<em>SNL</em> Gives the Impeachment Hearings the Soap-Opera Treatment

If NBC News believed the outset of the impeachment hearings “lacked the pizzazz” necessary to hold people’s attention, Saturday Night Live served up an unwieldy remedy with its cold open this week. Last night, “Days of Our Impeachment” transformed the ongoing American political maelstrom into a soap opera, drawing on all of the genre’s melodramatic tropes to underscore the tangled nature of the testimony.

For a sketch built around the premise that “the only thing at stake is democracy,” ’s messy version lacked focus, arguably the most crucial component in an era seem to lack the wherewithal—be that time or interest—to properly examine the evidence against President Donald Trump. As a result, the opening sketch appealed to the very thing it was ostensibly trying to mock: short attention spans.