Technical Issue Forces SNL to Momentarily Halt Live Show

Viewers watching this week’s Saturday Night Live may have wondered about that seven minutes-plus commercial break before Stevie Nicks’ second song.

LateNighter can exclusively report that the show was put into a live hold with just seconds to go before host Ariana Grande was to re-introduce Nicks. According to sources who were at the show Saturday night, the delay was precipitated by a sound board that went down at a most inopportune time. 

As technicians scrambled to fix the error, viewers at home saw a bumper of Nicks for a full 55 seconds before the show cut to a second set of commercials. 

The show returned two and a half minutes later, sound board apparently fixed (or a backup deployed), and Nicks performed her second song live without incident.

There were some cascading issues, however. 

Because that extra set of commercials had run earlier, the show found itself in something of a pickle in its second-to-last act.

The original rundown had called for there to be a commercial break between the Jennifer Coolidge “Maybelline” sketch and the show’s next live sketch, which was to have been a new edition of “Cinema Classics” featuring Kenan Thompson as Reese De’what and Ariana Grande as Judy Garland.

That break would would have given the crew time to reset for the next sketch (and for Grande to do a quick wardrobe change). Without it, the show was forced to run a dress rehearsal version of the cut-for-time “Hotel Detective” sketch as the live audience watched along on monitors.

It wasn’t immediately clear why “Hotel Detective” was chosen over the dress rehearsal version of the “Cinema Classics” sketch that had been planned. We can only assume it came down to a question of timing.

This isn’t the first time that timing and/or technical reasons have forced Saturday Night Live to air a dress rehearsal version of a sketch during a live show, but it’s been more than two decades since it’s done so.

Coincidentally, this week’s episode saw its start time delayed by five minutes due to a college football over-run on NBC earlier in the evening.

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7 Comments

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  1. Matthew says:

    “To the best of our knowledge, it’s the first time Saturday Night Live has aired a dress rehearsal performance during a live broadcast.“

    They actually used to do it a lot in the early 2000s. The famous Oprah sketch was actually from dress rehearsal, and not done live.

    1. Jed Rosenzweig says:

      Matthew, thanks for this. You’re right. Apparently there were at least two occasions in Seasons 28 & 29 where this happened:

      Press Conference (Brittany Murphy – Nov 16, 2002 S28E6)
      Oprah (Megan Mullally – Feb. 7, 2004 S29E11)

      We’ve updated the post.

  2. Lord Piddlepuck says:

    Ariana Grande was hilarious, she needs a comedy sitcom! She is so funny, she surprised me with just how incredibly funny she truly is.

  3. Matt says:

    That explains how Ariana Grande could go straight from the Jennifer Coolidge sketch to Hotel Detective with almost no time for a costume change.

  4. SM in SF says:

    I’m confused. What football overrun?
    On the west coast, I was watching the evening game on NBC, Ohio St at Oregon. Game ended at 7:59pm PST.
    After post game, NBC Bay Area News went past it’s usual 8:29pm ending till 8:35pm. Only then did SNL start.

    1. Keith Andoos says:

      Reminds me of The Heidi Guy” (yeah I’m that old). I worked with him at RCA. Hell of a nice guy.

  5. Keith Andoos says:

    Tell us the brand of audio console.