Keke Palmer to make Saturday Night Live debut with SZA

Just in case anyone out there didn’t watch last night’s Saturday Night Live for some reason, maybe because the show insists on booking a controversial host every year like it’s a corporate mandate to goose the ratings a bit before going back to non-controversial hosts so the writers and main cast can be like “it sure was weird when we had that bad person on” as if they weren’t complicit on some level (but, at the same time, sometimes your job does things that you don’t agree with and you’re not allowed to share whether or not you think it’s a good idea, so who are we to judge?), NBC announced last night that the show’s next host and musical guest will be Keke Palmer and SZA.

Fan-favorite multi-hyphenate Palmer was one of the stars of Jordan Peele’s Nope, which will be available on NBC’s own Peacock streaming service soon (which is also the exclusive streaming home of SNL now, so this is some elegant cross-promotion), and this will be her SNL debut. SZA, meanwhile, recently released a new single and a teaser video for something called “PSA,” so she has some stuff in the works. Maybe we’ll know more by the time this episode airs, because it’s not happening until December 3—in keeping with SNL’s semi-regular schedule of doing a lot of episodes, then a short break, then a lot of episodes (including a post-election episode hosted by the same person), and then a long break.

The previous hosts this year were Miles Teller, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Thee Stallion, Jack Harlow, and Amy Schumer, some of whom also served as their own musical guests (but not all of them, unfortunately, because we would’ve loved to hear what kind of tracks Brendan Gleeson has been kicking around).