Saturday Night Live Parodies Origin of National Treasure Map on Declaration of Independence

Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live explored the origin of the Declaration of Independence’s secrets, as seen in the . The Nicolas Cage-led film franchise follows a group of historians piecing together clues left by America’s founding fathers on artifacts from the United States’ history. The new sketch, led by host Jason Sudeikis, imagines what conversation led to such a convoluted premise. Sudeikis plays Thomas Jefferson, putting ink to paper on the declaration, joined by Mikey Day, Alex Moffat, Kyle Mooney, Andrew Dismukes, and James Austin Johnson as fellow founders helping him along. On suggests that treasure map and, when another pushes back, they get a surprise visit from the future. You can watch the sketch below.

During the show’s cold open, Sudeikis also reprised his role as President Joe Biden. During Weekend Update, he brought back the devil to joke about Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney.

These days, Sudekeis leads Apple TV+’s hit comedy series, Ted Lasso. The show’s been so successful that it may outlive its original three-season premise.  Series co-creator Brendan Hunt told Comicbook.com, “We’ve always seen it as a three-season situation. We still have a three-season story arc in mind, but the thing we weren’t prepared for when we were thinking three seasons, was the degree to which people would take to the show. So, perhaps that intention will be challenged a little bit, but that’s where our head is at right now.”

“It goes without saying, we certainly wished we hadn’t debuted in a pandemic, we wish there was no pandemic to debut during, but if we were some help in that difficult time, that’s great, because that’s, obviously, not what we were setting out to do. Pretty quickly after the show debuted, and, I think, maybe specifically, because there were three episodes that came out all at once in the beginning, the Twitter reaction was different.”

Co-creator Bill Lawrence told Deadline, “When we first pitched this particular story, we said this series was only going to be three seasons,” Lawrence said. “And I would probably stay clean and say that even if Ted Lasso goes on, the story the writing staff has been telling had a beginning, middle and end for the first three seasons. And then it might veer off from that.”

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