‘Saturday Night Live’: Octavia Spencer hosting March 4

Tonight, “Saturday Night Live” had a chance to follow up an insanely good weekend hosted by Kristen Stewart with an Alec Baldwin episode that also had a ton of potential. After all, there aren’t too many opportunities that you get to have to capitalize on ratings momentum like the sort that Melissa McCarthy provided in her cameo appearance. (It definitely made sense that they would bring Melissa back as Sean Spicer again — we just didn’t know if she would be available entering the episode.)

Going into tonight, we knew that there was going to be a little bit of a break before the show came back with another installment. The big mystery was simply not knowing who the next host would be. We hoped that the show would answer this; luckily, they did in customary fashion right before one of the commercial breaks.

It turns out that Octavia Spencer is coming up next! She will host the March 4 edition of the show, and we absolutely love this idea given that she’s had an incredibly year in film, and we haven’t gotten a chance to see her do very much like this at all. We expect that she’ll be willing to try a lot of different stuff, and maybe spoof a couple of her movies along the way, as well.

What was somewhat odd about this announcement was that for one of the first times in recent memory, the show didn’t announce the musical guest for the episode. We figure that one will be booked over the next week or two — given that the next show is still a ways out, there’s no rush. There will probably be at least one more episode in March, but we figure that the show is going to pace itself from now until May since they aired so many episodes in the first half of the year.

What do you think about this choice for “SNL”? Be sure to share some of your thoughts on the subject below! Meanwhile, be sure to head over here to get some additional news on the show, including a review for Baldwin’s episode. (Photo: NBC.)