Nate Bargatze fought hard to achieve the ‘Washington Dream’

In the minutes preceding the dress rehearsal of his first animation Saturday evening live in October 2023, Nate Bargatze was thinking about Studio 60 on the Sunset StripAaron Sorkin’s show on a SNL-like Workplace aired for one season on NBC from 2006 to 2007. In addition to watching SNL as a child, Workshop 60 was the primary means by which Bargatze engaged with the institution of the television sketch. So there he was, in Lorne Michaels’s office, choosing sketches for her dress, glancing at the curtain above the window that overlooked the studio, when he said what he had thought about it all week. “Man, it’s like Workshop 60.” And Michaels did what he’s done for decades: ignore a random thing said by a nervous celebrity.

Bargatze was in a very Aaron Sorkin situation: he was a white male protagonist, in the moment of truth, who had to stand up for what he believed in. In this case, it was that “Washington’s Dream” was on the “maybe” column of the table of potential Michaels sketches for the episode. He blew up during Wednesday’s table read and generally didn’t have much momentum all week. This was also the biggest costume change on the list, so cutting it would make the evening a lot easier. Bargatze thought to himself: I don’t want to ruin your 50 years of television because I watched Workshop 60. But when Michaels asked him what he thought of the sketch, he defended it; he felt that once presented in front of a live audience, the sketch’s timing would be locked in. So Michaels moved the sketch from the “maybe” column to the very end of the dress rehearsal. And during the dress rehearsal, it destroyed – so much so that Michaels moved it to the second live sketch after the monologue. The rest is history and over 17 million views on YouTube.

Thinking back to that moment in this week’s episode Good One: a podcast about jokesBargatze says he didn’t realize that “you have a lot more say than you think at the time.” SNL.” That’s why, when he returned to host in October 2024, he made it a point to champion sketches that other writers and cast members had struggled to air. One of them was “Golf Tournament,” written by “Washington’s Dream” writers Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell, with whom Bargatze also collaborated on the CBS show. Christmas in Nashville special this month. The other was Michael Longfellow’s sketch about a guy dying at the top of a water slide and wondering whether he should be pushed down the slide or carried down the stairs, which was the one thing Bargatze kept talking about to talk all week. Back at Michaels Workshop 60–In a typical office setting between dress rehearsal and live performance, Michaels asked what Bargatze was thinking. “What about ‘Waterslide’?” Michaels, like a father who had heard his son make the same request over and over again, retorted, “‘Waterslide’ is here. Don’t worry about it.”

However, “Washington’s Dream 2” didn’t require negotiating with Michaels; it was Bargatze who had to be convinced. “I had a friend who said, ‘Don’t do another one,'” he recalls, even though the original sketch was at that point the biggest moment of his career and the thing fans told him mentioned the most. He was nervous about ruining his inheritance. What he later learned was that Day and Seidell had already started writing it over the summer, while they were working on the Christmas special. So when he came back to SNLBargatze read the script and realized, “It’s not about what the jokes are. It’s simply the character of George Washington. People just want to see this character come back. And they did: the video for “Washington’s Dream 2” currently has over 7 million views. It garnered such a positive response that Bargatze won’t need much convincing regarding future installments. When asked if there would be more, he replied: “After the second one, yes. »

Listen or watch this week’s episode of Goodin which Bargatze, Day and Seidell share everything you ever wanted to know about the “Washington Dream.”