Saturday Night Live UK is both a revitalization and a rehash

Like all of us, Saturday Night Live keeps getting older. Unlike most of us, the show becomes more of an institution with age, growing further away from its storied first-season origins with every episode (a thousand and counting as of its current 51st season). Individual sketches might occasionally throw back to those early days, but the show’s overall structure remains firmly in place, for better or worse. This leaves the new Saturday Night Live UK, which is currently three episodes into an eight-episode debut season, in the unusual position of both offering something the original cannot—a genuine first season, with an entirely new ensemble—while doing it under much different circumstances, where a half century of showbiz history can’t help but dictate its outlines. A debut as eclectic, electric, and sometimes wobbly as the first few episodes of the original Saturday Night Live was probably never in the cards, even if some of those qualities turn up anyway by default.

To be clear, SNL UK (which hits Peacock on Sundays) isn’t anything close to the first international edition of the show. Throughout the late 2000s and into the 2010s, other countries including France, Spain, Italy, Japan, and South Korea introduced their own versions. But beyond the fact that most of them are not still on the air—congrats, SNL Korea, on 17 seasons so far!—these shows were as safely hidden from U.S. audiences as old TV commercials featuring preposterously famous American movie stars. As with those once-obscure-to-us ads, the internet and streaming technology have made it harder to sequester another country’s SNL, on top of which the U.K. version adds a common language, giving at least the illusion that comedy fans over here might have a shot at understanding it.

Indeed, SNL is not exactly known for its inscrutability, so a broadness its U.K. cousin has so far largely retained. If anything, comedy nerds in the U.S. might be disappointed by its lack of explicit British-isms. SNL UK hasn’t exactly been exotic. As an American dum-dum, this writer has been genuinely puzzled by approximately one sketch per episode, like a series-premiere bit about “your Irish grandpa” (though it played kind of like a Bruce McCullough bit on Kids In The Hall, which is a compliment) and a second-installment goof on Jools Holland (who I’ve heard of but don’t know enough about to understand an impression). Otherwise, it’s a classic case of letting the comedy lead, just as it might for teenagers learning about U.S. politics from the original show. A few weeks in and I suddenly believe, probably incorrectly, that I have a handle on the mannerisms and weaknesses of Keir Starmer (George Fouracres). Apparently he sounds a bit like the Peter Serafinowicz character Brian Butterfield. 

In that way and several others, SNL UK is a soft reset for U.S. fans (or British ones of the original show, as difficult as they are to picture). It’s a chance for the series to feel, if not exactly fresh or obscure, just a little more uncertain than its American counterpart, with a different set of cultural references and influences, even if the approach and structure is similar. As your intrepid Saturday Night Live recapper, here’s a quick, recap-esque breakdown of how the sister show is playing so far.   

What’s worked

You might expect that the segments of SNL UK most obviously derived from the original show might feel the most awkward or constrictive. Quite to the contrary: While both the politically themed cold-open sketch and Weekend Update come to this show far more codified than they were in 1975, they’re also forms that have felt pretty exhausted on the contemporary version of the series and can’t help but feel fresher here just through sheer novelty.

It’s entirely possible that in England, the cold-open sketches about current events play just as tired as the Donald Trump business tends to over here. But is it even possible for anyone to be as exhausting as Trump? He still turns up as a subject on SNL UK’s Weekend Update, which is an area where the show has been able to successfully get back to basics. Not only is there the automatic novelty of seeing Ania Magliano and Paddy Young, two people who are not Colin Jost and Michael Che, do the fake news (it’s been well over a decade!), the segment feels like less of a centerpiece on SNL UK. This means it’s less padded with filler jokes tailored to the hosts’ worn-out hang-ups and doesn’t feature an endless roster of desk guests. Young and especially Magliano have been able to work in barbs that feel pointed first and self-satisfied a distant second, which provides a major contrast to the current U.S. incarnation of Update.

Not every element of the show has benefited from such stark contrasts, yet they’re not entirely absent from the regular sketches, either. So far, the show’s best material tends to be the kind of simpler scenes that it’s harder to picture the original show putting together with such a large cast. With only 11 ensemble members, doing a two-person piece like “Hostage,” a sketch where a psychotic kidnapper winds up walking his victim through a situationship, doesn’t feel like it’s sidelining anyone. It’s allowed to breathe. A sketch from the Tina Fey-hosted premiere where a saleswoman helps Fey’s shopper feel better about buying bras is equally silly and not aiming straight for the recurring-character rafters.