Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

With a couple of notable exceptions, the three-hour special primarily revived recurring segments from the past 20 years. Kristen Wiig brought back Dooneese, the bizarre young woman with doll hands who performs with her sisters on The Lawrence Welk Show; she debuted the character in 2008. This time, Dooneese’s sisters were played by Ana Gasteyer and two celebrity guests, Kim Kardashian and Scarlett Johansson; Will Ferrell dusted off an old impression to join them as the crooner Robert Goulet. Kate McKinnon, who left the show in 2022, returned as Colleen Rafferty, a woman who is constantly abducted and exploited by aliens. Rafferty was joined by her mother, played by Meryl Streep—making her first-ever SNL appearance—but the sketch didn’t deviate much from past iterations.

The most overly familiar section featured the pop star Sabrina Carpenter participating in a version of the viral “Domingo” sketch, which debuted when Ariana Grande hosted this past October. Grande’s rendition hinged on a parody of Carpenter’s hit song “Espresso”; Carpenter returned the favor for hers by reworking “Defying Gravity,” from Wicked, the film adaptation of which Grande recently starred in. The third take on the premise in four months, the spot was among the most glaring moments when the night seemed like a celebration less of the entire show than of its catchiest contemporary material.

The selections were also at odds with the rest of the storytelling that has surrounded Season 50, which seemed to trawl SNL’s deep archives. In the lead-up to yesterday’s event, a wave of documentaries emphasized just how much history the show has encompassed. The four-episode docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night featured sketches and cast members from across the show’s entire run; each installment recalled an aspect or era of the show in detail. The excellent film Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music, co-directed by the Roots drummer Questlove, was a deep dive into the series’ relationship with its musical guests, including the punk band Fear, who made a controversial appearance in 1981, as well as the singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, who infamously tore up a picture of the pope onstage. It did a great job of showing the wide corners of culture that SNL has touched—a key theme of the overarching anniversary project.

Last night’s special had a comparatively narrow focus, prioritizing the characters and celebrities that many younger viewers would recognize. But even when such a major name as Mike Myers reprised his popular “Coffee Talk” character Linda Richman, originated in the early 1990s, it was in the context of a much more recent bit: Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph’s “Bronx Beat,” from the late 2000s. Some of these more contemporary sketches offered surprising twists on their formulas, however. In “Black Jeopardy,” Eddie Murphy pulled out a perfect impression of Tracy Morgan—while standing next to Tracy Morgan. The sketch demonstrated the veteran comedian’s prodigious talents, which we see all too rarely these days; it was the kind of showcase I expected more of from a celebrity-filled spectacle like SNL50.

Meanwhile, the latest edition of John Mulaney’s New York–themed musical sketch toured the past five decades of the city. It was a brilliant send-up, as the entries in this recurring series tend to be; a highlight was Nathan Lane, the original voice of The Lion King’s Timon, as a 1980s financier singing “Cocaine and Some Vodka” to the tune of “Hakuna Matata.” Mixing Disney with hard drugs is the sort of edgy comedy that SNL has catalyzed at its best, and the satire worked superbly here.

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These sketches played like a greatest-hits reel of the past 15 years or so, but the special’s more nostalgic bits got to the root of SNL’s uniqueness as a TV institution. The 10-time host Tom Hanks emerged to set up an “In Memoriam” segment—not for the deceased, but for all the gags that had aged poorly. (Categories included “ethnic stereotypes,” “sexism,” “sexual harassment,” and “gay panic.”) It was somewhat cringeworthy, but also bracingly self-aware. While the majority of the night’s material was expected hagiography, the pointed self-critique was a sober reminder that a lot of SNL does not hold up. (The subsequent “Scared Straight” sketch, which resorted to some of those same gay-panic jokes, was an unfortunate juxtaposition.)

Some of the other effective moments were ones that looked back almost plaintively. Adam Sandler—introduced by the actor Jack Nicholson, in a rare appearance—played an original song that was so filled with genuine love for the studio and its history, it was hard not to be moved. The comedian himself seemed to tear up when mentioning two of his friends and former castmates, Chris Farley and Norm Macdonald, both of whom have died.

