March of the Penguins

The Institution of Entropy

To review *Saturday Night Live* is not to review a television show, but to audit a utility company. Like the electric grid or the subway system, it is an infrastructure of American culture—essential, frequently malfunctioning, and seemingly impossible to modernize without shutting the whole thing down. Now navigating its fifty-first season, the program created by Lorne Michaels in 1975 has long ceased to be the countercultural battering ram of its youth. Instead, it has become something stranger and perhaps more difficult to maintain: a mirror that ages in real-time, reflecting a society that no longer agrees on what it sees.



Visually, the show remains a miracle of compression. The aesthetic of *SNL* is the aesthetic of panic masked by professionalism. The flat, high-key lighting of Studio 8H does not flatter its subjects; it exposes them. There is a specific, tactile vulnerability in watching a comedic actor like Mikey Day or Marcello Hernández stare at a cue card, the invisible umbilical cord connecting them to the writers' room. In an era of polished, filter-heavy digital content, *SNL* insists on the analog friction of wigs, glue, and plywood sets that wobble when a door is slammed. This adherence to theatricality is not just a stylistic choice; it is the show’s moral stance. It asserts that comedy is labor, that it is physical, and that it is prone to error.

However, the "Conversation" surrounding the series in recent years—particularly following the gargantuan 50th Anniversary celebrations—often centers on its relevance. Is it a toothless jester in the court of modern politics? The satire often feels caught in a trap of its own making. In trying to parody a political reality that has already outpaced parody, the "Cold Open" sketches often collapse into mere reenactment. We see the actors striving to find the emotional truth of a caricature, yet the audience’s laughter often feels like a reflex of recognition rather than the shock of insight. The show struggles most when it tries to be important, forgetting that its true power lies in being absurd.



Yet, the heart of the series still beats in the "10-to-1" slot—the final sketch of the night where the strange and the melancholic come out to play. It is here, away from the political impersonations, that the current cast finds its soul. Performers like Andrew Dismukes and Sarah Sherman (often engaging in body-horror surrealism) dismantle the polished veneer of network television. These moments are not about "clapping back" at a politician; they are about the fundamental weirdness of being human. When the show abandons the burden of commentary and embraces the chaos of the id, it achieves a kind of lucid dreaming that no TikTok algorithm can replicate.



Ultimately, *Saturday Night Live* persists not because it is always good, but because it is always *there*. In a fragmented media landscape where we watch content in isolation, this lumbering dinosaur demands we watch together, live, risking disappointment for the possibility of a single transcendent moment. It is a weekly vigil for the idea of a shared monoculture. The sketches may fade, and the hosts may falter, but the endurance of the format itself is the art. It is a stubborn, beautiful insistence that we are still talking to one another, even if we aren't quite sure what to say.