Saturday Night Live had one job in the thuddingly familiar first week of Trump’s second term: to not be the same Saturday Night Live of Trump’s first term. They crushed it.
Not that 2017-era SNL was so bad. It gave viewers elite bits like Melissa McCarthy playing Sean Spicer — a name that now feels so distant, it might as well be from the bible — and plenty of other scathing impressions that did not involve Alec Baldwin. The problem was that SNL, during that time, took on a thin surface layer of importance, which proved to be comedic kryptonite. Nobody had ever been through a holy shit, Donald Trump is the fucking president-type situation before, so people were ready to believe anything about how to get out of it. Many seemed to think that perhaps SNL would create a satire so irrefutably…
