A Transitioning SNL Shows New Spark—and a Willingness to Confront Trump

Saturday Night Live lives!

That shouldn’t be a surprise for a show that’s been a hit for the better part of the last half century. But as has happened with regularity, television’s most iconic entertainment program has spent the early portion of its 51st season facing questions about the inconsistent level of its performance.

The reason? Part of it is the natural letdown after the klieg-light intensity of the show’s larger-than-life 50th anniversary—the specials, the documentaries, the definitive Lorne Michaels biography, even a theatrical movie.

But the more traditional reason is that SNL is in a transition season again: old faces gone, including performers with dynamic résumés like Ego Nwodim and Heidi Gardner, and new faces working to define who they are on the show.

Transitions, and the negative critiques of them, are part of the natural rhythms of the show. Lorne Michaels has weathered every predictable period of “Saturday Night Dead” comments without flinching or altering his formula. When he senses the show needs freshening, he makes moves—and some fans (and critics) get restless.

Over the show’s initial episodes this season, that part of the routine has played out as it has in the past.

Then, this past Saturday, with Glen Powell hosting, the needle finally pointed up again. The show clicked back to form with a more energized and inventive episode.

Just as significantly, it was an unafraid show.

Among some, there has been disappointment that in an ongoing battle for truth, justice, and the American way, SNL seemed to be keeping its powder dry.

It did not go unnoticed, for example, that the cold open of Episode 3 was the latest edition of the recurring “Domingo” sketch rather than some satiric take on the biggest news that week (the “No Kings” marches, for example, which happened earlier that day).

When you’ve been the cultural lodestar that SNL has been—the show widely looked to for timely and heavy-punching send-ups of whatever public events have seized the attention (and outrage) of the nation—you carry a certain burden of expectation.

Has the show been looking over its shoulder early this season at the elephant in the room? (The Oval one, that is.)

How could it not?

The impact of a loud and menacing presence in Washington has rippled through almost every institution in America, but late-night television has felt a special storm surge.

Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have taken the brunt, but Donald Trump has gone after all the weeknight shows—including Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon. Both are still working for Michaels, who executive produces their shows.

Meyers seems to have especially shredded the tender sensitivities of the chief executive, eliciting a new frenzied denunciation and a call that NBC fire him this weekend. That was matched, ominously, by a “yessir” approval from the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr.

He is the Trump operative infamous for treating the First Amendment as an antiquated notion. Carr threatened broadcast licenses owned by Disney/ABC because of the President’s vendetta against Kimmel.

Michaels knows a cauldron is bubbling around late night. The prospect of federal withdrawal of broadcast licenses is not a subject anyone in the business can take lightly—no matter how clearly any such move would clash with the most fundamental rights in the nation’s defining document.

Most people across show business are treading softly. This past Saturday SNL got noisy, hammering the President over his efforts to suppress the Epstein files in multiple sketches and a passel of flame-throwing jokes on “Weekend Update.”

Those jokes carried extra potency, because with its longevity and reputation, SNL carries built-in expectations.

The show began as the definitive counter-culture show of its time, representing the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate youthquake in entertainment. Coming on the air “post” all that made the timing ideal. SNL didn’t have to be obsessed by, and confront, those nationally disruptive events as they were occurring—only the aftermath.

A few years earlier, the previous definitive counter-culture show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, went after Vietnam and the Washington establishment with satiric guns blazing, and got shot down dead for its trouble. (CBS canceled it, even though it was a hit.)

Richard Nixon, the President who previously held the title as most unrestrained in using the government to silence criticism, was gone by 1975 when SNL premiered. There was still a prevailing culture to counter, but it wasn’t filled with landmines.

In 2025, SNL isn’t counter-culture anymore. It’s culture, dead center. Almost nothing is more central to American culture now than live comedy late on Saturday night, with music artists of the moment added to the mix. Performers who once were seen on network television only on SNL are now the star acts for halftime shows at the Super Bowl (instead of “Up With People”).

Even before the most recent episode, this SNL season couldn’t be accused of shameless toadying to Trump, as so many other American institutions have in response to his bullying. He has been played in numerous sketches (by a skilled caricaturist, James Austin Johnson) and routinely skewered on “Update.”

Still, Trump’s destructive but absurdist meanderings through the foundations of American life have rendered conventional satirizing inadequate. The show’s consistent take has him portrayed more as Goofy than Darth Vader. That can play more funny-ish than funny for viewers who tune in expecting a thorough slicing and dicing from SNL.

Does that translate to the show pulling punches or still searching for something punchier? It went for the latter this week.

A constant with SNL has been that breakout moments—recurring sketches and characters—happen organically, not from meticulous planning. Tina Fey wasn’t a hilarious Sarah Palin until there was a Sarah Palin.

Likewise, nobody knew what Melissa McCarthy could do with (and to) Sean Spicer until she did it.

Early this season SNL seemed to be scratching along the surface, probing for the spark that leads to a breakthrough, whether from a performer or the perfect sketch idea.

That can and does make some critics and fans impatient.

But that’s only because they care about the show. More than almost any other show in TV history, SNL represents something to its viewers. As much as it is NBC’s franchise, it’s their franchise, too—their team. They grew up with it. They don’t just watch SNL, they root for SNL.

Going back three generations, the show has been in American viewers’ lives. Michaels is not wrong when he says people are always comparing the show to what it was when they discovered it—usually in high school.

It has succeeded as long as it has because so many of those initial responders still find their way back to the scene of the action. They want the experience to go on, to rise up and be an occasion again, as it has so often in the past.

For any endeavor to be 50 years old and still matter—matter so much to people that they show up each week, eager and hoping, wanting it to still be great—is a pretty extraordinary thing.