SNL just had its most-watched season in 23 years but one guy really hated it
He spent months as the butt of Saturday Night Live jokes. He hate-tweeted his displeasure. So why couldn’t he stop watching?
“Frankly, the way the show is going now, and you look at the kind of work they’re doing, who knows how long that show is going to be on?” Donald Trump, then president-elect, told Matt Lauer in December. “It’s a terrible show.”
On Saturday, SNL concluded its most-watched season in 23 years, a feat it accomplished while ratcheting up the political material and going hard in the paint on Trump jokes.
SNL mounted a 42nd season chock full of celebrity guest appearances, highly-anticipated hosts and sketches that broke out of the realm of pop culture to become politically relevant as well. Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation prompted reports that the actual White House press secretary’s longevity in the job would be threatened by it. Ivanka Trump answered criticisms that she wasn’t a moderating force in her father’s administration, but a “complicit” one - framing captured in an SNL video short. And never before has someone who was about to become president been as vocal as Trump has been in his disdain of the show.
It’s quite the turnaround from the previous season, when SNL caught major flack for booking Trump to guest host in November 2015. The highly rated, poorly reviewed episode attracted protests from some on the left, who accused producers and NBC of “normalizing” Trump’s rhetoric during the primaries.
No one these days is accusing SNL of going soft on Trump. Lampooning politicians has always been SNL’s bread-and-butter during presidential campaign season. Remember Al Gore’s “lock box?” Or the uncanny resemblance Tina Fey bore to Sarah Palin? But the political stuff tends to tamp down after Election Day.
Not this season, which began Oct. 1 and ended May 20. Almost every cold open – the sketch that kicks off the show – included impersonations of Trump or lampooned his administration. Resident Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin played him in all but three of them.
Putting on so many political sketches is the inevitable byproduct of the current moment. Weekend Update’s Colin Jost has pointed to SNL’s difficulty presenting parodies in recent years, because of how fragmented American culture has become. Years ago, more people all watched the same sitcoms, listened to the same music.
“Politics right now is probably the closest we’ve come to a fullblown national phenomenon as anything in a long time,” Jost told the Hollywood Reporter. “And anytime people are paying more attention to politics, it’s good for our show. But you almost feel like a war profiteer at times because we’ve benefited from a situation that’s so tough.”
Clearly a number of SNL cast members and writers have strong feelings about Trump (um, they don’t like him). But for all the public perception that SNL is on a crusade to get Trump – a view the president himself has voiced – executive producer Lorne Michaels has remained consistent that his show’s mission is to create laughs, not political change.
“The thing about SNL, from the beginning, is we were really not partisan,” he told the Dallas Morning News in February 2016. “In a time now where most of the news channels are very partisan, we don’t do that. We are doing what we think is funny.”
This season, SNL also had a few sketches that directly mocked liberals, such as one with Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock at an Election Night party, and another about a literal bubble for “like-minded, free thinkers ... and no one else.”
And the show has made fun of Hillary Clinton, ribbing the Democratic candidate as robotic and awkward in her attempts to relate to the public. But the episode after Election Day featured an entirelyserious cold open, with Kate McKinnon’s Clinton playing Hallelujah at the piano with tears in her eyes. Months later, Baldwin’s Trump did the same thing – but to poke fun at a chaotic week of bad headlines for Trump.