As if hosting Saturday Night Live six times isn’t enough, Melissa McCarthy staked her place in the show’s history books for another reason: going live from Los Angeles.
The actress is one of the only performers who can claim they’ve appeared live on SNL from somewhere other than New York. The rare remote appearance came in 2017, when McCarthy reprised her impression of former Trump administration press secretary Sean Spicer in an episode hosted by Jimmy Fallon. Airing the night before Easter, McCarthy’s Spicer delivered a holiday message to a group of kids while dressed in a bunny costume (before driving off in a motorized Easter Egg).
McCarthy had already cemented herself as Spicer earlier that season, with two widely praised, back-to-back appearances. When SNL came calling a third time, however, the Emmy winner was in Los Angeles and unable to make it to New York. The solution: McCarthy would go live from L.A.
SNL sent the Spicer costume out to McCarthy, who performed live and was beamed across the country for both the dress rehearsal and live tapings. With no studio audience or SNL cast members to play off of, some viewers noticed the sketch felt a bit off compared to the rest of the episode.
McCarthy’s L.A. hit wasn’t the first time SNL attempted to go live from a city other than New York, but it’s believed to be the first time in decades the show resorted to that tactic. Prior to the Spicer sketch, the last known example of SNL broadcasting a live remote segment was the Season 8 premiere on September 25, 1982, when host Chevy Chase performed his parts from Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show studio in Burbank.
Just as SNL leaned on The Tonight Show to get Chase’s remote appearance off the ground, another late-night host played an unlikely part in making McCarthy’s Spicer encore possible: TBS host and former SNL writer Conan O’Brien.
As SNL’s then-production designer Eugene Lee and his team oversaw the sketch’s set design from New York, he noticed two American flags had been placed behind Spicer’s lectern. For full accuracy, one of those flags should have been swapped out for one featuring the presidential seal. Scrambling to find a presidential flag, Lee’s team finally found one at the Conan studio. (At the time, O’Brien’s TBS show was based at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.)
“My set designer called around,” Lee told Vanity Fair in 2017. “Conan O’Brien had one. We borrowed it from him.”
McCarthy and Chase’s satellite appearances remain rare examples of bi-coastal SNL broadcasts. Aside from a trip to New Orleans for SNL’s Live From Mardi Gras special in 1977, the sketch show has opted to stay in Studio 8H throughout its run.
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