Saturday Night Live preview: Idris Elba – Khalid expectations
What Elba has going for him, first and foremost, is audience enthusiasm. Everyone is rooting for him. We know that countless people have been waiting to see him in Studio 8H for years now and this marks an opportunity for him to be able to showcase everything that he can do comedically. This is fittingly, promotion for its Netflix series Turn Up Charlie, which has found itself some surprising pop-culture competition in After Life, which we hear is absolutely brilliant.
The one thing that is probably going against Idris is, ironically, the thing that got everyone so enthused for this episode tonight in the first place: Enthusiasm. Everyone wants him to be awesome at this. As a matter of fact, everyone just assumes he will be! It’s what Benedict Cumberbatch ran into before taking on the job and, to a certain extent, Peter Dinklage was also saddled with it. Iconic TV actors have a hard time taking on that kind of hype. At least Dinklage had “Space Pants,” but we think that both his and Cumberbatch’s episodes weren’t as good as we’d constructed in our head beforehand.
Maybe the writers fall victim to false assumptions, as well, that a great actor automatically equals a great show. It’s on them entering an episode like this to know that the hype for Idris is in another atmosphere and you need to come up with material that exists on another plane.
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There’s one thing that we would ask of SNL — don’t try to do an R. Kelly sketch. While we know that a lot of great memes came out of the recent interview between the singer and Gayle King, remember what’s actually at the root of that issue. We know that it’s been the big pop-culture event of the past couple of days, but still. We’d actually prefer them steer clear of current events in general unless they have a really brilliant twist on things — the same goes for politics. Just mimicking something that is already absurd in the world of politics only has so much play when you’ve done it a dozen or so times this season.
Would we love a Luther spoof?
A Million percent, but that’s probably not happening. It’s too specialized an audience in America but John Luther, brooding detective who constantly digs his own grave, is a wonderful subject for a spoof or two.
If you missed it…
Check out our review for last week’s new SNL episode by heading over to this link! We shall be back tonight with another live review of everything that goes down. (Photo: NBC.)