Earlier this week with the Writer’s Guild of America strike fully underway NBC’s Saturday Night Live cancelled this week’s episode of the show and seemingly scrapped plans for the rest of the season. Now news has come out about the two hosts that would have appeared in the final episodes, with Deadline reporting that Succession‘s Kieran Culkin was set to host on May 13th and The White Lotus‘ Jennifer Coolidge would have hosted on the May 20th finale, the planned finale. Culkin just hosted the series back in November of 2021, but made a cameo in December of 2022, so he’s clearly an SNL favorite. This would have marked Coolidge’s first time hosting.
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With these three episodes of the show now officially cancelled, there will seemingly be no new episodes of Saturday Night Live until the fall of this year, meaning the season is over. It’s unclear how long this WGA strike will last, with the most recent one from 2007/2008 lasting for 100 days. Even if the strike goes that long, it would mean lasting most of the summer and not quite catching up to when SNL would return anyway. A source for the series spoke to the trade about the strike, adding: “We have to think about our crew too. I absolutely support the writers, and I want the writers to get what they deserve and need, but I don’t want our crew to be out of work. We can’t make this art without each other.”
Best Saturday Night Live season 48 sketches
With the latest season of Saturday Night Live seemingly over, assuming a surprise about face in the negotiations, we can go ahead and look back on the best sketches of the season. SNL fans were very quick to crown on the best of the year after it happened, when Abbott Elementary’s Quinta Brunson and Mikey Day starred in a traffic jam sketch. The other clear favorite of the year, Ego Nwodim’s surprise character “Lisa from Temecula.”
A major recurring trend for the season was having the hosts reprising a key role from their filmography for a sketch, resulting in favorites like Dave Chappelle reprised multiple characters from his hit , Steve Martin & Martin Short reprising their Father of the Bride characters, Aubrey Plaza appearing as her Parks and Recreation character April Ludgate, with Pedro Pascal starring in a The Last of Us parody about Super Mario.
How to watch Saturday Night Live
Throughout the remainder of Season 48, currently expected to run through May, NBC is simulcasting new episodes live on both NBC and Peacock. Peacock also serves as the streaming vault for all SNL episodes from its inception, with new episodes being added the day after they air.
Virtually every SNL episode, other than the select few locked away for good because of a variety of reasons, is now available to watch on the streaming service.