Sorry, Ian Abramson: Weeks after you filled the void left by Saturday Night Live’s coronavirus hiatus with your own solo show, the real thing is actually going to come back—though it’s still somewhat unclear how that’s going to work. According to Deadline, SNL “will start airing original content” this Saturday night for an undetermined length of time, possibly live (at least in some markets) and with an unknown selection of SNL cast members. Deadline says there will be a Weekend Update segment and “other original content” from SNL people, but that’s really all we know.
Update should be very easy to pull off, since you can just put Colin Jost and Michael Che on Zoom or whatever (though Che’s grandmother recently died from coronavirus, so the timing of this seems sad), but anything beyond that will almost certainly be strange. Writing and orchestrating some kind of comedy sketch on Zoom seems like it would be a lot more work than what we usually get from SNL these days, but also letting cast members do little teleconference stand-up sets also wouldn’t necessarily feel like SNL. It would be fun if John Krasinski and Dua Lipa showed up, as they were supposed to be the host and musical guest for the first SNL episode that got canned because of the virus, but Deadline doesn’t know if that’ll happen. Krasinski could even do a monologue, though some old standbys like an “impromptu” musical number or taking questions from the audience wouldn’t really work.