Does Saturday Night Live Return Tonight?

It’s going to be a little while until new episodes of Saturday Night Live return to your television sets. The show is currently on the first hiatus of its 46th season, making tonight the second-straight week without a new broadcast live from 30 Rock. In fact, the NBC sketch comedy will be off at least one more weekend, allowing cast members to spend Thanksgiving with their families, should they choose to travel outside the Big Apple.

Instead of a new episode, NBC will instead air two separate SNL bits from different points in time. At 10:00 p.m. Eastern, a Kerry Washington-hosted episode from 2013 will air that has Eminem as musical guest. In the regular time spot at 11:30 p.m., the series will serve an encore of Bill Burr and Jack White’s episode from earlier this year.

As of now, it’s expected for the series to come back the Saturday after next on December 5th. This will give the cast and crew a few more weeks of shows before going on an extended holiday break into January.

Prior to the hiatus, the show got six straight episodes in, an uncommon feat for the Lorne Michaels-led series. NBC scheduled another episode so the series could have a show immediately following the 2020 presidential election, one hosted by Dave Chapelle.

When the series does return, it will likely continue to have a limited studio audience, despite rising COVID cases across the country. Earlier this fall, Michaels said a live crowd was integral to the success of the show.

“We need the audience, obviously. With comedy, when you don’t hear the response, it’s just different. With the kind of comedy we do, which quite often is broad, timing gets thrown off without an audience,” Michaels explained. “And for me, what is most important is when you’re absolutely certain of some piece on Wednesday, and then the dress-rehearsal audience sees it on Saturday and tells you you’re wrong. . . .I think us coming back and accomplishing the show will lead to — I hate to use the word normalcy — but it’s a thing that is part of our lives coming back, in whatever form it ends up coming back. So the physical problems of doing it — number of people who can be in the studio, number of people who can be in the control room, how you separate the band so that they’re not in any jeopardy — all of those are part of the meetings we’ve been having”