5 Reasons You Have To Tune In To Tomorrow’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ Premiere

This will be Miley’s first big public event since her kerfluffle with Nicki Minaj at the MTV Video Music Awards and she’ll be performing a couple of those weird songs from her new album, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. Needless to say, the exhibitionist pop star will likely do something to bring attention to herself. Will she walk out naked? Will she star in a segment called, “Miley Explains What’s Good?” Will she rip up a photo of everyone’s favorite pope? We don’t know! We do know that despite her wild reputation, Cyrus is a consummate professional who has nailed all of her previous SNL hosting gigs. With that in mind — and knowing that Lorne Michaels despises artists who choose spontaneity over sticking to the SNL script, we have to assume that Cyrus will push the envelope…in a fairly mundane way. (i.e. SHE’S NOT GOING TO GET NAKED, but she will make headlines.)

As we mentioned above, Saturday Night Live has had to sit out the recent political media circus while its been on hiatus. Which means, its writers and performers are chomping at the bit to get in the national conversation. When we spoke with Saturday Night Live featured player and head writer Colin Jost this summer, he was buzzing about all of the possibilities for this impending season, saying, “I’m excited on the level of figuring out casting for who’s going to play whom in all these [Presidential] primaries, you know?” It seems that Kenan Thompson has already secured the post of Ben Carson and that there was a heated competition for who got to play Donald Trump (that we’ll get to below).

Expectations are high for the show, but with good reason. This is the one comedy program that can immediately respond to the news with dramatic satire. And it’s one of the few comedy shows that can really alter the public’s perception of a candidate. Jost has very cogent theory for why Saturday Night Live is always so good during election cycles. He told us, “It’s the time people most watch the news and so it’s the time where you can write the best. You can write about more detailed things and people are paying attention.” In short, they can write smarter jokes because we are a more well-informed audience during election months.

Saturday Night Live has to tackle Donald Trump’s wild presidential primary season in its opening moments. There’s no way it can avoid it. Much like the nation tuned in on a weekly basis to watch Tina Fey dismantle Sarah Palin bit by comedy bit in 2008, we’re all waiting on tenterhooks to see how Taran Killam takes on the Donald. Deadline reports that Killam beat out several other cast members for the gig and he’s poised to give us our first fresh take on Trump since Darrell Hammond left the show as a cast member. (Coincidentally, Hammon is SNL‘s current announcer and will likely reprise his Bill Clinton impression this fall.

It’s also been rumored that Trump will appear on the program in some form in the upcoming weeks. Trump hosted the show in 2004 and gave us one of the show’s most deliriously delightful sketches, “Trump’s House of Wings.” Splitsider dug up a recent interview where Trump told reporters he was sworn to secrecy about an inevitable SNL appearance. So, maybe his cameo will happen sooner rather than later?

Last year, Lorne Michaels shook things up and took Cecily Strong off of Weekend Update and put writer and stand up Michael Che in her place. Che and the show’s head writer Colin Jost seemed to immediately hit it off as pals, but didn’t necessarily connect with audiences the way former pairings did. In essence, they didn’t know if they should follow the tried and true formula of “sweet, but snarky” as set up in the late ’90s by Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey (and their likeminded successors) or could they forge their own path?

Jost told us this summer that he was excited to get back to the Weekend Update desk with Che. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I’m really psyched about next year. I also think it’s a combination of things where I feel more comfortable now and just excited about finding a new gear for Weekend Update and in general for the show.”

Could this be the year that Weekend Update finally steps away from the shadow of Fallon & Fey & Poehler & Meyers? We think so.

Saturday Night Live has always rallied against naysayers, but the show is currently petering along as though it’s existing in a vacuum. Next week, Amy Schumer hosts the program and we expect it will be a fascinating show. Schumer is one of the comics leading a sketch comedy renaissance and  Inside Amy Schumer took home the very first Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Program two weeks ago. Yup, it beat SNL.

In recent seasons, Saturday Night Live‘s most inspired sketches have been shot as video shorts or flavored by an absurdist bent. Clearly the young actors and writers want to embrace this new wave of how to do sketch comedy. But being on Saturday Night Live means you have to conform to specific tried and true formula. As Lorne Michaels gets older, how much longer can he shepherd the show? And furthermore who would be his successor? Is the show too staid to evolve? Or could the injection of fresh voices once more give the program new life? It will be interesting to see if the cast and writers are able to meld together and find their own cohesive voice that stands the test of time. If it’s going to happen, this will be the year.

Saturday Night Live‘s 41st season debuts on NBC on Saturday, October 4. [Watch Saturday Night Live on Hulu]

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