Should Saturday Night Live season 44 feature more recurring sketches?
From our vantage point, season 43 was a very funny season. While it may not have produced a sheer abundance of super-memorable sketches for all-time classic moments, it did routinely make us laugh. With this show, that’s often the goal more so than anything else.
Yet, there is something that season 43 really lacked — the introduction of some new recurring sketches that we could see on many different occasions. Whether it be the introduction of a new character, a parody like Celebrity Family Feud, or a sketch themed around a setting like Last Call, there wasn’t that much from this past season that we imagine we’ll be seeing again. Bits like Whiskers R We and some of the other ones we’ve suggested are starting to run dry, and there are only so many pre-tapes / political sketches we can see in a given season before we’re over them altogether.
In a lot of ways, we actually do think that SNL has become so reliant on things like current events and celebrity cameos that it’s made their jobs a little bit easier. These are cultural touchstones that viewers will immediately recognize and tell their friends about — maybe it’s an NBC mandate to include them, but we do miss the days where there were a lot of different sketch ideas introduced that could be done multiple times. There are some recent ones that have worked — see the supernatural encounters bit with Kate McKinnon recounting some of her various abductions. There were some attempts made in season 43, but they just didn’t quite work.
For season 44, we’d like to see SNL go back to basics somewhat and think about some more recurring sketches and characters outside of Weekend Update that they can go back to and things that can be watched and enjoyed online years after the fact. While touching on current events is super-important for a series like this, SNL is also a timeless show (as opposed to the show Timeless, which really needs to be saved — cue Leslie Jones). We don’t want it to lose that quality in favor of living too much in the now.
Do you wish SNL would shift its identity more to classic characters and recurring sketches, similar to what we saw in the run leading up to Donald Trump’s arrival? Share in the comments!
Meanwhile, like CarterMatt on Facebook for more news! We’ll definitely have more discussion on all things SNL well before we get around to the show’s premiere. (Photo: NBC.)