On SNL 50 and Sliding Into My DMs
Talk TV To Me
If you were invited to parties when you were in high school, you’re probably not aware that tonight at 8pm Saturday Night Live is airing their 50th Anniversary Special.
If you couldn’t guess already, I was not invited to any parties when I was in high school so I’ve pretty much built my weekend around the SNL 50 special.
In September when this season of SNL was starting, I took it as an opportunity to create my own nerdy version of sports betting and began posting videos before each new episode in which I make predictions about what sketches, jokes, and performances would be included. It was mostly just a challenge to myself so that I could test my pop culture and comedy knowledge. I posted it on Instagram as a way to keep myself accountable, knowing I’d be embarrassed if I dropped the bit after one week. I posted it on TikTok because I knew that with their vast subject-matter-driven algorithm I would be able to find other like-minded people whose reaction to hearing a mention of SNL isn’t immediately, “Oh I don’t watch it anymore, that show hasn’t been good since the ‘90s.”
And I was right, TikTok brought a decent amount of traffic to my first video (nothing in comparison to my viral Stranger Things video from 2022) and I watched as over 50 people interacted with it - commenting their agreements and disagreements to my predictions, adding the video to their personal saved collections, sending the videos to other friends on TikTok, and it was great. I had found my people and we were all willing to nerd out over whether or not Sarah Sherman was going to be in full creature creation prosthetics or argue whether Mike Birbiglia or Nate Bergatze were going to play JD Vance. I was happy to curl into my little corner of the internet and discuss this “presently uncool” show with the other comedy nerds.
What I didn’t expect to happen was on the next day, when I posted to my Instagram story the follow up screenshot where I counted how many things I correctly predicted, that I would get about a dozen DMs from people I don’t regularly talk to, let alone interact with on socials, telling me they watched the first episode just to see whether anything I posted about was correct. These were the people who typically say SNL hasn’t been good since the ‘90s. These were the people who were at parties on a Saturday in 2010, not eating popcorn on their parents’ couch at 11:35pm EST! But there they were, sliding into my DMs in 2024 to let me know that actually, they weren’t above tuning in, it just took someone making them aware of it again to pay attention.
Week by week, I kept posting prediction videos. I honed in on my intro line so that it became recognizable for the TikTok crowd and I started to build an audience that would return for a weekly discussion on whether or not I was totally off-base. I perfected the mix of predictions for monologues, musical guests, and sketches. I figured out the best time to film for both lighting in my apartment and engagement numbers and figured out the quickest way to edit my videos for both platforms. And my Instagram DMs stayed hot. The pool of peripheral acquaintances reaching out to me each Sunday with congratulations or condolences on my performance kept becoming wider than the week prior.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit how much joy all of this attention brought me, but it also helped me realize that we’re all missing something when it comes to entertainment. It’s the ability to connect to people in real life through it. Streaming services drop most series one big season at a time, and it leaves very little room for discourse between friends. I live alone, and I’ve noticed that my TV watching habits have drastically decreased now that I don’t have anyone to turn to in the middle of an episode and share a smile or gasp in surprise with. I miss talking about TV more than I miss actually consuming TV itself! It’s been so nice to hear from friends I used to work with but don’t see regularly anymore, and friends’ siblings I met once on a weekend trip, and high school friends’ parents who still follow me and want to share their two-cents on Michael Che and Colin Jost are hilarious on Weekend Update. I’ve loved running into people in public and having them say, “I had never watched an entire episode of SNL before but I’ve watched a few this year just to see if your predictions were right.” My tender little single-and-in-my-hometown-alone-for-Valentine’s-weekend heart swelled today as multiple people texted me to say “Happy SNL 50th!” knowing that I would be tuning in.
So, it’s only fitting that just as I would have been at 14, I’m standing in my parents’ kitchen at 31 making stovetop popcorn and getting ready to sit down and giggle to myself while watching Saturday Night Live. I know I’m going to get misty eyed a few times tonight because I got misty eyed during the SNL Music special on Friday night and I cried at the end of the Saturday Night movie when I saw it in theaters. It was a show made by the weirdos, for the weirdos and somehow it’s managed to become an institution along the way. Molly Shannon and Tina Fey and Cecily Strong taught me what being smart and confident and funny looked like when I was growing up and it’s a show that makes me feel the same when I talk about Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman now. And in the same way I would be dying to get to the Newspaper Room on Monday mornings to reenact an Amy Poehler sketch with my friends in 2009, I’m going to be hopping onto TikTok and Instagram to discuss with my friends now.
So please, whether it’s about SNL or not, know that if you’re watching something good I want to hear about it. And if we’re both watching the same thing, you should know I’m thinking about talking to you about it while I’m watching and wishing it wasn’t weird to reach out. Shoot me a text, slide into my DMs, TV is nothing if not a conduit for conversation in my book.