On Saturday night we had a games night over FaceTime (shout-out to whomever is writing the article about which group chat apps are chosen for which activities.) It was the most fun – and the most ‘out’ – I’ve felt in weeks. But even though it was great, or maybe because it was great, and we wanted to keep it going, we all signed off at midnight, excited and nervous to check out the firstSaturday Night Live在我们eks.

我知道，即使许多其​​他节目到目前为止都达到了他们的“解决方法”格式，但它会感到不一样，而且很奇怪。SNL是独一无二的 - 与吉米·法伦（Jimmy Fallon）和詹姆斯·科登（James Corden）SNLis about the combinations of people you get, every time. It’s about the alchemy of combinations of people, and how the host plays into that, and as Tom Hanks said,“It’s SNL, you know, there’s gonna be some good stuff, maybe one or two stinkers, you know the drill.”

I’d venture that Tom Hanks was the weirdest part of the whole thing, right? For so many reasons. Because there were no laughs in the monologue, because we’re watching him in the vague knowledge that he had and survived the thing we were most afraid of, because it was his 10th time hosting and you can’t shake the post-apocalypse vibes of ‘how it might be from now on’, because he wasn’t actually in any sketches…

……因为，面对现实，他的房子令人荒谬地分散了注意力。

I’m not the only one who kept trying to figure out what was going on there, right? The shot was… a LOT tighter and more constrained by space than I expected, to a confusing degree. At first I wondered if Tom and Rita had returned from Australia and gone to some New York condo they own, but even then there’d be an entranceway of some sort, right? I’ve been in a lot of LA homes and they don’t ever have the kitchen right off the entranceway, which is what we seemed to be looking at. Someone smart on Twitter said they figured Hanks was probably in his guest house, which makes sense in terms of the architecture… but it still gives me slight discomfort. If Tom Hanks is okay, show me the grandiose mansion he’s okayin, so I can feel that the world is unfair and therefore normal!

实际上，这是平凡的部分SNLat home were the weirdest parts, right? First of all, a substantial number of people were clearly in LA, which shatters my beloved illusion that they all live in New York. Also, the show was definitively shot in daylight, because that’s what iPhones and laptops do best (though that worked extra well in cases like Pete Davidson’s Staten Island rapper with just $2000).

Overall, though, this episode ofSNLworked because it felt new, and therefore a bit dangerous, like anything could happen. Obviously the actors self-taping sketches (or recruiting family members to do so) could send multiple takes, so we were less likely to have line flubs, or the internet’s hoped-for goof of Scarlett Johansson walking in behind that carefully placed acoustic guitar behind Colin Jost…

But we still had Michael Che making Jost read off-colour jokes with no warning, or the rest of the cast cracking up, as ‘live’ as possible, at Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon’s antics during the ‘Zoom orientation’ sketch. Plus stuff like a Bailey sketch at home, or Ego Nwodim getting ‘Zoom ready’, which we never saw before – it wasn’t like they were relying on reruns of ‘Celebrity Jeopardy’.

There were the parts that felt ‘New York normal’, like how Kate McKinnon clearly had no space to do her RBG workout, and parts that felt ‘SNLnormal’, like Alec Baldwin and Larry David being slightly annoying and taking their sweet time anyway. Like Hanks said, a couple of off sketchesisnormal. I’ll even admit to liking that some cast members didn’t show up that much, or at all – on the one hand, it made me medium worried about them, but on the other hand, it felt refreshingly normal, like not even Coronavirus is gonna get you on the show if Lorne doesn’t deem you worthy that week, you know?

I wonder how long this took to put together. I hope they can do another this week, though the editing is obviously a bigger part ofSNL比通常情况下，他们的直播团队可能会发疯，但我真的很欣赏他们能够做的事情 - 包括承认不在工作室8H中这样做的局限性的部分，而不是试图隐藏它它。没有人想要这个，但是由于我们必须拥有它，所以我选择为自己感到骄傲。每次你计数SNLout, it proves it’s not done being a legend.