‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Review: Tina Fey Helps Give Sky One’s ‘SNL’ Spinoff a Promising Start

Saturday Night Live UK had its looooooooooooong-awaited premiere this weekend, and let’s get a couple of obvious jokes out of the way.

First of all, congratulations to Saturday Night Live UK on marking the last week nobody will be able to say the show used to be funnier!

But also, the writers had 51 years to write jokes for the first episode and this was what they came up with?

Hilarious, I know. But given that Tina Fey began her monologue by joking that she’s the youngest person to ever host Saturday Night Live UK, easy punchlines are in play.

While it’s thoroughly baffling that it took Lorne Michaels this long to franchise one of American television’s most beloved and lucrative formats, the transplantation of Saturday Night Live for British audiences went off basically without a hitch.

The Saturday Night Live UK premiere was like a funhouse-mirror version of the long-running NBC smash, but not one of those fully committed funhouse mirrors that makes you look three feet tall or precariously wire-thin. No, this was like looking at yourself in a slightly askew mirror and going, “Wow! I look one inch taller than normal!” or “This mirror makes it look like I’m wearing a funny hat.” The premiere was full of easily observable changes of the sort that might make a difference if you’ve grown up watching the original show — I can’t believe Tina Fey used a microphone during the closing “Good night!” segment! — and a few more significant tweaks. Generally, this felt like Saturday Night Live.

The premiere struggled mostly in ways that SNL often struggles — namely, the writers didn’t always have fully developed ideas and they didn’t always have ideas that got full value out of the cast. But Saturday Night Live UK proved quickly that the cast is gifted and versatile and funny, which will be the key reason I’ll be tuning in weekly for episodes that will air on Peacock in the States, a day after the Sky One premiere overseas.

Fey was a perfect pick as the inaugural host. They needed somebody who could give a stamp of approval. Who better than a former head writer and Weekend Update anchor who won an Emmy for her guest-hosting performance and has been one of the two names most frequently mentioned as a potential steward for the brand once creator Lorne Michaels eventually calls it quits? It isn’t quite as simple as “Tina Fey is SNL and SNL is Tina Fey,” but if you needed a one-person representative example of what SNL can be and what SNL can do, it’s tough to beat Tina Fey.

So why did Fey act like she needed to introduce herself to British audiences in her monologue like every SNL cast member in history had drawn straws and she got the short straw? They have 30 Rock in the U.K. They have Mean Girls and Date Night in the U.K. Heck, they get Saturday Night Live in the U.K., which made it strange that Fey’s monologue contained an explanation for what Saturday Night Live is. It’s like when you go to a mid-level restaurant and the waiter asks if you’ve dined there before and proceeds to list several things about the restaurant that are actually true of every single restaurant ever. I’m sure the audience was grateful to have it explained to them that Saturday Night Live will include sketches, musical guests AND a host.

They found better ways, though, for Fey to explain the show, utilizing a variety of special guests from the audience — including very funny Derry Girls star Nicola Coughlan, reasonably funny representative Canadian Michael Cera, and Graham Norton, who revealed that Saturday Night Live UK is taping in his regular studio — before Fey moved through the best part of the monologue, in which she did one-sentence impressions of a bunch of the British shows she grew up watching.

One can imagine a version of this hosting gig that Fey might have seen as an opportunity to expand her performance repertoire beyond what SNL writers traditionally give her to do when she drops by, but this was not that. Other than getting to attempt British accents in several segments, she played things very straight, letting the cast shine, which was the correct move for the circumstances.

British comedy fans definitely already knew a few members of the ensemble, which has a little more seasoning than the typical rejuvenation of 20-somethings that Lorne Michaels normally goes for with SNL. A couple of cast members are, God forbid, in their 30s already. Wild, right?

Over the course of the premiere, there were several immediate breakouts.

