In April, Kristen Wiig hosted Saturday Night Live, an occasion that, under normal circumstances, would merit some excitement. But anyone familiar with the peculiar lore of SNL would know better: This was Wiig’s fifth time hosting, and when someone hosts SNL five times, the opening monologue becomes absolutely unbearable. This is the fault of SNL’s longtime schtick known as “the Five Timers Club,” where the conceit is once you host the show five times, you get a velvet smoking jacket and entrance into a mythical exclusive society full of other laureates like Steve Martin and Tina Fey and Justin Timberlake.  It is also an excuse for the show to indulge its worst impulses: Packed with A-list guest appearances, Wiig’s monologue saw Paul Rudd pitifully ask why he wasn’t asked to be one of the celebrity cameos; Matt Damon, who has hosted only twice, wearing a Five Timers jacket because executive producer Lorne Michaels said he was so good that he deserved it; and Jon Hamm and Martin Short begging Michaels offstage for a chance to host again. In total, eight of the country’s most beloved actors joined together to fawn at the altar of SNL and, specifically, its creator.  There are infinite ways for SNL to be unbearable: a sketch outstays its welcome, the rookie featured player keeps flubbing his lines, the writers forgo jokes altogether and instead force us to listen to a bizarre piano ballad in an attempt to say something earnest about politics. But by far the worst version of SNL is when the show becomes more interested in its own mythology than making people laugh.  This year, the institution’s 50th, promises to be full of such moments. In the season premiere, host Jean Smart recalled her younger self watching the very first episode of SNL, knowing she’d one day host the show, while the “SNL50” branding was everywhere, from interstitials to the top story on Weekend Update.  The slate of hosts this fall are largely limited to repeat hosts, including John Mulaney and Michael Keaton, who will return for their sixth and fourth time hosting, respectively. The nostalgia tour extends beyond the show: On October 11, Saturday Night, a movie that dramatizes the story of SNL’s 1975 debut, will premiere in theaters. In the meantime, Questlove is producing a documentary about SNL; filmmaker Morgan Neville of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is, somehow, producing five of them.  The worst version of SNL is when the show becomes more interested in its own mythology than making people laugh.  And on Valentine’s Day 2025, SNL will host a “homecoming” event at Radio City Music Hall, produced by Michaels and Mark Ronson, in addition to a live primetime reunion special with current and former cast members to air the following Sunday.  The film Saturday Night, directed by Jason Reitman, received just-okay reviews, with many critics irked by its exorbitant flattery of both Michaels and SNL. Rolling Stone called it a “gushing love letter”: “Saturday Night Live has long swooned over its own self-mythology, and Saturday Night is happy to add to that backpatting as the show’s golden anniversary approaches,” writes David Fear. Put more plainly, according to the New Republic, the film is little more than “a cinematic circle jerk.” To be fair, franchise nostalgia is a plague affecting more than just SNL. Pop culture is in a deeply self-referential, self-obsessed mood: Endless reboots that recycle previously successful intellectual property is a symptom of an entertainment industry that has strained under the weight of crushing corporate consolidation. The result is films about recognizable companies’ origin stories (Nike, Pop Tarts, BlackBerry, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, to name a few), TV prologues (The Rings of Power, House of the Dragon), and constant sampling in pop music.  Or take, for example, the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe, which sold movie tickets throughout the 2010s by promising hardcore fans that they might see their favorite character in a post-credits scene. Or the other blockbuster cultural product of the decade, Taylor Swift, who orchestrated the highest-grossing tour of all time by packaging and repackaging nostalgia for her fans.   When SNL commits the sin of self-referentiality, it feels worse, not because it’s any more guilty than the rest, but because SNL is supposed to be funny. There’s nothing hilarious about watching rich and famous people congratulate themselves (that’s what award shows are for!). Instead, it comes across as profoundly lazy.  SNL’s best moments have always been the ones where you haven’t a clue what kind of brain they could have come from. With few exceptions, its topical and political material is never as memorable as its quirky characters and absurd sketches — recent standouts include last year’s silly Beavis and Butthead sketch and Lisa from Temecula. In other words, SNL works when it lets the young comedy nerds who staff the show do their thing without reminding us that we’re watching a show that’s been on the air for 50 years.  That, however, isn’t usually what happens when an aging leader doesn’t understand that the best use of their power is to hand it to someone else. Lorne Michaels is a show business icon who is also nearly 80 and can be forgiven for wanting to stick around long enough to enjoy a victory lap (50 years helming a network powerhouse is nothing to sneer at, after all).  Despite Michaels’s statements to press in 2020 that he was planning to retire after the 50th season — a position repeated in 2023 when he hinted that his replacement “could easily be Tina Fey” — he recently told multiple media outlets that he now plans to stay indefinitely. “I’m going to do it as long as I feel I can do it,” he said to the Times, adding to the Hollywood Reporter, “As long as it’s important and I can be useful, I’ll stay.” To say you watch (or even care about) SNL in 2024 is itself kind of embarrassing, though this has been the case for decades — people who tuned in as children or teenagers tend to believe no cast could possibly live up to the one who introduced them to sketch comedy. You could say it sucks at any point in its history and you’d at least be a little bit right, but it’s especially depressing to watch talented writers and performers spend their energy deifying and worshiping their own employer. Like too much of pop culture right now, SNL is relying on audiences pointing and saying, “I get that reference!” instead of creating work that’s genuinely fresh or funny or compelling. After all the meta in-jokes, all the celebrity cameos, all the cutaways to the big boss looming offstage, there’s hardly any room left for laughs. If the bland season premiere is any indication, don’t expect many of those this year. 

