Sometime midsummer last year, I found myself becoming engrossed in the history of Saturday Night Live. While I missed the SNL50 coverage, there were still highlight reels popping up on Facebook giving me brief snippets of what the later cast members had been up to. I remember being especially charmed by Jane Wickline, though there were enough laughs at other points to make them a welcome addition to my scrolling. I grew enough affection that, with over a month to ponder how serious I was about such a commitment, I decided to do something I hadn’t ever done before. I would watch a full season of the comedy institution.
I’m not a purist by any measure. There isn’t a “golden era” so much as the perfect embodiment of American sketch comedy. Some hits. Some flops. Coming up with 90 minutes of material on a weekly basis is a challenge I could never achieve, so I’ve always admired the comedians on that level. If the highlights weren’t enough to win me over, I had begun seeing other cast members branching out. Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernandez were in Adam Sandler movies. Bowen Yang was minutes away from graduating to Hollywood. Then there’s Keenan Thompson, whom I somehow knew since I was a child, while Colin Jost had been on my radar since high school.
This is to say that Saturday Night Live in 2025 still struck me as a reliable pipeline for a comic career. Even if there are now hundreds of names that make me say, “Who?” I figured it was worth discovering the new class during a period of massive turnaround, where it was about to form a different tone than whatever I had missed. It was a year when I heard the name Ashley Padilla outside of NBC circles in a way that reminded me of Amy Poehler and Kristen Wiig. Everything was as it should be. If you have to ask me if the show felt different from any Saturday from the past half-century, I would tell you a confident, “No.” The names and events may have changed, but this feels as go-for-broke as the early days, the best days, and even the worst. It has highs and lows, but that is to be expected from giving a team a week to build a show around an outsider coming in and becoming the focal point.
I know this probably sounds like a copout, but some relief overcame me after a few episodes because this wasn’t a show about continuity or delving too far into pretentiousness. In dark times, it’s important to laugh. For every bit that drove me mad (must there be so much karaoke?), there would be a reminder of what embracing the dumbest of gags can achieve. With enough commitment, you could make something like the pinwheel gag from the Nikki Glaser episode wonderfully stupid. As much as I like to think I’m above the lowbrow, loud voices, arm-flailing gags, you begin to feel disarmed by the fact that, yes, this is a comedy show and we’re all just having fun. The best of hosts (Ryan Gosling, Sabrina Carpenter, Alexander Skarsgard, and Colman Domingo being personal favorites) know how to work the room, and their magic complements the duct-taped nature of certain scenes. It begins to feel like magic. Sure, it’s still a hit-and-miss production, but you live for the actors trying to keep a straight face as Matt Damon dances, or Hernandez trying to avoid giving up the ghost that the Emoji sketch is a delightful kind of stupid.
For a while, though, I feared that the show had fallen into the stereotypes that I had in my mind. Given how many were students of viral video film school, I assumed there would be a certain break from the Millennial sense of humor with a group likely targeting Gen-Z. I’m not wishing to suggest there isn’t overlap, but I’ve grown dispassionate about the “terminally online” type of jokes, and they do show up. There’s a segment in the Damon episode where they enhance house burglary protection by adding influencers, and I do imagine it landed for everyone but me. With that said, my favorite bit of the entire season owes its existence to a viral video in which Wickline plays a woman who collects buttons without a clear reason why. I love her deadpan confidence as she alludes to a morbid subtext of collecting to symbolize the passing of time while Jost fails to understand the practicality. Even so, that’s not how I would’ve judged the first few episodes.
If you were to ask me how I felt after the Bad Bunny premiere, I likely would be pulling on my collar and growing nervous. Even if the Poehler episode was collectively better, both embodied a show that felt a bit too reliant on nostalgia over new material. I should say that I give them some lenience given that it was a new season finding its feet, but the Bad Bunny episode fell flat in such a way that I was tempted to tap out. I was not a fan of the segment in which they recap their previous summer by discussing how obsessed they were with K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025). I’m not opposed to the conceit, but it’s all an excuse to have Huntryx perform after stumbling through easy references. Even Poehler’s stint felt like it leaned too heavily on cameos from alumni. I’m welcome to anything happening, but the season’s clumsy inauguration had yet to produce a home run.
