‘The Timeline You’re All Living in Is About to Collapse’
<em>SNL</em>’s inaugural episode of 2022 turned to dark, and often awkward, absurdity to explain our exasperating moment.
by Amanda Wicks
Jan 16, 2022
3 minutes
Saturday Night Live’s first episode of 2022 attempted to make up for the strange, empty show that ended 2021 amid the rise of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant. The cast was back, the masked audience was back, and the show, as they say, went on. But it couldn’t escape the world outside of 30 Rock’s doors.
This season has thus far blended thin political fare with dour-noted escapism, as though the pleasure of putting on a has been waiting to turn a corner, to move past a scenario with little to laugh about. Last night’s episode felt like one long exasperated sigh. As James Austin Johnson’s Joe Biden wretchedly joked in the , “People got vaccinated and the pandemic got worse.”
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