And, speaking of death, no segment of SNL50 was more poignant than the original cast member Garrett Morris presenting “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” a 1978 short film by the former staff writer Tom Schiller. The black-and-white clip featured the late John Belushi, dressed as an old man, walking around a graveyard memorializing his co-stars with goofy, sardonic epitaphs; Belushi, of course, preceded most of them in death, giving the comedy a somber tone. This was the kind of odd, even morbid artifact that SNL has accumulated in spades over the years—and the 50th-anniversary celebration could have benefited from digging up more of them.

As Saturday Night Live nears its official 50th anniversary, the pageantry and buildup around the big event has reminded me of something fairly unfunny: a royal jubilee. It’s fascinating to consider how an anarchic weekly comedy show has developed the backstage air of a British royal drama, between the often-hagiographic retrospectives, the many “best of” lists appraising its hallowed cast and most revered sketches, and the constant speculation over who might succeed its 80-year-old creator, Lorne Michaels, as executive producer. But what occurred to me as I took in two recent examinations of SNL history—the four-part Peacock miniseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, and the music-focused special Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music—was that the show’s five-decades-deep lore is as important to its long-running success as the comedy itself.

Full credit to these undertakings; each one is an incredibly meticulous, self-reflective work that avoids an easy, by-the-numbers approach. Documentaries recounting the show’s famous moments and scandals have littered the airwaves over the years, and the book Live From New York already offers an authoritative history. But these new looks back delve into SNL’s greater legend in ways both whimsical and sometimes genuinely surprising, even for a devotee. Somehow, they mine new territory on what is possibly the most over-discussed TV series in American culture.

The common theme for all of these works? Just how impressive it is that the show gets made, week after week, year in and year out, despite the seeming impossibility of the enterprise. SNL50 does this by appealing to the highest rank of SNL lovers. The first level of the fandom is the simplest; it entails enjoying new episodes, glomming onto the stars of the current ensemble, and rewatching favorite sketches. The second involves plumbing the history and acknowledging the legendary cast members of yore, such as Phil Hartman, Gilda Radner, and Dana Carvey. But the level after that comprises studying the traditional, Rube Goldbergian process that creates everything behind the scenes. It’s a delicate dance of gathering material for a mix of cast members and celebrity guests while incorporating Michaels’s remote dispensations of wisdom. This sensitive practice accounts for the peaks and valleys of perceived quality that SNL has experienced throughout its tenure.

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SNL50 cleverly lays out that cycle in its four distinct installments, which dig into a particular niche of how SNL has ticked along for half a century. The first, “Five Minutes,” is about the auditions; it’s particularly enamored with the show’s mythos, as any dedicated viewer (or aspiring cast member) might be with this peek behind the curtain. It takes advantage of an incredible archive of audition footage from cast members young and old, as well as some recognizable figures who inexplicably didn’t make the final cut—Stephen Colbert, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Coolidge. There are lovely, nostalgic moments in which current cast members watch their shaky, nervous first steps, but I was struck by how little “Five Minutes” actually explains why the people who make it through get picked.

The lack of definitive reasoning is where I felt the sphinxlike figure of Michaels looming. The placid Canadian has run SNL for 45 of its 50 years (he took a five-season break in the ’80s). He’s seen his reputation shift several times over the eras, from revolutionary shit-stirrer to staid comedy gatekeeper to the grandfatherly charmer he is today. But he’s also, somehow, kept himself and his machinations a little opaque; he’s largely absent from the various new documentaries. “Five Minutes” puts the spotlight on other crucial, less heralded names in the SNL production system over the years, such as the former longtime producers Marci Klein and Lindsay Shookus. But when discussing what makes for a good audition, many of their answers boiled down to something ineffable: It’s either an obvious yes, or it isn’t.

That’s the tricky balance these new anniversary specials have struck: going behind the scenes without fully puncturing the mystique. SNL50’s third chapter, “Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room,” assumes a fly-on-the-wall position to reveal a single episode’s genesis. It portrays the ideation and writing process for the actor Ayo Edebiri’s debut hosting gig in February 2024. Any deep fan knows some of the stressful basics here, but it’s fun to see them play out—writers throwing concepts to the guest while they squat on the carpet in Michaels’s cavernous office; Tuesday’s maddening, all-night scripting rush; and then the miraculous alchemy that somehow turns their grab bag of notions into full-fledged pieces for TV, some rewritten just before airing.

