Editor’s word, February 13: NBC is ready to air “SNL50: The Anniversary Particular” on Sunday, February 16 at 8 pm. This text about SNL’s fiftieth season was initially printed on October 4, 2024.
In April, Kristen Wiig hosted Saturday Night time Reside, an event that, underneath regular circumstances, would advantage some pleasure. However anybody aware of the peculiar lore of SNL would know higher: This was Wiig’s fifth time internet hosting, and when somebody hosts SNL 5 occasions, the opening monologue turns into completely insufferable.
That is the fault of SNL’s longtime schtick often known as “the 5 Timers Membership,” the place the vanity is when you host the present 5 occasions, you get a velvet smoking jacket and entrance right into a legendary unique society filled with different laureates like Steve Martin and Tina Fey and Justin Timberlake.
Additionally it is an excuse for the present to indulge its worst impulses: Full of A-list visitor appearances, Wiig’s monologue noticed Paul Rudd pitifully ask why he wasn’t requested to be one of many movie star cameos; Matt Damon, who has hosted solely twice, sporting a 5 Timers jacket as a result of govt producer Lorne Michaels mentioned he was so good that he deserved it; and Jon Hamm and Martin Quick begging Michaels offstage for an opportunity to host once more. In whole, eight of the nation’s most beloved actors joined collectively to fawn on the altar of SNL and, particularly, its creator.
There are infinite methods for SNL to be insufferable: a sketch outstays its welcome, the rookie featured participant retains flubbing his traces, the writers forgo jokes altogether and as a substitute power us to hearken to a weird piano ballad in an try and say one thing earnest about politics. However by far the worst model of SNL is when the present turns into extra thinking about its personal mythology than making individuals snicker.
This yr, the establishment’s fiftieth, guarantees to be filled with such moments. Within the season premiere, host Jean Sensible recalled her youthful self watching the very first episode of SNL, realizing she’d sooner or later host the present, whereas the “SNL50” branding was all over the place, from interstitials to the highest story on Weekend Replace.
The slate of hosts this fall are largely restricted to repeat hosts, together with John Mulaney and Michael Keaton, who will return for his or her sixth and fourth time internet hosting, respectively. The nostalgia tour extends past the present: On October 11, Saturday Night time, a film that dramatizes the story of SNL’s 1975 debut, will premiere in theaters. Within the meantime, Questlove is producing a documentary about SNL; filmmaker Morgan Neville of Received’t You Be My Neighbor? is, by some means, producing 5 of them.
The worst model of SNL is when the present turns into extra thinking about its personal mythology than making individuals snicker.
And on Valentine’s Day 2025, SNL will host a “homecoming” occasion at Radio Metropolis Music Corridor, produced by Michaels and Mark Ronson, along with a stay primetime reunion particular with present and former solid members to air the next Sunday.
The movie Saturday Night time, directed by Jason Reitman, acquired just-okay critiques, with many critics irked by its exorbitant flattery of each Michaels and SNL. Rolling Stone referred to as it a “gushing love letter”: “Saturday Night time Reside has lengthy swooned over its personal self-mythology, and Saturday Night time is blissful so as to add to that backpatting because the present’s golden anniversary approaches,” writes David Worry. Put extra plainly, based on the New Republic, the movie is little greater than “a cinematic circle jerk.”
To be truthful, franchise nostalgia is a plague affecting extra than simply SNL. Popular culture is in a deeply self-referential, self-obsessed temper: Limitless reboots that recycle beforehand profitable mental property is a symptom of an leisure trade that has strained underneath the burden of crushing company consolidation. The result’s movies about recognizable firms’ origin tales (Nike, Pop Tarts, BlackBerry, Flamin’ Sizzling Cheetos, to call a couple of), TV prologues (The Rings of Energy, Home of the Dragon), and fixed sampling in pop music.
Or take, for instance, the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe, which bought film tickets all through the 2010s by promising hardcore followers that they could see their favourite character in a post-credits scene. Or the opposite blockbuster cultural product of the last decade, Taylor Swift, who orchestrated the highest-grossing tour of all time by packaging and repackaging nostalgia for her followers.
When SNL commits the sin of self-referentiality, it feels worse, not as a result of it’s any extra responsible than the remainder, however as a result of SNL is meant to be humorous. There’s nothing hilarious about watching wealthy and well-known individuals congratulate themselves (that’s what award reveals are for!). As a substitute, it comes throughout as profoundly lazy.
SNL’s finest moments have at all times been those the place you haven’t a clue what sort of mind they might have come from. With few exceptions, its topical and political materials is rarely as memorable as its quirky characters and absurd sketches — current standouts embody final yr’s foolish Beavis and Butthead sketch and Lisa from Temecula. In different phrases, SNL works when it lets the younger comedy nerds who employees the present do their factor with out reminding us that we’re watching a present that’s been on the air for 50 years.
That, nonetheless, isn’t normally what occurs when an growing old chief doesn’t perceive that the very best use of their energy is handy it to another person. Lorne Michaels is a present enterprise icon who can also be almost 80 and will be forgiven for wanting to stay round lengthy sufficient to get pleasure from a victory lap (50 years helming a community powerhouse is nothing to sneer at, in any case).
Regardless of Michaels’s statements to press in 2020 that he was planning to retire after the fiftieth season — a place repeated in 2023 when he hinted that his alternative “might simply be Tina Fey” — he just lately advised a number of media shops that he now plans to remain indefinitely. “I’m going to do it so long as I really feel I can do it,” he mentioned to the Instances, including to the Hollywood Reporter, “So long as it’s necessary and I will be helpful, I’ll keep.”
To say you watch (and even care about) SNL in 2024 is itself type of embarrassing, although this has been the case for many years — individuals who tuned in as kids or youngsters are likely to imagine no solid might probably stay as much as the one who launched them to sketch comedy. You might say it sucks at any level in its historical past and also you’d not less than be somewhat bit proper, nevertheless it’s particularly miserable to observe gifted writers and performers spend their vitality deifying and worshiping their very own employer.
Like an excessive amount of of popular culture proper now, SNL is counting on audiences pointing and saying, “I get that reference!” as a substitute of making work that’s genuinely contemporary or humorous or compelling. After all of the meta in-jokes, all of the movie star cameos, all of the cutaways to the large boss looming offstage, there’s hardly any room left for laughs. If the tasteless season premiere is any indication, don’t anticipate a lot of these this yr.
