The future of SNL can't rest on Ashley Padilla's sketch-comedy classicism alone. It needs the TikTok honed skills of co-stars like Jane Wickline and Veronika Slowikowska, too.
One of the more inventive recurring bits in recent seasons of Saturday Night Live takes the point of view of someone endlessly scrolling through TikTok. Through their eyes (and in between text messages of increasing urgency that the scroller ignores), we see quick-hit impressions, spoofs of real viral videos, and assorted absurdities inspired by internet culture. It’s the rare sketch that can typically include every member of even an oversized ensemble, or close to it, alongside the host and sometimes even the musical guest, too. That’s almost part of the game, knowing that the sketch probably can’t end until everyone has turned up.
This sketch didn’t air in the first 19 episodes of SNL’s 51st season, which makes it unlikely to turn up in this Saturday’s Will Ferrell/Paul McCartney finale. But maybe the show’s latest transition has rendered a TikTok sketch redundant, no matter how much fun it is. The season after a landmark anniversary was bound to look more like a rebuilding year, especially after a series of cast departures: long-time faves Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim, and Bowen Yang are all gone, while a whopping five new cast members were added to the featured-player roster, in addition to season 50 newbies Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline. The show had just marched through that season with a big, veteran-heavy cast (plus some election-season regular singers); it felt both triumphant and a little stagnant, as if eyes and minds were half-occupied by the planning of that midseason celebration. Without any more of that on the horizon, SNL set out again to figure out what its next configuration might look like.
Many would say that it looks more like Ashley Padilla than some addled TikTok feed (or the cast members who hail at least in part from that world). Padilla truly blossomed in her sophomore year, quickly ascending (without promotion to the main cast) to levels of screentime previously enjoyed by the dominating likes of Kate McKinnon or Kristen Wiig. She also resembles those powerhouses in her ability to wring a fully functional comedy sketch out of seemingly simple behavioral observations: a mom confessing, with maddening deliberateness, that she may have lost her faith in Donald Trump. A woman paralyzed with embarrassment by her own surprised flatulence. A friend smiling through a horrific new haircut.
Padilla has undeniable acting skills, a refreshing change from the number of stand-up comics the show has hired in recent years with the assumption that they’ll power their way into sketch comedy by sheer force of personality. That assumption isn’t always wrong, but for someone who watches and writes about SNL on a weekly basis, it’s been a joy to watch Padilla score surprisingly big laughs through pure timing and intonation, rather than learning on the fly to translate her solo, onstage sensibility into sketches. Her ability to hold for a laugh is particularly stunning in a field that prioritizes the quick kill.
Yet Padilla doesn’t strike me as the future of the show, per se. In fact, it seems like part of the reason she resonates so much with the SNL fandom is that she’s so directly reminiscent of the past: the barely concealed neuroses of Wiig, the showmanship of McKinnon, the flustered-mom energy that Aidy Bryant or Cecily Strong could bring to any number of characters, the brassiness of Jan Hooks—I could go on, all the way back to the straight-woman deadpan of Jane Curtin. In other words, Ashley Padilla is exactly what people think a good SNL player should look and act like.
In a way, though, the future of the show may look more like Jane Wickline. This line of thinking may cause some fans to hurl their phones across the room in shocked disgust (though not anyone following along with The A.V. Club’s weekly recaps, who will be passingly familiar with this reasoning if not necessarily happy about it). I don’t mean that Wickline is secretly holding the show together—though she is funny, and her hit rate for her Weekend Update songs, occasional pretapes, and supporting sketch roles rivals most of her castmates. I mean that the TikTok-trained approach of Wickline and Veronika Slowikowska, as well as the traditional (using that term relatively here) stand-up path of Sarah Sherman, probably augur more about where the show is going (or should go) than the rock solid fundamentals of someone like Padilla.
There’s comfort, yes, in settling in for a Padilla-led sketch knowing that she’ll perform the hell out of it. But there’s also an exciting spark to the left turns of Wickline’s Update songs and deadpan line readings, or the feral energy Slowikowksa brings to her sketches, even if they bomb or get cut for time. Flipping through their respective TikTok archives, it’s striking to see how the tension between their scrappiness and the demands of a bigger-budget live show, as well as the contrast with fellow comedians, enhances what’s funny about them, rather than watering it down.
