Saturday Night Live preview: Expectations for Steve Carell, Ella Mai

Saturday Night Live

This weekend’s new episode of Saturday Night Live is being hosted by Steve Carell, and on paper, this has the makings of being one of the greats. After all, it’s Steve Carell!

Related SNL video! – Check out some of our thoughts on this past episode below, and remember to subscribe to CarterMatt on YouTube for some other insight. For more scoop, be sure to check out our full SNL playlist right now.

The truth is that the promos for this episode, including the latest one at the bottom of this article, are not particularly hilarious. Yet, Steve Carell is bar-none one of the funniest actors of the past few decades and he can play a lot of different characters. Given that he hasn’t hosted the show in a long time, and he also hasn’t really done a lot of mainstream comedy in a long time (he’s been doing more indie fare as of late, especially around awards season), he is probably looking at this as an opportunity to go back out and scratch some familiar itches. Like the majority of the actors on SNL at the moment, Steve has a background in sketch comedy and with that in mind, he’ll probably embrace almost anything that is thrown at him.

Specific expectations – Even if he does not play any character on The Office, it feels fair to say that Michael Scott will be mentioned at least once and the idea of it not happening is a little too much to bear. Carell recognizes just how popular this show remains and it really feels like social media over the past several years has been successful in almost creating a brand-new life for it that it really did not have otherwise. We do think that there’s a small chance that he could reprise his Anchorman role of dopey weatherman Brick, but only if Will Ferrell turns up in some capacity.

Given that this is the Thanksgiving episode, it’s virtually a slam-dunk that there will be at least one Turkey Day sketch somewhere in here. It wouldn’t be a shock if it was some sort of pre-tape featuring a number of the women on the show, given that this is something that we’ve seen them do in the past. Otherwise, we don’t think that there’s been one unifying dumpster-fire political story; things have been a little bit quiet on the social-media front with that.

Musically – We’re not going to pretend that we have a rich musical knowledge of Ella Mai, but judging from what we have heard, she is a tremendous talent and the series is fairly lucky to have her on board as a guest for this episode. She brings to the table a lot of R&B soul, and should offer the series something refreshing.

Related News Have you seen the other promo that we have online already for this episode?

What do you want to see when it comes to this particular Saturday Night Live episode? Be sure to share right now in the attached comments. (Photo: NBC.)

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