Is There a New ‘SNL’ Episode Airing This Week?

We’re deep into the 45th season of “Saturday Night Live” now, and also deep into the holiday season. The most recent episode of “SNL” aired on April 11, and was a special coronavirus quarantine episode that cast members shot from their own homes. And it wasn’t actually live. It did, however, have Tom Hanks popping in as host to deliver a monologue, though he didn’t end up appearing in any of the sketches.

But that wasn’t the only celebrity cameo we got on “SNL” last week. Larry David delivered a monologue of his own later in the show, in character as Bernie Sanders, delivering a postmortem on the presidential candidate’s recently suspended campaign. And Alec Baldwin called into Weekend Update as Donald Trump to share some other racist names for COVID-19 that his administration had come up with but didn’t use.

In season 45, Alec Baldwin has made seven appearances as Donald Trump thus far, starting in the premiere episode, and in the cold open on October 26, when he shared the stage with Darrell Hammond, the former “SNL” cast member who played Trump on the show for years. Baldwin popped up less often in season 44 than he did in the previous two seasons, when he would appear as Donald Trump in the cold open most weeks.

His quarantine appearance was the first time he’d popped up on the show since the Feb. 1 episode, when “SNL” imagined a version of Trump’s impeachment trial that actually made sense.

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This week, on Saturday, April 18, there* WILL NOT be a new episode of “SNL.” *For now, that special “SNL At Home” episode is a one-off, and we don’t currently know if they’ll be doing any more of them. It’s likely that the sketch show would have taken this week and April 25 off even without a pandemic going on, as NBC typically ends each season with three straight episodes in May.

Since it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll get another normal episode in season 45, it wouldn’t be too surprising if they pulled together another quarantine episode next month.

In the meantime, NBC will be doing its standard slate of reruns on Saturday night, with a shortened episode that will run at 10 p.m. ET/PT, followed by local news and a re-airing of the last studio episode of “SNL” we’ve gotten, the Daniel Craig episode from March.

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While season 44 saw “SNL” seemingly tire of doing political commentary late in the season, season 45 has seen it return its politics-heavy form — and you can’t really get much more political than having a major presidential candidate make an appearance.

Every cold open this season has been political, and each has featured some surprise celebrity cameos. Including, perhaps most shockingly, Darrell Hammond’s brief appearance — Hammond was devastated three years ago when it picked Baldwin to play Trump over him. We’ve also seen Lin-Manuel Miranda and Billy Porter feature in one cold open, and Matthew Broderick in another.

While it certainly was surprising how light “SNL” was on politics in the back half of last season, it’s certainly no surprise that it’s back to its old ways given that we’re now neck deep in a new presidential election cycle. So the focus has been not just on mocking Trump, but also the circus that has been the run up to the Democratic primaries.

Not that the sketch show has in any way shied away from mocking Trump. The impeachment has certainly been a common topic for cold open sketches this season. There was the one where Baldwin’s Trump went through his contacts list trying to find a fixer who could make the impeachment stop, ending with a call to Liev Schreiber playing himself — Trump thought his character Ray Donovan, a fixer on the eponymous Showtime series was actually a real person.

There was also that one where “SNL” sent up the impeachment hearings by doing a “Days of Our Lives” parody that starred Jon Hamm.

As for the madness with the Democratic primary, we’ve had numerous big cameos in the debate sketches, as presumably “SNL” is already preparing for how season 46 will handle the general election this fall. So we’ve had Woody Harrelson make a couple appearances as Joe Biden, as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda as Julian Castro, Larry David as Bernie Sanders, Rachel Dratch as Amy Klobuchar, Fred Armisen as Michael Bloomberg, Mara Rudolph as Kamala Harris and Will Ferrell as Tom Steyer.

That’s a lot of cameos, and “SNL” actually managed to jam nearly all of those folks into a single sketch — a 12-minute debate parody from a late November episode. Miranda did not appear in that one, but he had previously popped up as Castro in October in a parody of the Democrats’ LGBTQ town hall that was moderated by Billy Porter in character as himself.

Meanwhile, the show is staying in-house for Elizabeth Warren, who has been played this season by “SNL” cast member Kate McKinnon several times, including a town hall sketch that she had all to herself. Though perhaps the real Warren might make more appearances in the future.

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