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Subject: Is It Finally Time to Put 'Saturday Night Live' to Bed?
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https://www.thewrap.com/nbc-snl-saturday-night-live-cast-leaving-time-to-end/ 

Now in its 48th season, NBC's late-night institution has become a joke -- and 
not the funny kind. 

Benjamin Svetkey   October 29, 2022 @ 11:49 AM 

Did you happen to catch the season premiere of NBC's "Saturday Night Live" a 
few weeks ago? 

The show's "cold open" was a spoof of "Monday Night Football," with guest host 
Miles Teller impersonating NFL analyst Peyton Manning and "SNL" writer and 
feature player Andrew Dismukes imitating his brother Eli. Except instead of 
talking sports, the two focused their running commentary on "SNL" itself, 
ripping apart a separate skit-within-a-skit, shown in split screen, in which 
other cast members bumbled around the stage as Donald Trump and his minions at 
Mar-a-Lago during Hurricane Ian. 

"Let's take a look at the stats so far," Teller quipped a few minutes into the 
program. "Fourteen attempted jokes, only one mild laugh and three chuckles." 

The parody was clearly intended as an archly self-referential bit of meta 
schtick. But what that three-chuckle sketch actually revealed to the audience 
-- if that's what one can even call the thinning crowd of stragglers still 
tuning into the show -- is that "SNL" has become so unfunny over the years, 
even its writers and performers know how lame it is. 

I hate to be the one to point this out, because "SNL" has meant so much to so 
many viewers over so many decades -- or at least given generations of teenagers 
a reason to feel slightly less crappy about being stuck home on a Saturday 
night. But clearly the time has come to put this creaking relic, now in its 
48th season, out of its all-too-prolonged misery. 

It's time to cancel "SNL." 

I understand that this is supposed to be a "transition year," as "SNL's" 77-
year-old creator and producer Lorne Michaels insists on calling it. Pete 
Davidson, Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant left the program at the end of last 
season, along with nearly a half-dozen other regulars who bolted Studio 8H over 
the course of 2022. It's been, in fact, the biggest cast turnover since the 
great exodus of 1995, when Adam Sandler, Mike Myers and Chris Farley all 
skedaddled from the show. And while it's at least theoretically possible that 
this newest crew of "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" -- Molly Kearney, 
Michael Longfellow, Devon Walker and Marcello Hernandez -- might turn out to be 
the second coming of John Belushi and Gilda Radner, so far this season they 
haven't even ascended to Gilbert Gottfried levels of comedy. 

To be fair, "SNL's" mediocrity isn't entirely the new cast's fault. It's not 
like the show was killing it with the cast that came before them, or, for that 
matter, the cast before that. The program's audience has been shrinking for 
decades: This season's premiere pulled in only four million viewers, making it 
the least-watched in the series' history. While "SNL's" ratings remain 
relatively strong -- it's No. 4 among the top 50 live broadcasts among the 18-
49 demo -- it's still attracting just a third of the viewership it was drawing 
back in the 1990s. Granted, nobody today is watching broadcast TV the way they 
did 30 years ago, but that's sort of the point. Why is NBC clinging to a show 
that peaked during the Clinton administration? 

But let's be honest -- even back in the 1990s, "SNL" wasn't always all that 
great. To be even more honest, the show was never all that great, even during 
its early golden age in the 1970s. For sure, there were many moments of 
inspired comic brilliance (Belushi's Samurai deli, Dan Aykroyd's Julia Child 
impersonation, Bill Murray's smarmy lounge singer crooning the "Star Wars" 
theme). But watch those ancient episodes on Peacock today and you can't help 
but wonder what the fuss was all about, particularly when it comes to Chevy 
Chase. Even back then, in those very first Weekend Updates, he came across as 
insufferably smug. 

What was extraordinary about "SNL" when it first arrived on the airwaves, 
however, was how new and fresh it seemed. Television in the 1970s was mostly a 
vanilla wasteland filled with pablum like "Starsky & Hutch," "The Six Million 
Dollar Man" and "The Love Boat." Even the best of it -- "The Bob Newhart Show," 
"The Rockford Files," "The Odd Couple" -- was pretty traditional fare following 
straight-forward formulas. 

But "SNL," which, in 1975 burst onto the scene like a pop cultural uprising, 
was a wholly original revelation. It was filled with rock n' roll (it's where 
Simon and Garfunkel reunited in 1975), political humor (Chase's impersonation 
of Gerald Ford, which mostly involved slapstick pratfalls, likely helped elect 
Jimmy Carter in 1976), and irreverent spoofs of TV itself. Even TV commercials 
-- the very hand that feeds broadcasting -- were fair game for parody on this 
bonkers new show. 

"SNL" in those early years felt rebellious and subversive, even when its jokes 
fell flat, which they frequently did. It was as if the inmates had taken over 
the asylum. Only these inmates had all escaped from institutions with names 
like "The National Lampoon" and Second City. And the fact that it was all 
broadcast over the high-wire act of live television made it even more crazily 
exhilarating. 

Over the decades, "SNL" has sometimes managed to recapture that original 
iconoclastic energy, or at least put its snarky imprint on major cultural 
moments. Tina Fey's "I can see Russia from my house" gag pretty much nailed 
Sarah Palin (who appeared on the show opposite Fey, anyway, right before the 
2008 election, proving just how reckless a politician she actually is). Kate 
McKinnon sitting down at a piano to sing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" was 
exactly the right note for the show to strike after Donald Trump's election in 
2016 (no matter what one-time cast member Rob Schneider has to say about it). 

Still, television today isn't a particularly hospitable environment for 
rebellious skit comedy. For one thing, the rebels took over the medium a long 
time ago, with shows like "The Simpsons," "Seinfeld" and "South Park" upending 
what was left of TV's norms after "SNL" opened the gates. These days, 
iconoclasm is the new establishment. 

For another, rebellion is for kids, and in 2022, young people aren't staying 
home on Saturday nights to tune in to the National Broadcasting Company on some 
antique cathode-ray-tube contraption in their parents' living rooms -- not even 
when Lorne Michaels invites a teen magnet like 67-year-old Irish actor Brendan 
Gleeson on the show as guest host (see the Oct. 8 episode; actually don't, it's 
a disaster). They're not watching TV at all; they're glued to their phones. To 
the degree they're even aware of "SNL," it's likely because they've seen clips 
of it uploaded to TikTok or YouTube. 

Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful to NBC for giving Belushi and Aykroyd and all 
the rest 90-minutes of weekly late-night airtime all those years ago. I'm glad 
I live in a pop cultural universe in which "Saturday Night Live" played such a 
huge role. I'm just saying it's finally time to gather up the cast on that 
iconic stage, fire up that Howard Shore closing theme song, and at long last, 
say goodnight.