Live from Everyone’s House: It’s Saturday Night!
Saturday Night Live (SNL) At-Home Review
April 11, 2020, “Saturday Night Live” was one for the record books. At the height of a pandemic of the COVID-19 virus in New York, the city that is the hardest hit in the world at the moment, the SNL cast connected by Zoom conference call to put together its weekly show, “Saturday Night Live At-Home.” In spite of all of the worry, lock-down and fear that is going on in New York, the SNL cast managed to successfully coordinate themselves to gather online for sketch comedy, music, and a remembrance for a crew legend lost this week to the virus.
There is much to unpack here.
Technically, the show was presented as series of sketches that spanned several independent YouTube videos, that could be threaded or watched separately. Tom Hanks, who is recovering from Coronavirus, delivered the opening monologue from his home in Los Angeles. After the monologue, the SNL musicians played their intro over Zoom and the familiar graphics introduced the show’s cast and “special musical guest, Coldplay’s Chris Martin,” who performed via video from his home in Los Angeles, another city under quarantine.
One of the best parts of this show was the creativity of the cast in absentia of their usual support crew who provide costumes, make-up, sets, and props. In SNL At-Home, the cast made do with paper mustaches colored in with marker (Tom Hanks), cotton swabs, batteries, and Kate McKinnon’s cat/son Nino Positano for the RBG Workout sketch, and the use of children’s markers (Ego Nwodim) for a Quarantine QT YouTube beauty spoof. The creativity of the cast trying to “put on a show” was in full force. They had to work it, doing many more jobs than usual, and to their credit, they were able to produce a show and run it on YouTube on a Saturday night.
Where SNL crossed the chasm was that some of these mock videos were so persuasive, that within the context of viewing them on the Internet, they were almost “too real.” This is especially true with Cam Playz Dat (Mikey Day) doing a Call of Duty Twitch stream. This sketch showed graphic content that might not have made it passed NBC censors, but within the context of the Internet, was perhaps more tolerated. Either way, this sketch, along with some of the others, transported the viewer out of the idea of SNL and more into the regular Internet culture, creating a bit of dissonance. This is hard to manage cognitively on a regular day viewing televised clips within YouTube, but in the context of SNL At-Home, some Internet based sketches created a contextual tension for the viewer, leaving us to figure out which simulation we were participating in.
For many of us, tonight’s SNL provided an anchor within a time where we’ve been stuck on loops watching television shows and series that were produced months or years ago, supplemented by YouTube videos. The devices at play during SNL At-Home were incredibly meta. We watched the cast via YouTube use Zoom to make parodies of YouTube videos. We watched the cast use Zoom to make parodies of Zoom videos. We watched the cast have a video call to try to figure out what to make a sketch about. We even watched YouTube video of Pete Davidson, in his mother’s lush fully finished Staten Island basement, make two separate video music spoofs, one of Drake and the other of Andre 2000, the latter of which also included not just the basement, but shots of the driveway.
The only live TV the US has had lately has been press conferences, supplemented by Internet streaming productions. Because we are watching Internet media more closely, it was fun to spot where SNL sketches might have derived source material. One example of this was Sport Report, where Bob Tisdale (Alex Moffat) gave play-by-plays of various mundane household activities and objects. This seemed to be a nod and mash-up of the style of sports announcer Andrew Cotter’s successful Twitter videos (documenting the activities of his labradors Olive and Maple, as competitive sporting events) combined with various videos we’ve seen of our housebound selves using pretty much anything as a TikTok prop. Reflexively looking at our television past with no future programming in sight has become tiresome, and SNL delivered many versions of the “professional” amateur video tonight giving us a new hybrid model. It was bold.
In some ways, SNL was unrecognizable as many of the show’s identifiers were missing. We could see the cast, but in a new screen format, without a live audience, and with a distributed Internet audience. It seemed to be viewed in mostly asynchronous time, with over 2 million views of the opening monologue, dropping down to lower numbers in the hundred thousands for various sketch segments. We were told it was SNL, and we went along with it, because it had the markings of SNL, the tone of SNL, but by many a comparison, there was no SNL there.
So, how did we believe it? How did it work?
One of the reasons why we were able to recognize a show that was pretty much nothing like its usual self is due to the memory of Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the cultural psyche. SNL has been providing “Live from New York” sketch comedy since October 11, 1975, and here, 45 years later, it has maintained this tradition in a city in the midst of a pandemic. SNL works, because SNL is a brand. We recognize it as a brand for its various elements and for the story it has communicated about itself to us for the past 45 years. It is live, it is from New York, it is on Saturday Night, and it has had Lorne Michels at its helm since the very beginning. SNL has a reliable format of an introductory monologue, mock commercials, talk shows or music videos, a news segment, a guest star, a musical guest star, certain graphics, music, and an announcer who glues it all together.
We recognize SNL as a brand, and it is because of this brand and the story that it has told us for the past 45 years, that we are able to look at a bunch of connected YouTube videos performed by actors who are not in professional costumes, or holding believable props, or disguised with make-up, that we are able as an audience to fill in those gaps ourselves to make the format work — even though it was filtered through Zoom and through YouTube. We know it is SNL.
At the very end of the show, the cast continued their Zoom performance with a memorial to their beloved music producer, Hal Willner, who died of COVID-19 this week. Legacy cast members contributed anecdotes via video, and SNL legends came together to sing a song of remembrance while within the Zoom conferencing software. It was a fitting “make it work” tribute to a man who had made it work at SNL for the past 40 years.
During this Montage remembrance, there was footage of Mr. Willner speaking, where he described what it felt like to work at SNL.
“When it’s all working, there’s nothing like it. I mean, I kind a get off on the danger, there’s the area that this could really f*ck up, or this could be so magical.”
I’d have to say, on April 11, 2020, SNL achieved both.
