‘Saturday Night Live’ preview: Is Kristen Wiig going to pull this off?

This weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” has every bit of the potential that an edition of this show needs to be roll-on-the-floor funny. Why? There’s only one reason: Kristen Wiig.

When we saw her on a weekly basis for years, we were actually pretty critical of Lorne Michaels for basically turning the entire show into Wiig Week, and giving her so much airtime that some of her characters grew tiresome. However, this is definitely a case of distance making the heart grow fonder. We haven’t seen any of Wiig’s personalities all year, and so seeing them now is in a word “refreshing”. She has a bigger backlog than almost any former star of the show ever, and as if that was not appealing enough, she also has the capacity to create new things. Who knows? Judging by the fact that Michaels wasted no time whatsoever in bringing her on board the show as a host, he could easily bring her back again on a near-annual basis to make a tradition out of it.

The truth of the matter is that we’re nearly clutching Michaels’ legs at this point and begging for an “SNL” that actually makes us proud to admit to being obsessed with every inner working of the show. We haven’t had that feeling since Melissa McCarthy hosted, and there have been three shows in particular this year (Adam Levine, Kevin Hart, and Vince Vaughn) that need to have the tape incinerated in a barrel, and then carted away to the NBC graveyard.

The first video preview for this week’s show features Wiig’s old pal Fred Armisen, and this one has someone else she knows rather well from her tenure in Kenan “all of my impressions are of me” Thompson. While none of the jokes in this clip (which also features musical guest Vampire Weekend) are hilarious, this was likely written in three seconds in between someone pitching “The Californians” again. We’ll find out in a few days whether or not Wiig’s show is really worth all of the hype it’s been getting.