‘Saturday Night Live’: Why Stephen Amell of ‘Arrow’ should host
Today in our “Saturday Night Live” Wishlist series, we’re venturing for the second time over to The CW, and specifically to someone in “Arrow” star Stephen Amell who we think would be absolutely brilliant on the show. He’s got a great sense of humor, is down to make fun of himself, and there are a wide variety of other reasons why this would work out well — but we don’t want to give all of them away just yet…
The context – There is a real lacking of big TV names who get hired to host “SNL.” We suppose you can consider Alec Baldwin from this weekend to be one, and then Aziz Ansari from earlier this season to be another. The same thing goes for Benedict Cumberbatch. Kristen Wiig is someone we’d count for the sake of her being an alumni. (John Cena we suppose could also count, given that wrestling does air on TV and there are certainly performance elements to it.)
Even when you look at all of these names, there is one common thing missing: None of these actually star currently on a scripted broadcast / cable TV series that airs a new episode a week during its run. The last host who did was Julia Louis-Dreyfus of “Veep” last year; Taraji P. Henson of “Empire” in April 2015 is the last network star specifically with the distinction.
Why Amell? – For one, we know that he really wants to host the show — he said so on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” a couple of years ago. It’s always great to have someone who is this enthusiastic about being a part of the show, since you know that they would bring it at every opportunity. You could easily do some fun “Arrow” parodies, but we feel like he’s be game to do all sorts of other silly stuff. He could be the crazy guy in a sketch, someone trying to keep it all together in some others, or do something a little bit more physical. He’s so used to having to act doing action sequences that there may be some elements of this that are similar to when Dwayne Johnson last hosted — which, for the record, is one of our favorite “SNL” shows of all time.
Also, if there was a way for “Arrow” fans to campaign for him to get the gig, we know that they would — helped him to get on “Late Night” in the first place.
Could it happen? – Most of it does come down to whether or not Lorne Michaels and the network start to welcome more network TV stars on the host the show. We understand that there could be a perception that they’re giving another network’s talent added publicity, but at the same time we’re an advocate for “SNL” doing the best thing to help itself, and not caring as much about the metrics. We really just wish there was a parallel universe (an “SNL” Earth-2?) where they could do another ten or so episodes a year without exhausting the cast into the ground. This would give people like Amell more opportunities, especially given that he really only has a window of a month or so near the end of the season where he would be available to host. After all “Arrow” films from the summer until the spring, and it wouldn’t be easy to make the trip from Vancouver to New York in the middle of production unless he somehow had a massive break at some point.
Do you want to see Stephen host “SNL” in the future? Be sure to share some of your thoughts in the comments below! You can also head over here to get some other editions of our SNL Wishlist series. (Photo: NBC.)