subconscious for a long time, like I’d hallucinated her before we ever formally met. It must have been on the Boston University campus or thereabouts. I was majoring in business, at my father’s insistence. Thanks, Dad. She was studying something delightfully random—French Arthurian romance, something like that?—but she took the core curriculum like the rest of us mere mortals. There was an elective drama class for those of us who either hadn’t passed the auditions for the fancy BU drama program or didn’t want to immediately commit to a life of penury and struggle at the age of eighteen. She was in that class her freshman year, but I don’t think she showed up more than twice. It wasn’t her bag.

She seemed to just drift in and out of classes. Out of parties more than into them. I remember seeing her in the student union on St. Paddy’s Day, sitting on a sofa, looking around like she’d been teleported there—just deeply, deeply confused. As if the party had coagulated around her and she wasn’t sure how to escape. Sure enough, before I could go up and introduce myself, she was out the door and poof, gone. And whenever you’d ask someone, in the dining hall, wherever, Hey, who is that girl over there, the one who looks like one of the fairies in those fake Victorian photos, the one with the crazy long wavy hair and huge eyes?, nobody ever knew!

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Read an Exclusive Excerpt of Jennifer Iacopelli's 'Game, Set, Match'

I’d pretty much convinced myself she was a ghost when one day, I was out distributing flyers for the Townies—this would be senior year, by which point we’d graduated to a regular weekly gig at a dive bar on Commonwealth, but I still, you know, had to hand out flyers on the street corner like a busker—and I saw her and crossed traffic to hand her a flyer. I said something insanely intense, I’m sure, like, “The Townies, tomorrow night, you won’t regret it, you’ll never be the same!” And she said, “Okay.” Which I figured was a brush-off, and fair enough. But then Friday night rolled around and there she was in the audience. I couldn’t believe it. She might have thought we were a cult, or some political extremist group, not sure what it says about either of us that she turned up, but there you go. We won her over. And vice versa.

Excerpted from The Midnight Show by Jennifer Thorne and Lee Kelly. Copyright © 2026 by Jennifer Thorne and Lee Kelly. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.