Saturday Night Live Is Doing Another New “At Home” Episode This Weekend

Saturday Night Live is following up its most interesting episode in years with another “at home” episode. It airs this weekend, in the show’s regular time slot.

If you missed the first one, you missed a scattershot attempt at recreating the SNL formula from the homes of its quarantined cast members. That formula is so rigid and exhausted that any attempt to change it up is memorable, and so an episode built entirely of Zoom videos and solitary performances immediately stood out. Again, it wasn’t necessarily any better than most episodes, but several of the pieces had a personal feel to them that can be hard to find on the regular show. And the Middle Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was a big viral breakout hit.

Of course, that was two weeks ago. We’ve seen it happen. The novelty will be hard to repeat, and if anything, now that they know they can do this it wouldn’t be a surprise for the show’s producers to try to make this next one feel even more like a standard episode. Hopefully it maintains that looser, more off-the-cuff feel of the first one. And hopefully they figure out a better way to do Weekend Update—or, honestly, just scrap that whole segment. We’ll find out how this second at home episode goes on Saturday night at 11:30 p.m.