This weekend, Stranger Things star and filmmaker Finn Wolfhard hosted Saturday Night Live — and, as you might expect, the show feaured plenty of riffs on both Stranger Things and prestige television as a whole. There’s some precedent for that — when Anya Taylor-Joy hosted in the wake of The Queen’s Gambit‘s success, one of the standout sketches involved various SNL cast members pitching her chess-themed followups.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer dismissed talk of revisiting the characters in a new project, saying, “I don’t know how that would read as anything but a gross cash grab to me.” That’s real life, but comedy can involve glimpses of a road not taken — in this case, a sketch that envisioned a world in which Netflix opted for the cash grab, and reunited Wolfhard with two of his Stranger Things costars, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin.
This wasn’t the only sketch that riffed on Netflix and the television landscape in general. Another sketch riffed on a very real upcoming Netflix documentary, in which Free Solo‘s Alex Honnold attempts to scale the 101-story building Taipei 101 with no safety gear. SNL‘s sketch asked: what if Honnold was joined by another climber, a man with no training whatsoever and a number of very good reasons not to try to scale a massive skyscraper.
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People on TikTok can’t get enough, so we talked to a fandom expertAnd, not surprisingly, this week’s episode also addressed the growing popularity of Heated Rivalry, with a sketch that envisioned HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter adaptation as evolving into, well, “Heated Rivalry, but with Quidditch.” (This one also featured an unexpected cameo.) Will the Heated Rivalry riffs continue further into 2026? We’ll see next week, when Teyana Taylor hosts.
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