Saturday Night Live season 43: Ryan Gosling to host premiere

For most of the past few weeks, we’ve speculated at length about people like Gal Gadot or Tom Holland to host the Saturday Night Live premiere. Ryan Gosling was not a name we anticipated seeing out there, mostly because the longstanding tradition with this show seems to be to either A) choose an alumni for the role or B) choose someone who is coming off of a really big summer. We don’t think that he necessarily qualifies for either one of these things.

Nonetheless, Gosling has a big role coming up in the new Blade Runner movie, and his previous hosting gig on the show was reasonably well-received. We do think that he has more potential than we’ve seen from him on the show so far; his first show had funny moments, but he also seemed to appear nervous at times and a little bit off-kilter in some of his sketches.

Nonetheless, his first hosting gig did give us the debut of Kate McKinnon as the super-weird woman who tells stories about paranormal encounters. It does have that going for it.

Perhaps the even more notable news about the September 30 premiere at the moment is the musical guest: JAY-Z. He’s one of the biggest names that we’ve had a chance to see on the show in a premiere in quite some time. The fact that SNL was able to book him for the show should serve as further evidence as to the series’ pop-culture clout at the moment. This is a series coming off of some of its best ratings in years, and while we often do see things tend to decline in the years following the election, at the same time Donald Trump is clearly getting a whole lot of headlines. As a result of that, we don’t think the show’s performance is really going to be slowing down all that much.

This announcement comes at the end of a brief Weekend Update Summer Edition experiment that drew a few laughs, even if the entire thing was basically a watered-down version of a segment that is better in smaller doses. While this was far from the greatness of SNL proper, let’s still be honest: This was far and away better than what we had on television the majority of this summer. We especially mean that when it comes to comedy, as things have been sorely lacking and then some when it comes to the genre.

For the record, we do also still hope that we get to see a show featuring Gadot or Holland at some point in the future given how important they were to the summer and to pop-culture as a whole.

What do you think about Gosling hosting the season premiere of SNL? Be sure to share some of your thoughts below!

Meanwhile, head over to the link here in the event you want some additional news when it comes to the show. (Photo: NBC.)