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Edebiri’s appearance was, in my memory, a perfectly ordinary edition of SNL—a couple of good sketches, others more forgettable, with the actress an energetic and game emcee. Watching the herculean, possessed frenzy of making it was much more entrancing, like producing it seems to be. It was hard not to get swept up in the mythmaking on display: The institution’s survival seems to hinge on the staff’s belief in its fabled scrappiness, compelling it to keep doing an absurd amount of work. Sure, the chaos seems like a bizarre way to put together a live TV show, but can you come up with a better method?

The most fascinating section of SNL50 is “Season 11: The Weird Year,” which lays bare how easily the flow can be disrupted. It focuses on what’s regarded as one of the oddest and worst runs in SNL history, so bizarre that Madonna opened Season 12 by reading a statement purportedly from NBC: “It was all a dream—a horrible, horrible dream.” Somewhat tellingly, it’s the only entry of the miniseries with much on-screen involvement from Michaels himself. He recounts returning to SNL in 1985 after a half-decade hiatus and deciding to completely overhaul the cast with young, buzzy talent; he brought on actors such as Robert Downey Jr., Randy Quaid, and Joan Cusack, along with the cast’s first openly gay performer, Terry Sweeney, and the first Black woman to star, Danitra Vance.

A few of the new hires worked: Michaels retained Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn, and Dennis Miller for Season 12, which was otherwise a total teardown. But overall, what’s interesting about Season 11 is how the producer deviated from his established formula—of drawing unknown talent from the stand-up circuit and the country’s best improv and sketch groups—to go bigger and bolder, only to be left with a cast that lacked chemistry and was tougher to mold. Once more, I realized that the miniseries is, inadvertently or not, arguing for the cloistered way Michaels and company operate. It’s a noble and in-depth examination of one of the series’ biggest failures, which saw Michaels fire two cast members halfway through and the writers undermine the season on-screen before it had even ended. Yet for all the dysfunction it lays bare, “The Weird Year” also makes a stealthy case for what keeps SNL otherwise stable.

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The remaining installment further breaks down the show’s humor, as opposed to just its creation, by fleshing out in wonderful detail the famous “More Cowbell” sketch—in which Will Ferrell and the guest host Christopher Walken crack up their castmates during an absurd recording session of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” Meanwhile, 50 Years of SNL Music is a gorgeously edited repository of SNL’s music history. Interviewees discuss major moments in-depth, such as Sinead O’Connor’s shocking protest of the Catholic Church, Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching, and the punk band Fear bringing a group of moshers onstage. Better still, the co-directors Questlove and Oz Rodriguez also illuminate how the musical guests have broken ground. Avant-garde musicians appeared early on, including Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, along with the first rap group to perform on national TV (Funky 4 + 1, in 1981). Even segments as seemingly divorced from the comedy as the musical acts can become part of the lore—just as a one-off routine can have an hour-long backstory.

There’s an underlying triumphalism to all this watchable, well-done anniversary media. They’re a procession of clips, interviews, and behind-the-scenes tidbits that assure the viewer that SNL is not going anywhere. Yes, the auditions are hell, the schedule is exasperating, and sometimes whole episodes don’t connect. But I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s oft-mangled quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. SNL is a beautiful, if strangely shaped, comedic edifice. But after 50 years, it’s still standing.

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On Abbott Elementary, celebrity sightings are as common as a back-to-school flu outbreak or drama with the PTA. The show’s Season 2 premiere kicked off with the spunky second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (played by Quinta Brunson) trying to surprise Abbott students with an appearance from “the only celebrity that matters”: Gritty, the internet-famous mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers. In Season 3, Bradley Cooper joined a class for show-and-tell, the Philadelphia Eagles star Jalen Hurts tried to help a teacher’s boyfriend propose, and Questlove DJed a party in the school gym.

As on many a network sitcom, Abbott’s celebrity cameos tend to involve the stars playing themselves, with some embellished biographical details to sweeten their stories. (Questlove, for example, claimed that he and Allen Iverson both credit their illustrious careers to Abbott’s principal, who happens to be one of their closest friends.) Now, midway through its fourth season, Abbott has found a clever way to continue celebrating that hometown pride—and expand the show’s comedic arsenal. The latest episode taps some of Philly’s most well-known fictional personalities, using their outlandish antics to draw out a bit more edge from Abbott’s plucky educators.

