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The British version of Saturday Night Live that launched over the weekend closely resembled its American cousin in structure: a cold-open sketch, a host monologue, a mix of live and pretaped sketches, two musical performances, and a centerpiece fake-news segment called Weekend Update. Yet despite the fact that there are around a thousand previous SNL episodes that more or less conform to this format, there was something new the U.K. edition was able to bring to the table, besides different accents and a full cast of fresh-to-U.S.-viewers faces: the first new Weekend Update anchors in almost 12 years.
With every episode of the original Saturday Night Live, current co-anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che extended an astonishing record: They are currently the top two longest-tenured Update anchors in the show’s history, and no one’s in much position to catch them. Jost remains forever slightly in the lead; it was just over 12 years ago that he and Cecily Strong swapped in for a departing Seth Meyers, in a pairing that only lasted through the end of the 39th season. When the show returned for its then-landmark 40th season in the fall of 2014, Strong, thought to be of stronger use in sketches and Update characters, was swapped out for Michael Che. The duo has done 219 episodes together, handily beating Meyers’ eight seasons and 154 episodes (some of which were shared with initial co-anchor Amy Poehler). Anyone who beats their record would be taking the show well past its 60th season, and either Jost or Che or both would have to actually vacate the chair for that to happen. For years, Che has made noises about leaving. Apparently Jost always convinces him to stay (though Jost himself wrote about the possibility of leaving as early as 2021 in his 2020 memoir).
At this point, their mutual exit would almost be more surprising than their stranglehold on the segment. The show’s 21st century approach to Weekend Update has mirrored the way Lorne Michaels rarely if ever undergoes a full-cast reset; instead, performers leave the show gradually, with equally gradual replacements. Hence the team of Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon gave way to Fey and Poehler when Fallon left the show; then Poehler and Meyers, when Fey left; then Meyers on his own when Poehler left. Even the Jost/Chen team was subject to transition, as Meyers was awkwardly partnered with Strong for a few episodes to ease her into the job before Jost stepped in. Was series creator Lorne Michaels so spooked by that half-season-long fumbling that he took comfort in the stability of an unchanging 12-years-and-counting anchor team?
NBCIt can seem that way, though it’s equally likely that Jost and Che are accustomed to what seems like a fun job; all the visibility of SNL stardom without nearly so many wigs. Regardless, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Update anchors simply aren’t meant to last this long. In the first dozen years of the show, about a dozen different cast members hosted Update. That’s an extreme example, given how much tumult there was following Michaels’ initial departure from the show in 1980, but even in the more stable 1990s, which included an abrupt firing of all-time great Norm Macdonald, there were four different guys at the desk. And in the smoothed-out 2000s and 2010s, that number stayed around the same through natural turnover. Since 2014, though, we’ve been growing increasingly, perhaps vexingly, accustomed to the particular rhythms of Jost and Che, including their welcome embrace of a little more behind-the-desk looseness, most famously in their “joke swap” segments that add an element of genuine spontaneity to the proceedings.
But there’s only so much spontaneity still left to generate after 14 years, and even their ad-libbed reactions to each other’s jokes, or to the audience’s audible reactions, have long become predictable. (Remember that stretch where Che made barely-there variations on “c’mon, it’s the ’90s!” seemingly every week?) Che likes to make fun of women’s basketball. Jost will be the butt of jokes about being a secret racist, or make them himself. Jost will put his head in his hands when Che says something particularly faux-embarrassing. Many of the jokes are more about their well-established personas than actually cutting satire of current events; it’s all kind of insular. At this point, we know the moves.
That, moreso than any real innovation, accounts for the feeling of freshness of the U.K. edition’s Ania Magliano and Paddy Young. Based on a single episode, they have a touch of Fey/Fallon energy, in that she has caustic confidence to spare and he goes a little sillier with his jokes, not all of which landed on the first episode. Mostly, it’s just a relief to see someone else take a crack at the format. Their version of Update also stuck a little closer to jokes about actual news, rather than trawling novelty headlines for absurd material that seems to exist primarily as a joke setup.
Of course, that’s been an Update weakness for ages. And you can’t entirely blame Michaels for feeling like he’s cracked something open by just sticking with Jost and Che. Circa the height of the Jon Stewart version of The Daily Show, conventional wisdom that with that program’s cultural cachet and all of the nightly talk shows doing current-events monologues, a weekly fake news cast couldn’t help but be late to the party (at least, on those weeks where a 20-episode season allowed Weekend Update to show up at all). Now Michaels has built an institution that, while probably not as beloved as The Daily Show in its prime, has a larger dedicated audience for its topical jokes than many former competitors. Late-night talk shows are dying; Saturday Night Live is expanding to another continent. And why wouldn’t the original show maintain an anchor team as long as the newscasts it’s supposed to be parodying? The most popular network news anchors routinely do a decade or more; David Muir, the longest-tenured evening network news anchor currently on the air, started in 2014 – same year as Jost and Che.
But Saturday Night Live doesn’t really need any further help in resembling a long-running institution, and the sheer cheerfulness Magliano and Young exhibited on their SNL U.K. debut made a pretty convincing case for bringing novelty to Update again. They weren’t just reminiscent of Fallon and Fey in style, but in the fresh air that duo represented after several years of Macdonald’s bumbling replacement Colin Quinn. Quinn is a funny guy, but he never seemed at ease as an Update anchor; Jost and Che, on the other hand, have gotten more comfortable than anyone in the history of the show. Comfort is a lot of things, but funny isn’t always one of them.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
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