Blog! From New York! It’s Saturday Night!

Maybe you’ve already watched the Saturday Night Live 50^th anniversary extravaganza which was about 17 hours long and featured everyone from Pedro Pascal to Bad Bunny to, for some reason, Al Sharpton. Maybe you’ve already seen Questlove’s acclaimed documentary on Saturday Night Live’s fifty years of musical guests ranging from the iconic to the ephemeral. Maybe you’re one of the people who’s watched the Domingo sketch on TikTok a hundred and fifty times, or maybe you’ve had the lyrics to “Lazy Sunday” memorized for two decades.

Or maybe you’re saying “Saturday Night Live is still on the air? I go out on the weekends with actual friends.”

Regardless of whether you think Saturday Night Live is the best thing ever to happen to American comedy, or that it’s the millstone dragging American comedy into mediocrity, you can’t deny its influence. Or its success – not just in comedy but in television at large. In a time when network audience shares are shrinking and mass culture has splintered into nonexistence, SNL remains pretty much the last non-sports network program that lots of people make a point of watching in real time or shortly thereafter.

Yes, the sketches are almost always too long. Sure, creator Lorne Michaels’ heavy curatorial hand favors the familiar over the oddball. But even if all the show ever accomplished was giving us that Nate Bargatze George Washington sketch – I mean, wouldn’t that be enough?