In tonight’s episode, the main characters of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia saunter into the public school and invigorate the mockumentary by stirring up chaos. Anyone familiar with the long-running FX sitcom about a group of bartenders knows that the Sunny protagonists don’t belong anywhere near an elementary-school campus. Throughout its 16 seasons, the most of any live-action American comedy series, It’s Always Sunny has been a riotous, foul-mouthed chronicle of escalating misbehavior from a gang of total miscreants. The loosely plotted sitcom has followed the Paddy’s Pub slackers through outrageous, ill-conceived schemes that almost always reveal just how craven they are: They’ve smoked crack in an attempt to exploit the welfare system, siphoned gas to sell door-to-door, and outlined some deeply concerning strategies for picking up women.

Suffice it to say, none of them is getting invited to speak at a commencement ceremony or Career Day. By contrast, most of the strangers who’ve popped up at Abbott over the years, whether they’re district bureaucrats or local businesspeople, at least pretend to have altruistic motives. When these visitors cause issues for the school, it’s usually due to incompetence, negligence, or an easily resolved misunderstanding. And of course, there’s generally a moral at the end of the story—the kind of humorous, heartfelt fare that makes Abbott so beloved as family viewing.

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But things go awry almost immediately after the Sunny squad shows up in “Volunteers,” the first of two planned crossover episodes. The gang arrives at Abbott under the guise of offering the overworked educators some much needed help from the local school district. Instead, Mac (Rob McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Frank (Danny DeVito), and Deandra (Kaitlin Olson) quickly discover that there are documentary cameras rolling at Abbott, prompting the superlatively toxic Dennis to excuse himself because he knows “quite a bit about filming and consent.” The others stick around, acting slightly more buttoned-up than usual because they know they’re being recorded, but they’re still too abrasive to fit in. They admit that they’re there only to satisfy the community-service requirements of a court order, and in response to one teacher calling them criminals, ask whether it’s really a “crime” to dump 100 gallons of baby oil, 500 Paddy’s Pub T-shirts, and a Cybertruck in the Schuylkill River.

These kinds of ludicrous scenarios are par for the course on Sunny, but they strain the boundaries of the malfeasance we usually see from Abbott characters. For the educators, that creates an amusing challenge: The Sunny gang isn’t a pack of wayward teenagers waiting for an understanding mentor to show them the light, and their moral failures can’t be rehabilitated with a pep talk. No earnest, well-articulated argument for the importance of early-childhood education will make characters like these abandon their selfishness, and the unexpected dose of cynicism gives Abbott’s formula an intriguing mid-season shake-up—a nice wrinkle, considering how many network sitcoms begin to feel repetitive the longer they stay on the air.

Take the drama caused by Deandra, or “Sweet Dee.” This episode finds the lone woman in the main Sunny crew initially bonding with Janine while volunteering in her classroom: Dee praises Janine in front of the second graders after the two women realize they both attended the University of Pennsylvania. But their camaraderie takes a hit when Dee starts lusting after Gregory (Tyler James Williams), Janine’s fellow teacher—and, after a lengthy will-they-won’t-they storyline, also her boyfriend. When Janine tells Dee that she’s in a relationship with Gregory, the Sunny transplant is undeterred: “You’re good if I take a spin though, yeah?” It’s the first time Janine’s encountered a real romantic foil on the series, and as the conflict plays out, Dee’s brash flirting style forces Janine to acknowledge her fears about the relationship. These scenes offer Janine, easily the most childlike of the teachers, an opportunity to grow by facing the tension head-on—a feat made easier by her having a farcical villain in Dee.

Abbott will never be the kind of show where the main cast routinely has to fend off mean-spirited romantic sabotage or keep tabs on a man who gives off serious Andrew Tate vibes. After the volunteers slink back to Paddy’s, the most shiftless person on campus will once again be Principal Coleman (Janelle James), whose ineptitude and vanity don’t prevent her from advocating for the students from time to time. Still, the Sunny crossover episode marks a compelling chapter in Abbott’s evolution. The series has stayed family-friendly thanks to its educational setting, showcasing the comic talents of both its students and teachers. But Abbott is now proving itself adept at something different too: comedy with a real bite, even if it’s not in service of teaching a lesson.