Saturday Night Live: The Alligator

I love Saturday Night Live. Ask anyone I know and they'll tell you I'm the ultimate SNL nerd. I collect the merchandise, I've camped out to get standby tickets and I've absorbed every bit of knowledge and trivia I could about the show. I often encounter people who tell me that the show isn't funny or that "it used to be really funny but now it sorta sucks". I try to take these comments in stride and to squish my normally argumentative disposition down into my gut. Truth be told most of the people who make these comments often don't or rarely watch the show and are parroting things they've heard from their parents or the endless amounts of op-eds you can find online. However this is as good a medium as any to finally tell them they are wrong and why (one of my favorite things to do).

Saturday Night Live is often referred to as a dinosaur. It relies on more old fashioned ways of producing, especially those popular when live television was a more consistent form of broadcast, and it costs a million dollars an episode because of it. Because of these methods, some of which many deem archaic, it is called a dinosaur, a beacon of the "old ways of doing it". But SNL isn't a dinosaur. Dinosaurs go extinct because they can't face new environments or refuse to evolve. SNL instead is an alligator. Sure it existed in the time of the dinosaurs, or as I like to call it, the 70s, but they learned to adapt and were unafraid to do so, they became ready to enter dangerous situations and tread unforseen territory. While many networks have seen a steep decline since the dawn of the streaming age, SNL was already built for the internet, especially making digital shorts their mark on the web. In addition they have consistently called for innovation, circulating in new players to keep the show fresh and capture a new younger audience. Yes each episode cost a million dollars to make but it doesn't matter because SNL, because of it's nature, almost always captures their time slot in terms of ratings. In a television landscape that calls for the survival of the fittest, SNL has proved to be the head of the foodchain.

Colin Jost, Cecily Strong, and the Weekend Update Desk

This week, Saturday Night Live announced that Michael Che, currently a correspondent for The Daily Show, would be replacing cast member Cecily Strong and joining head-writer Colin Jost at the Weekend Update anchor desk. This comes just half a year after Jost took Seth Meyers' seat at the desk. I think that Lorne Michaels and the show's other creative staff made a serious misstep in this decision.

The history of the Weekend Update segment in the 21st century is dominated by names that went on to achieve even greater success elsewhere. Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Seth Meyers have all gone on to anchor their own shows: Poehler and Fey found second lives on the NBC sitcoms Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock, respectively, and Fallon and Meyers occupy back-to-back time-slots in the network's late-night schedule. However, when Meyers announced his plans to depart at Christmas 2013 posed a unique problem for the show, with no truly strong contenders in the cast available to take his place. Lorne Michaels decided to pair Meyers with Cecily Strong for the first half of the show's 39th season last fall:

Meyers and Strong

After strong reviews of the pair, hopes were high when Jost, the show's head-writer and Meyers' best friend, replaced the male half of the pair. However, Jost gave a less than memorable performance in his first couple of shows, and although he began to improve by the end of the season, he had already lost the trust of much of the SNL audience. It was clear that the show was going to make changes at the desk going into the 40th season. However, this week's announcement seems like a step in the wrong direction to myself and many other fans. 

Michael Che's work on The Daily Show has admittedly been strong. His correspondent segments often dealt with race and the experience of being a modern black American in interesting ways. 

The Daily Show
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However, Lorne Michaels' decision to go with Jost instead of Strong shows a bit of bias towards the longer-tenured writer, who may have payed his dues on the show more. That's all well and good, but I     believe that the stronger performer should have won out. Many fans are speculating that the decision was based on giving Cecily Strong more time to write and perform sketches and characters. I hope that that's the case.