REVIEW
By Valeria Mejia @VALMEIJA
Season 42 of Saturday Night Live premiered on Oct. 1. The season premiere had the highest ratings in eight years, according to Nielsen Media Research. With the departure of Taran Killam and Jay Pharaoh, and the arrival of new featured players Mikey Day, Alex Moffatt and Melissa Villaseñor, the show seems to be changing quite drastically.
Many tuned in to watch how the comedy sketch show would poke fun at the presidential elections, with Kate McKinnon returning as Hillary Clinton and actor Alec Baldwin replacing Darrell Hammond as Donald Trump.
With the elections rolling around, you can expect a lot more political sketches this season on SNL, and you can also expect for each episode to be longer, containing a few more sketches. NBC Universal will be cutting back on commercials, by removing 30% of ad space from the show.
Creator of SNL, Lorne Michaels said, “As the decades have gone by, commercial time has grown,” He said. “This will give time back to the show and make it easier to watch the show live.” To make up for the commercial cuts, the show will be doing product placement six times a year.
The season premiere was hosted by Margot Robbie and had a performance from The Weekend. Robbie is a first time host. She was praised for her performance on the show. In one of her more popular sketches, Margot plays a sexy librarian who gets hit on by students in the library. The students come to find out that the sexy librarian isn’t truly as attractive as they thought she would be.
The second episode of the season was hosted by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the popular Broadway musical Hamilton. Twenty One Pilots served as musical guest. Miranda’s high energy monologue had everyone talking and gave a glimpse of what it’s like to see a Broadway show live. Lin’s performance on the show also scored him positive reviews among the critics. Lin-Manuel’s high energy throughout the episode made each sketch very watchable.
Both episodes went heavy with the politics, but most notably the second episode poked fun at Donald Trump and his racy remarks he made during an audio taping back in 2005. In the skit, Alec Baldwin, playing Donald Trump, interrupts the Vice Presidential debate between Tim Kaine (Mikey Day) and Mike Pence (Beck Bennett) to address the vulgar language he used in 2005.
This season seems to be going in the right direction. With the addition of three new cast members, each episode is getting better. It was announced that episode three will be hosted by Emily Blunt and have a performance by Bruno Mars. Episode four will have Tom Hanks as host and Lady Gaga as musical performer. These next few episodes seem very promising and are definitely going to be on my watchlist.