At the same time, it’s difficult to really say I had a strong impression of the cast by the end of November. Part of that is to be expected, but they all came across as variations of the same white guy. Hernandez initially struck me as the eccentric ethnic guy, à la Chris Kattan, and the joke was how over the top he was. He’s a very likable guy, but when that was the only differentiation, I was worried. Given that I was also hearing Kam Paterson saying how he felt like he didn’t fit on the show and that Yang was not long for this show, I had to wonder if any of these people would have a long-term impact on my enjoyment.
An important thing to know about comedy is that you can sound pretentious by trying to diagnose why it’s funny. I was willing to accept that some of my hesitation was the fear of the new. Even if I was warming up by the fifth episode, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make it through a whole season. Part of that reason was the show itself, but I’m also very noncommittal to most TV these days. I feared missing one week would set me back three hours, and that sounds exhausting. Still, I made it work and found some weeks to be anticipatory. Sure, I found others like Harry Styles, Jack Black, Melissa McCarthy, and Teyana Taylor a bit insufferable (which Styles skits were not about cult of personality?), but that was not because of the cast. It was a mismatch of styles, and I commend them for making me laugh despite this.
To get the obvious out of the way, Weekend Update remained that reliable source of merriment. The easy set-up/punchline structure more often than not landed for me. Whatever didn’t worked because Jost and Michael Che knew how to feed off each other, appearing docile enough to land the night’s sharpest jokes (“these aren’t even the top 10 grossest weekends that Michael Jackson had”). Even if the rotating cast of supporting roles were less consistent, they at least continued the tradition that you’d expect from the show.
This is an odd thing to admit, but Saturday Night Live in 2026 especially works for no other reason than it’s reliable. We are talking about a time when The Late Show is being cancelled, and Jimmy Kimmel can’t go six months without pissing off the president. Culturally, it feels like a lot of media is sliding into lazy A.I. slop and conservative messaging that doesn’t challenge the status quo. Art feels like it’s in crisis. Sure, that’s a very broad overview, but there hasn’t been confidence in the institutions that we pass on generation to generation. I’m not wishing to suggest this excuses anything, but there’s something to the curtain call every week that makes me a little emotional. It’s the completion of another week where we see a cast who love working together continue to put on a show that makes them happy. I may love parts and loathe others, but they clearly want to be there. It’s organic, it’s fresh, and very diverse in approaches. Having a new class respecting the traditions of the past has a subtextual impact that’s hard to explain and largely projection on my part.
Not only that, but it’s been fascinating to see it escape the trap some have placed on it for decades now that Saturday Night Live is no longer relevant. Maybe it’s because I sought out the news more often, but I found the contrary to be true. Not only did Padilla become a breakout star, but Jost’s impersonation of Pete Hegseth as a college frat bro became so ubiquitous that people were arguing that the real-life subject was imitating Jost’s hyperbolic madman rhetoric. Not only that, but the videos continue to regularly get millions of views on YouTube while another video broke out as being a great way to talk to your MAGA family members who are starting to have buyers’ remorse. There’s obviously a lot more, but the culture around the show felt shockingly vital, and it’s one of the only comedies that has felt regularly in the news in the same period. I learned about how the version I watch (on Peacock) sometimes edits in Friday rehearsal footage while others shared different stories about how they came up with the videos (notably Wickline and the music video about cousins).
Initially I set out to write an essay that was more in-depth about the highs and lows of the season I watched, but at some point the idea felt redundant. The best that can be said is that the show feels comfortable. It allows you to dig into the random zeitgeist that makes up American life and find something to poke fun at. It’s still as artful and esoteric as ever, but there are voices that I’m still warming up to as well. As far as assessing the show as a complete package, I will say that watching something live-ish has merits and detractors. You’re not judging on cumulative but on how you felt in that moment. There’s value in that, even if long stretches felt closer to misfires. Still, I came back the following week in anticipation that things would be better. There was never a week that I failed to laugh a little, and that goes a long way.
Will I continue to be a regular viewer? For the time being, I’ll say yes. I’m not sure if life will get too hectic to keep hope alive permanently, but the show is no different than it was in 1976. I know that sounds odd given everything that’s happened since, but the nature of sketch comedy is a team coming together to see what works. At some point, it’s simply about laughs, and that is even older than Lorne Michaels. It may not feel as radical as it did, but there’s enough reliability to compensate, and I have a soft spot for these guys now. I still love hearing those opening words, and I’m hopeful that next week (whenever that is) delivers another all-timer. Only tuning in will help me find out.
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