A lot of people are already convinced Saturday Night Live UK is going to be shit. I've largely gleaned this impression from social media, despite having learned the hard way that the people making snide comments on Instagram aren't necessarily the great cultural critics of our times. Still, it seems to bear out in the real world, too. Whenever I mention the show - which begins its six-week-long test run this weekend - to friends and colleagues, they grimace as though I've just told a C-tier dad joke.
Isn't that weird? OK, the American SNL doesn't have a great reputation over here, and for those of us who once loved the show, the current iteration feels a bit flat. Part of that isn't quite their fault - it's a topical show, and we're entering our 12th year of Donald Trump being the centrifugal force of global politics, so the cold open's reliance on James Austin Johnson's undeniably excellent impression is several years past stale.
Still, SNL's 50 years have been littered with great eras, and it hasn't been that long since the last one. I will happily go into bat for the shorts from trio Please Don't Destroy in the early 2020s. And, actually, the last memorably excellent sketch, Shane Gillis' "Couplabeers", is only a year old (it's done in the style of a pharmaceutical ad, but shilling a few lagers as the answer to a sad middle-aged man's problems, which include "Boredom", "Winter" and "Moderate to severe Italian wife").
The nature of sketch comedy is that you have to dig through some shit to find the gold - even Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave, for my money the high watermark of the format today, has its share of misses. I think SNL seems so washed over here because we mostly consume the show through short, out-of-context clips on social media.
SNL UK, on the other hand, is basically a new thing altogether. They've hired a load of genuinely funny social media comics (like Al Nash, Emma Sidi and Hammed Animashaun), built an impressive new studio and - by the sounds of it - dumped a truckload of cash into doing so. For people worrying it's going to be cringeworthily American, that seems very unlikely. It's a British show run by British writers with an all-British cast. If SNL UK fails, it won't be because it's too much like the American version - and that thought should be freeing for everyone involved. This show can be bad on its own terms! Or maybe it'll just be good?
The first clip we've seen, a promo featuring inaugural host Tina Fey, dropped on Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the cast have been given a little too much marketing to do in it - they announce where it's on, what time, which channel, during the bit. They kinda make a joke of that very fact. But despite these teething problems, it's hard not to feel excited - with the obvious talent on show, and the fact that they've got Fey, a veteran of SNL, to show them the ropes. There'll probably be more bumps along the way, but we should give the first few episodes some grace. I think they'll win us all over in due time.
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