SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
NBC, 11:29 p.m. ET
Last week’s “At Home” edition of SNL was important, and very welcome. I loved seeing Tom Hanks as host, especially as he began by poking fun at two durable show-biz institutions: Saturday Night Live and himself. Tonight’s show is a rerun, but is worth watching because it’s the most recent episode performed and televised live before the pandemic shutdown. Daniel Craig was the guest host, making jokes about the fact that he was there to promote the new James Bond filmed, even though the studio had just pushed it back to the fall because of newly suggested social distancing concerns. That was on Saturday, March 7 – and to look at the audience and the show, five weeks later, is like looking at another world. Two days later, on March 9, I attended a preview performance of Company in New York, my last stupid move before taking the coronavirus ultra-seriously (but hey: the tickets were expensive, and the production was to die for. Luckily, I didn’t.) And two days after that, on March 11, they closed down Broadway until further notice (cue Billy Joel singing about the night the lights went out on Broadway…). So watch this SNL recent repeat, as a trapped-in-amber look at a world it might take us years to experience in the same way again. Live, from New York…