Anna Daniels
Saturday Night Live has been delivering special remotely produced episodes of the late night sketch series for a few weeks now. However, that will come to an end with the third (maybe final?) Saturday Night Live At Home this weekend, which will mark the finale for the current 45th season.
Here’s the announcement from SNL, with an amusing glimpse at some bloopers from the previous At Home episodes:
Season Finale this Saturday ?? #SNLAtHome pic.twitter.com/CFTQzqBX8y
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) May 7, 2020
It just goes to show you that it’s not super easy for Saturday Night Live to pull off these episodes when the cast members are writing and starring in these sketches by themselves. Thankfully, they have a good team of post-production people who are dealing with graphics, editing, sound and whatnot, but it’s still very much a makeshift production environment that comes with a whole new set of challenges. It might not be quite as daunting as a regular episode of Saturday Night Live that’s put together in a single week, but it still requires a lot of hard work.
The second episode of Saturday Night Live At Home that aired a couple weeks ago was a considerable improvement over the experiment of the first episode. The overall quality was better when it came to the sketches, not to mention the variety of bits they could do, and there was a big leap on the technical side of things as far as lighting, on-screen graphics, and more.
Since this is the season finale, hopefully SNL will be bringing in some special guests to help close out what has been a stressful end to the 45th season. Tom Hanks ushered in the first episode after recovering from coronavirus himself, Brad Pitt popped up as Dr. Anthony Fauci in the second episode’s cold open, Paul Rudd surprisingly co-starred in a sketch, and Adam Sandler made a music video with Pete Davidson (which included a Rob Schneider cameo). Of course, the “hosts” of the show can’t do more than open the episode, maybe do a monologue, and introduce the musical guest, but it’s always fun when some big names stop by.
As for when Saturday Night Live will return for season 46, that depends on how the future of Hollywood production turns out. It’s not clear when movies and TV shows will resume, but when they do, there will be plenty of new policies in place in order to protect the cast and crew and stop the potential spread of coronavirus again. Considering the unique production process for SNL, which includes a lot of people occasionally being in close quarters in Studio 8H, it makes me wonder if it will take longer for the show to get back to what they consider to be normal.
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