Saturday Night Live doesn’t need Elon Musk to prove it’s actually live. It does that well enough on its own with the occasional technical and/or performance flub.
If we’re being honest, it’s one of the reasons we watch the show–it is a tightwire act, after all.
But if you don’t watch the show live, you’ll miss many of those flubs. That’s because, when they can, the show’s post-production team will correct errors for future airings, YouTube, and the archived Peacock edition of the show.
So which flubs did the show wallpaper over from this week’s Season 50 premiere, and which will live to see another day? You’ve come to the right place.
Maya’s Still Dancing
It wasn’t immediately evident that this was a flub when it first aired, but it’s since been removed from the online versions of the sketch. In the cold open, after Andrew Dismukes as David Muir introduced James Austin Johnson‘s Donald Trump, there was a brief cutaway to Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris. The fact that she was still dancing at the time suggests that she was prepared to be on camera, but the timing was odd and its subsequent removal suggests it was a control room error.
Book Gag Goof
In the “Textbook Writer” sketch, Jean Smart played a first-time textbook author whose background writing romance novels forms the crux of the joke. At one point in the sketch, she’s meant to show off the cover of the textbook, but cameras failed to properly catch it on the live show. The online version swaps in the dress rehearsal version of the same shot.
That T-Shirt Joke
It’s not entirely clear whether this one was a flub or just a joke that didn’t land, but also in the “Textbook Writer” sketch, SNL rookie Ashley Padilla played a receptionist who’s lightly berated by Ego Nwodim’s Scholastic exec for her blouse. “Jess, we don’t wear T-Shirts here,” Nwodim says. The line, which was greeted with an awkward silence in the live broadcast, apparently set up a later joke at dress rehearsal, which was cut. The line (and the silence that followed) remains in the online versions of the sketch.
Cough, Sniff, Wheeze
Word on the street was that Jean Smart was under the weather this week, and she did seem a bit congested on the show, sniffling and coughing on several occasions both on and off camera. Not much the show’s post-production team can do about that. Smart’s sniffles remain.
Pyramid Scheme
Eagle-eyed viewer Nick R. wrote in with this one: “I caught this watching back on Peacock—presumably a technical error. In the “Pyramid” sketch, the monitor on the left contestant desk showed a video feed of the sketch itself, while the right one had the presumably correct image of just a red panel. Eventually they turned off the left monitor altogether.”
What did we miss? If you happened to catch any live flubs that were later fixed (or not), drop us a line and we’ll add them to this list.
