"SNL" Turned (Somewhat) Introspective On its 50th Anniversary

There’s a tendency among institutions celebrating a milestone anniversary to go for the victory lap. Certainly Saturday Night Live has done this. The show’s 15th anniversary felt at times like a celebration of the show going from scrappy upstart to, well, a comedy institution. Its 40th anniversary included a segment in which famous fans of the show — including Edward Norton and Emma Stone — did their best renditions of characters from the show’s run so far.

This weekend’s celebration of the show’s 50th anniversary had plenty of high-profile cameos and plenty of recurring sketches, including Black Jeopardy, a supersized Weekend Update and Debbie Downer. But some of the special’s best moments came when SNL got a little more candid with its own history.

Sometimes this came with a relatively light touch, as when Bowen Yang and Andy Samberg took center stage in a Digital Short that riffed on the anxiety the show’s cast members feel. It’s very funny, but given Yang’s candor about his own experiences with anxiety and depression, viewers wouldn’t have to dig too deeply to find something more serious beneath the surface.

Sometimes the nods at history were a little more clear-cut. Miley Cyrus and Brittney Howard covering “Nothing Compares 2 U” felt like a tribute to Prince and Sinéad O’Connor as well as — as several people noted online — SNL‘s way of apologizing for its treatment of O’Connor in the wake of her controversial 1993 appearance on the show.

Elsewhere in the special, a somber-looking Tom Hanks introduced a montage of “in memoriam” clips, not because of the deaths of the people involved, but because many of these sketches had aged terribly, whether for racist costumes, casual sexism or hosts who’d gone on to do terrible things.

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Perhaps the most bittersweet evocation of the show’s past came from a sketch almost as old as SNL itself. Original cast member Garrett Morris took to the stage to introduce a sketch directed by Tom Schiller from 1978. At that point it was clear what was about to happen: we were going to see the short Don’t Look Back in Anger.

I can only imagine that this sketch — in which an elderly John Belushi visits the graves of his former castmates, having outlived them all — played very differently in the time between when it originally aired and Belushi’s 1982 death. The word “bittersweet” doesn’t quite do justice to the experience of watching it now. That it didn’t feel like a jarring shift in tone is one of a few reasons why this special resonated a little more deeply than you might have expected.