I liked the "SNL at Home" show!!!

[Chocolate Moose]

I thought it was cute and funny! It was interesting to see their apts too!

[Schmoopie]

I didn't even know about it till I saw an article about it online. I did watch Tom Hanks' monologue and thought it was hilarious. It was a relief seeing how good he looked although I was taken aback at first by his haircut (or lack thereof!). I wish I could see the whole episode b/c I wasn't able to find the rest of it.

[TMC]

SNL At Home was unexpectedly moving

Saturday Night Live's first-ever remotely shot show was "in all honesty ... a weaker-than-average episode of a show whose average episodes aren’t what they used to be," says Judy Berman. "Yet, as I watched what the cast and writers managed to put together, prepared to be disappointed by SNL as usual, an unexpected sense of gratitude blindsided me. It wasn’t about the sketches themselves, though there were highlights." Berman adds: "The lows were predictable: too many stale Tiger King jokes. Too many sketches that had Gen Z influencer types blithely vlogging, doing DIY makeup tutorials and live-streaming video games in the time of coronavirus. An awkward split-screen edition of 'Weekend Update,' apparently recorded on Zoom with an audience listening in to provide laughter, was essentially a digest of the past month on Twitter....Still, what I appreciated was the effort to make comedy out of the unprecedented situation we’re all living through. As with late-night hosts who are cobbling shows together from their living rooms and musicians doing sets on Instagram Live, SNL at Home was, at least, an attempt to make us forget our troubles for 90 minutes on a Saturday night. More importantly, if newspapers (and weekly magazines, not to mention digital media) are a rough draft of history, then so are all of these timely forms of entertainment. Decades from now, when future generations want to know about the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ll have a bottomless trove of harrowing news reports to consult. But they will also be able to dig up a special episode of NBC’s stalwart sketch show and understand the more mundane daily realities of being alive in America during the spring of 2020: the boredom, stir-craziness and sexual frustration. The anxiety. The ambient grief. And—lest we ever forget—the Zoom."

ALSO:

• SNL at Home was a cultural document of our times, offering surreal comforts: "Watching cast members such as Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, and Pete Davidson rattle around in their homes may have had a touch of public-access strangeness to it, but each of their performances had a pent-up quality that many a home viewer could probably relate to," says David Sims. "They’re performers, after all, and they have nobody to perform for. As McKinnon bounced around the room doing home workouts as part of her Ruth Bader Ginsburg impression, her exuberance at finally unleashing some energy felt contagious."
• All things considered, it was pretty good. And all things not considered, it was pretty good, too: "In addition to the variable quality of the sketches, the show was marked by different degrees of technical polish, picture quality, sound quality and costuming," says Robert Lloyd. "(Hanks was in a suit at the top — 'this is the first time I’ve worn anything but sweatpants since March 11' — and more casual at the close.) Glimpses into the living spaces of cast members, in the opening credits and throughout the show, revealed that some live like adults and some like young adults, and also that Tom Hanks has a nice kitchen, a collection of old typewriters and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. What sets Saturday Night Live apart from talk-show late night, of course, is that it’s an ensemble comedy, most of the time, which would seem tricky to pull off when its cast members, like the rest of us, are hunkered down in their individual bunkers. But the fact that the whole wide world has discovered ways to be together when forced apart provides both form and content for a new kind of group comedy."
• Saturday Night Live was able to conquer the unique challenge of making comedy during a pandemic: "SNL won’t be the last show to figure out a socially distanced version of itself, though its schedule makes it one of the first," says Alison Herman. "It’s unclear if SNL plans to produce more At Home episodes in future; next week, at least, will be a rerun of John Mulaney’s dispatch from simpler times. While often rough or inconsistent, SNL at Home proved itself a workable substitute, especially for a show where roughness and inconsistency are partly the point. But it’s also a perfect time capsule: far enough into the new normal to accept things can’t go on as they were, but not far enough to know how things will become."
• SNL At Home was scattershot but welcome: "A mid-show graphic announced that there’d be no new show next week (we get a rerun of this season’s John Mulaney/David Byrne episode instead), making this admittedly catch-what-you-can episode feel, again, more like a little gift than a bold or innovative adaptation to this new, unnerving normal," says Dennis Perkins. "And that’s fine, honestly. If Lorne (Michaels) and the gang had been spending these off weeks energetically retooling Saturday Night Live for the long haul, the splash would have been chilling for a viewership hard-put to find any normalcy. Instead, we got one proper sketch, really, a videoconferencing office meeting that brought back Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant’s terror-stricken receptionists to ineptly operate 'the Zoom' and break down in weeping, oversharing surrender when they can’t."
• SNL At Home got strong viewership
• Chloe Fineman was the star of SNL At Home with her Timothée Chalamet, JoJo Siwa, and Carole Baskin "MasterClass Quarantine Edition" sketch

Saturday Night Live can adapt to social distancing, but not if it sticks with the SNL At Home format

Late-night hosts from Jimmy Kimmel to Samantha Bee to Jimmy Fallon and Trevor Noah have found success doing their shows from home during the coronavirus quarantine because the talk show format thrives on the personalities of the host, says Jen Chaney. "All the taped bits and karaoke sessions are fine, but ultimately, they’re not central to what a late-night talk show needs to do," says Chaney. However, "Saturday Night Live is a different animal," she says. "We expect SNL to be both polished, with sketches that are well written and smartly realized by an agile production staff, and rough, as sketches are live, which means a screwup is always just a second away. In a socially distanced format, the show can’t be polished. There are no real costumes. Sets and backdrops in Saturday night’s episode consisted mostly of homemade signs. And because all the bits are pretaped, the unpredictability that comes from going live is missing. What has always given SNL its zing, even on its bad nights, is the energy that comes from having a group of comedy pros bouncing silliness off each other. That energy can’t be replicated when the players are not in the same space. It just can’t, even when a valiant, technologically supported effort is made." Still, Chaney says the emotional Hal Willner tribute showed the value of SNL during the pandemic. "It wasn’t a bit that was going for laughs, obviously, but it spoke to why we need SNL right now," she says. "Because Saturday Night Live is a tradition. Because, as dysfunctional as its climate has often been, its cast and alumni feel like family. Because you want to see all the faces in that family to make sure they’re all doing okay. For those reasons, I think SNL should continue to air in the 11:30 time slot, not just as repeats but perhaps not in exactly the Saturday Night Live at Home format, either. Trying to make SNL look like usual SNL is just not possible right now. Instead, maybe Lorne Michaels & Co. should plan to do a combination of clip show and new content." She adds: "There are a lot of ways to make Saturday Night Live into a must-watch weekly event without trying to do it the way it’s always been done. Part of living through this pandemic means realizing that we have to let go of certain habits and approach them entirely differently. This seems like a moment for Saturday Night Live to do exactly that." ALSO: Kenan Thompson tells Jimmy Fallon how SNL At Home came together.