There also seems to be less pressure to hold that spotlight for extended periods. Just as the days of the strongest SNL players graduating to major movie stardom seem to be over for now, it seems possible that the show will attract less talent with that specific kind of unspoken main-character energy (which is distinct from self-generated attempts at main-character energy, still inextricable from having such a mainstream showcase for comic actors). Someone like Pete Davidson can find a groove at the show even while spending several of his early seasons joking about not getting on. In his later, more assured years, he nonetheless proceeded without a signature array of characters or the ability to sell almost any sketch to the decision-makers and/or audience members. In terms of the latter, Sherman has spoken in plenty of interviews about some of her weirder ideas not making it past the table read. That’s disappointing, yet lends the show a bit of unpredictability, too: A Sherman body-horror or animal-costume bit could pop up at any time, but without that clockwork regularity that breeds annoyance in some longtime viewers. The same goes for Slowikowska/Wickline team-ups like their delightful sketch about nerdy teenage girls asking out a drive-thru worker or their “Cousin Planet” music video, a true extension of the YouTube-friendly Lonely Island lineage.
This anti-star approach actually applies to Padilla’s traditionalism, too. So far—though it could always change—she doesn’t come across quite as hammy as Wiig or McKinnon at their easy-laugh worst. She’s willing to go smaller and more targeted, and as a result there’s a great clarity about what an Ashley Padilla-driven sketch is. Typically, it’s about a woman trying desperately to save face, whether attempting to own her shocking haircut, insisting on telling a joke about “four gorgeous dogs,” joining in break-room conversations unbidden, or renouncing Trump on her own extremely belated terms. There were certain hallmarks of McKinnon or Wiig sketches too, of course, but Wiig had so many quirked-out passive-aggressive recurring characters that they started to blend together, and McKinnon’s oddball virtuosity could read as a free-floating audience-gooser, enlivening some sketches and torpedoing others. Padilla’s showcase sketches have, so far, only occasionally succumbed to that plug-and-play sensibility. More often, they’re too tightly focused on her characters’ weird psychologies to feel like pre-programmed beats. She turns the SNL tradition of main-character sketch domination into something that feels more niche.
That micro-targeting is really the story for all of the show’s best current players. Andrew Dismukes is the millennial heir to the Will Ferrell/Beck Bennett school of imperiled masculinity. James Austin Johnson plays affable weirdos with a certain (sometimes literal) musicality. Even bits I’m less personally fond of, like Marcello Hernández bellowing his way through an aggro Update routine, can be fun when set in contrast to the rest of the show (or a contrasting scene partner, like Hernández and Wickline as an extremely mismatched couple).
That’s where the resemblance to the show’s TikTok sketch comes in. While the sketch is designed to simulate a parade of ultra-short-form videos, it of course must dial down the natural repetition of an algorithm-driven feed, in order to offer a more diverse array of roles. Some mini-characters circle back around, but to provide runners and comic punctuation, not to fixate on one particular type of character. Similarly, SNL at its recent best (which to be clear, is as inconsistent as ever) has more variety than any number of video scrolls. Yes, there are still standby sketch settings and formats—game show, talk show, classroom, local news, Mikey Day pointing out that someone is behaving strangely—that endure. But while an audience’s delight at, say, Domingo might ensure that the bit gets revived at least once past the point of tolerance, the real-time experience of the show is rarely so monotonous, even in its more painful moments. Compare this to the relentless targeting of most short-form video platforms that will quickly peg you as, let’s just pick a couple examples completely at random, absolutely obsessed with Esther Povitsky doing crowd work or Seth Meyers interviewing SNL alumni on Late Night at the merest sign of played-through enjoyment.
Saturday Night Live adopting some of the advantages of short-form video while avoiding some of its worst pitfalls probably isn’t by design, at least not consciously. It’s not as if the show’s component parts have become punchier, more numerous, or more format-breaking. In fact, if there’s anything truly programmatic about the show, it’s how any given episode almost always breaks down into roughly a dozen segments filed under a handful of categories: cold open, monologue, Update, music times two, one to two pretapes and four to six live sketches. If anything, it could be a sign that a lot of short-form video is like an old variety show with dopamine-seeking algorithms providing less than expert curation. But it’s also telling that TikTok comics like Wickline and Slowikowska have been able to carve out their own space on the same show that in the past shrugged off distinctive voices like Sarah Silverman or Tim Robinson.
Time was, the show could afford that kind of capriciousness. It still indulges it from time to time: Cue the fans asking, not without cause, what the hell happened with Chloe Troast? For years SNL thrived in part by being the freshest thing available to watch on network TV late on Saturdays—“a mediocre restaurant in a great location,” per a knock about the show that’s now older than some of the cast members. In recent years, it’s hung on by remaining one of the few TV shows that feels like some kind of appointment event, to those who are watching live or catching up the morning after, either in full via Peacock, or in small doses via YouTube, Instagram, and yes, TikTok.. It’s only appropriate that it might eventually shift into a comedy reel that’s less immediately craven and gimmicky than the attention-craving bits and pieces of the average video feed. That’s where Padilla-style classicism and Wickline-style Gen Z-isms might merge to keep the show at least a step or two ahead of disappearing into the endless scroll.
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