This is new—but also very old.

Going with the flow.

At the current price, this portable monitor is a no brainer.

While Virginia is reportedly for lovers, most everyone acknowledges that nearby Washington, DC, is not. The nation’s capital has been consistently ranked as one of the worst places to date and one of the US’s worst cities for singles. Too many type As, too many people too into their jobs, too many people ready to leave after two years — it’s not exactly a city that screams romance. They say that politics is show business for ugly people, which would make DC the Hollywood of uggos.  Given Washington’s notoriety, it was only a matter of time before Netflix took Love Is Blind to the nation’s capital.  In its first season, the Netflix reality dating series asserted the hopefulness of romance — the possibility of falling in love with someone sight unseen and marrying them within a month — but it has become a show about irreparable incompatibility featuring terrifying tales of red flag-waving monsters. There have also been lawsuits from contestants alleging toxic and inhospitable workplace environments in and out of the “pods.” Yet the love experiment is one of Netflix’s biggest hits, and each season a captive audience tunes in to see a new batch of daters and the horrors — body shaming, weaponized therapy speak, flies in toilets — that await them on the other side of the wall.  Now we have what sounds like a perfect, hellish match: one of the worst dating cities in the US, combined with one of the bleakest reality TV dating shows in history. On paper, it feels more like a dare or taunt, a gift to haters. Truly only the freakiest freaks, some real District of Columbia sickos would sign up to be on Love Is Blind: DC.  But while this immensely watchable season has plenty of villains and inter-crossing love triangles, it, sadly, doesn’t feel very DC. For one thing, no one on this season explicitly works in government. To be fair, the show isn’t very specific when it comes to its participants’ professions, so an “IT specialist” could ostensibly be working for some military government contractor and an “engineer” could be doing research for, say, Lockheed-Martin. Still, the closest we get is a cast member being described as a “policy advocate,” which seems like a nice euphemism for lobbyist. Capitol Hill keeping their employees from representing on Love Is Blind is understandable because of how embarrassingly and negatively many of the participants are portrayed. But that dynamic of an adjacency to national political power fueling a person’s dating identity is exactly what makes DC dating unique and (from all these news stories about people who hate dating there) so hostile. That the show spent a season in DC and couldn’t capture the snobbiness of a staffer asking “Who do you work for?” feels like a loss.  There seems to be a reluctance to get into politics this season, too. A contestant talks about how he voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and there’s a conversation about what kind of political beliefs one has while serving in the military, but politics as they relate to dating preferences  — e.g., whether love trumps politics, whether similar politics mean compatibility, etc. — is barely addressed. That’s a missed opportunity, not only given how politically active DC allegedly is, but also because finding partners who share the same politics has increasingly become more and more important to singles.  That said, there’s still enough relationship dysfunction this season to sustain its horror-junkie audience.  Brittany, a beautiful woman who wants to be a trophy wife and tells the camera she cannot spell the word “physicist,” falls for Leo, a young art dealer who tells everyone that one of his insecurities is that he inherited a humongous amount of money and never has to worry about anything financially. The more the audience gets to know Leo, the more it seems like this isn’t an insecurity at all. The more Brittany gets to know Leo, the more interested she is in his “insecurity.”  There’s also Hannah, a 26-year-old woman who quit her “dream job” to be on the show. The dream job in question? Medical device sales. Perhaps there is honor and allure in, say, the vending of CPAP machine accessories, but she’s given it all up for the possibility of sight-unseen reality TV love. To that end, she tells Nick, one of her pod suitors, that she dates athletes and she’s always worried that men only see her as a hot girl. Nick tells her he looks like a less buff Henry Cavill. Neither is setting themselves up to overdeliver.  Hannah, Nick, Leo, Brittany and their cohort deliver a season draped in red flags and dealbreakers. From chilling fights about yapping too much to roundabout conversations about getting the ick from watching your partner straddle patio furniture, there’s plenty here. If you’re coupled, they’ll make you breathe a sigh of relief that you’re not in the dating pool. If you’re single, they’ll make you relish it.  Love Is Blind is still a riveting, deranged exploration of the worst people falling in and out of love, even if it doesn’t feel like DC.  This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

A surveillance system proven during Covid-19 is now being used to track outbreaks of RSV.