George Fouracres, a TV and Edinburgh Fringe veteran, got the premiere’s major spotlight, with the Keir Starmer and David Attenborough impressions that steered the opening sketches, and then a “45 Seconds With…” mini-sketch later in the episode. I know Starmer’s public persona well enough to recognize the broader aspects of Fouracres’ perpetually sheepish and spineless impression, but not well enough to recognize mannerisms and nuances, if they were there. Fouracres’ Attenborough was largely vocal and it was fine. He showed, later in the episode, that he could take on straight-man roles as well, making it a safe guarantee that he’ll have a slate on a weekly basis.

The undeniable attention-grabber from the less experienced side of the cast — performers without a pre-existing Wikipedia page, basically — was Jack Shep. His nervously posh Diana, Princess of Wales, felt more like an impression of Emma Corrin’s impression of Princess Diana from The Crown, but it made me laugh more than any of the other impressions in that “Last Supper With David Attenborough” sketch. Shep recycled many of those mannerisms in a later sketch, as an unborn baby pretending to be shy; by the end of the show, I was wondering how much range he has. But he conveyed a lot of the same youthful energy as Marcello Hernández on the mothership.

Hammed Animashaun quickly introduced a number of prospective recurring characters; Emma Sidi’s episode-closing bra concierge character probably has ongoing potential; and Celeste Dring had a few quirky line readings that I enjoyed.

In the coveted Weekend Update chairs, Ania Magliano and Paddy Young both had moments — I loved the anti-comic beats of Magliano’s “Khomeini? Two. But one’s dead now” and Young’s helium bit — but the premiere gave no indication of their chemistry. The cheap-looking news set might have held them back, putting the anchors too far apart and too forward-looking — one of several instances in which the show’s blocking appeared to be “Actors line up onstage and look toward the camera, rather than interacting,” which also happens in lesser sketches on the original show.

Most of the flaws in the premiere were, in fact, entirely part of the SNL DNA.

The Starmer-driven cold open was soft, boiling down to Keir Starmer as an abused spouse trying to break up with Donald Trump, seeking the help of his new Gen Z facilitator (Shep) with punchlines that were consistently a little funny, but never very funny.

The David Attenborough sketch was one of those “Let’s do a lineup of impressions with no actual spine to the scene” things. The filmed sketch about the people who work together to make the internet suck was a vague idea without any real punchlines. The filmed commercial for the beauty product Underáge had one good punchline — “The anti-aging cream that works so well, everyone will think your husband is a nonce” — that was then rearticulated 10 times until it ceased to work. I really liked the junket sketch with Animashaun as the compulsively honest Ed Boovies, host of “Boovies Goes to the Films,” but it ended at least one or two beats too soon. Ditto the bra inspector sketch and the David Attenborough sketch, examples of good ideas and insufficiently baked executions.

There were no disasters, though, which can’t always be said for episodes of traditional-flavor Saturday Night Live.

Other than that, the differences in the format were small, distracting only because of how ingrained the cadences of the original are. Was I annoyed by the interstitial music between scenes because it was bad or because it wasn’t identical? The latter! Ditto the absence of goofy host images introducing sketches.

More tangibly “fresh” was the freedom to swear, which Saturday Night Live UK thankfully didn’t abuse. The Shakespeare/Hamnet sketch, giving us the opportunity to hear the Bard dropping what Americans puritanically would call “the c-word,” felt like it used swearing as the joke itself.

I’ll be interested to see how British audiences respond to getting their own version of Saturday Night Live roughly 50 years after it might have been cool. Part of why I assume it took so long to mount this spinoff is that the UK has its own assortment of existing showcases for up-and-coming comic talent, from sketch shows to panel shows to the genre hybrid that is Taskmaster. It’s easy to imagine British comedy loyalists thinking that this is a lukewarm leftover that adds nothing new to the cultural landscape, or to imagine British and American audiences both feeling like one Saturday Night Live is plenty and the ability to say “c***” isn’t reason enough to add more of the same.

For me, the cast was good enough that I’ll watch the next few weeks, if only to justify facile jokes about how it USED to be funny.