Saturday Night Live closes out Season 51 this weekend with one of the most anticipated finales in recent memory as Will Ferrell returns to Studio 8H for his sixth time as host, and Paul McCartney takes the stage as musical guest for the fifth time, two weeks before the release of his new album The Boys of Dungeon Lane.
Ferrell, of course, needs no introduction to Studio 8H. He spent seven seasons as a cast member from 1995 to 2002, building a legacy that includes some of the most beloved characters in the show’s history. He returns this weekend as the executive producer and star of Netflix’s upcoming golf comedy The Hawk.
Here are five storylines we’ll be tracking Saturday night:
Which Will Ferrell classics make the cut?
The question is not whether Ferrell will revisit his SNL past. It is how much of it the show can realistically fit into one episode.
His bench is absurdly deep: the Spartan Cheerleaders, the Roxbury Guys, George W. Bush, Neil Diamond, Robert Goulet, Alex Trebek, Craig the Cheerleader, Harry Caray, and on and on. A Ferrell-hosted finale could easily become a greatest-hits special if he and the show let it.
Two possibilities feel especially tempting.
The first is Celebrity Jeopardy. The sketch has not appeared in its classic form since SNL40 in 2015, and Ferrell’s Trebek remains one of the show’s most enduring comic creations. With Colin Jost’s real-life Pop Culture Jeopardy! also in the mix, there’s an obvious path for the show to play with both versions of the format — perhaps with Ferrell’s Trebek looking down on Jost’s version of the job, or sliding in as a contestant.
The second is the Dog Show, starring Ferrell as David Larry alongside his longtime former SNL castmate Molly Shannon as Miss Colleen. Given that Shannon costars with Ferrell in The Hawk, the return of the sketch, last seen in 2000, would be both great synergy and fan service.
Could McCartney help deliver a grand musical goodbye?
The last time Will Ferrell hosted a season finale was May 2009 (Season 34), with Green Day as musical guest. That episode produced one of the more memorable final sketches in the show’s history, with a musical sendoff featuring one of the most star-packed ensembles ever seen on the SNL stage.
The epic goodbye featured the entire Season 34 cast alongside returning alums Norm Macdonald, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph, former hosts Tom Hanks, Anne Hathaway, and Paul Rudd, and cameos from Elisabeth Moss and Artie Lange all joining Ferrell in a rendition of Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon.”
The question this weekend is whether SNL uses the power of McCartney, one of the most historically significant musical guests the show has ever had, for something similarly grand.
As LateNighter has reported, there’s also the possibility that McCartney will bring “Home to Us,” his first-ever true duet with Ringo Starr—released just one week ago—to the SNL stage. If Starr joined McCartney, it would be the first time two former Beatles have ever appeared together on the legendary sketch show.
What is left for Jost and Che’s Joke Swap?
The “Weekend Update” Joke Swap has become a finale tradition unto itself: Colin Jost and Michael Che forcing each other to read jokes they have not seen in advance, usually with the escalating sense that one or both of them may never recover.
But after 13 installments (watch them all!), the bit now comes with its own challenge: how do you keep topping something built almost entirely on escalation? Special guests have been deployed. Family members have been invoked. Boundaries have been tested, retested, and then tested again.
What has kept it working is that, beneath all the engineered discomfort, the reactions still feel personal. The pauses, the winces, the half-laughs, the visible calculations over whether they can get through the next line without losing the room—that’s the part that still gives the segment its charge.
That may be the real question this weekend: does Joke Swap still have another level left, or is Jost and Che’s dread now the whole point?
Ashley Padilla gets her Will Ferrell moment
When Will Ferrell first hosted a season finale in 2009, the episode paired him with a young cast member who would become one of the show’s all-time greats. Ferrell and Kristen Wiig’s chemistry in that episode was electric, and Wiig’s ability to go toe-to-toe with Ferrell was an indication of how much the show wanted to see them play together and how far Wiig would go among the all-time greats.
There is a similar opportunity this weekend with this season’s undisputed breakout performer.
Ashley Padilla has been open about Ferrell’s influence on her comedy. In a recent Vulture profile, Padilla cited him as a model for the kind of comic intensity she loves—“he has a way of getting so mad about something so little, that’s my style of comedy.”
A season finale that throws Padilla into sketches with her comedy hero is both a gift to her and an opportunity for SNL to make a statement about who carries the show into the next era. With an incredible résumé of Season 51 sketches under her belt, Padilla could have a moment opposite Ferrell this weekend that fans will be talking about for years.
Who, if anyone, is saying goodbye?
SNL season finales always come with a little cast-change anxiety. Sometimes the goodbyes are explicit. Sometimes they are only visible in retrospect.
Last year’s finale brought plenty of speculation about Colin Jost’s future, especially with Scarlett Johansson hosting, but no on-air farewell materialized, and no exits were confirmed until late summer.
There’s no one person dominating the exit buzz going into this year’s finale, but that’s not to say viewers won’t be watching closely for clues.
Mikey Day is one name that naturally stands out. This weekend marks his 200th episode as a cast member, a milestone very few performers in SNL history have reached. Day has said that he wants to stay “as long as I can,” so there is no reason to assume this is goodbye. But if a longtime cast member were ever going to get a big, affectionate finale sendoff, doing it opposite Will Ferrell would make a certain amount of SNL sense.
And then there is Lorne Michaels.
There is no indication that Michaels is stepping away. But for anyone inclined to read finale tea leaves, the pairing of Ferrell and McCartney is almost suspiciously ideal: one of the defining cast members of Michaels’ second great SNL era, alongside one of the Beatles, whom he famously tried to lure to the show in 1976 with a check for $3,000.
Unlikely? Yes. But anything can happen in an SNL season finale.
This weekend’s Saturday Night Live airs Saturday, May 16 at 11:30 p.m. ET / 8:30 p.m. PT on NBC and Peacock.
Join us at LateNighter.com immediately after for the Saturday Night Network’s live after-show, where SNL experts and superfans share their hot takes on the night’s best and worst moments.
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