Television

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/27269746

Over the last 50 years, Saturday Night Live has become a cornerstone of US television and a conveyor belt for new comedy talent, attracting A-list cameos and launching careers. British TV executives are now hoping it can bring some of that lustre across the Atlantic in a deal to bring the show to the UK for the first time.

After numerous failed attempts to recreate the late-night comedy format that has proved so successful in the US, Sky has announced it is making a British version of the show to premiere next year. Crucially, the show’s original creator and champion, Lorne Michaels, will be an executive producer.

The broadcaster is already promising a “star-studded lineup of hosts”, adding that it will be filmed in London. It is also promising to stay true to the US show’s “live, fast-paced style” – which has included comedy sketches, a roster of comic presenters and musical guests – with a cast list of “the funniest British comedians around”.

It will no doubt be a draw for leading comedians in the UK, as the US original has launched the careers of comedy royalty including Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell and Mike Myers.

...

The move is also a gamble by Sky, given the number of previous attempts to recreate a live, late-night comedy show concentrating on topical issues. While the UK has had a number of hit comedy panel shows, such as Have I Got News for You, the live sketch-style programme has not endured in the same way.

In the 1980s, Saturday Live was launched and similarly featured rising and established talent, including Ben Elton, Harry Enfield, Stephen Fry, Tracey Ullman, Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall. It was moved to Friday nights for its third series before being cancelled. It was briefly revived in 1996, hosted by Lee Hurst.

Channel 4 launched Saturday Zoo in the early 1990s, featuring comedy and celebrity interviews. It ran for just 13 episodes. Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show also worked with up-and-coming comedians and boosted the careers of Ricky Gervais, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jimmy Carr.

Brian Logan, the Guardian’s comedy critic, said there was a “strange alchemy” in the early successes of SNL in the US that had made it self-sustaining. “They’re quite different comedy cultures,” he said. “It’s not just SNL that has been tried here, but also late-night talkshows and comedy shows.

“And America has experimented with panel shows, which never seem to take off in America, but are a massive comedy vehicle for comedians in the UK. So there is clearly something going on whereby these things don’t always transfer. But if the SNL team are involved in this one, it stands a better chance than some.”

Others in the TV industry say the format’s mixed success in the UK comes down to money. In the US, the show’s backers are able to pay and retain top comedy talent. But shows in the UK, made on far lower budgets, often lose their star performers to more lucrative ventures.

Autogynophilia (AGP) is a debunked pseudo-science concept that trans women are motivated to transition primarily as a sexual fetish, and Mike White confirmed on a podcast with the anti-trans conservative Andrew Sullivan that the Sam Rockwell monologue in s03e05 is autogynophilic.

Here is a clip from the podcast on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1joh7dd/creator_of_white_lotus_mike_white_appears_on/

For more about autogynophilia, see Julia Serano's article on the topic.

(see also Julia Serano's post on the White Lotus episode before Mike White went on to confirm he meant to reference AGP)

This comes after Mike White removed a scene mentioning a non-binary character from the show after Trump won the election:

“You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” Coon said. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”

“It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world,” Coon added.

According to the actor, Trump’s re-election made series creator Mike White hesitate about including that character detail in the final cut.

“The season was written before the election. And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time came to cut the episode down, Mike felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation,” Coon continued.

Coon also said that White handles his characters with nuance: “They’re not just one thing.”

In another article it was clarified the scene was cut due to a political "vibe shift":

“The Trump thing becomes much more offensive to Laurie because of her daughter, but this was before Trump was reelected and before this war on the trans community was escalated,” Coon said, despite the fact that Republicans have been filing anti-trans legislation at the state level for the entirety of the 2020s. The actor added, “Mike felt that it was actually too political, or too far, or too distracting.”

White responded, saying that that conversation “felt right in March of last year.”

“Now, there’s a vibe shift. I don’t think that it was radical, but that’s not the kind of attention I want,” he said. “The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about. And a lot of it was about time. Every episode is bulging at 60 minutes.”

I also got the sense from this season that conservative Christianity was given a more serious place, a kind of reverence, alongside Buddhism (which is a departure from the previous two seasons). There is the relevance of the Christian choir to the husband character, but there is also a Trump supporting conservative character:

In the far-ranging conversation, the cast discussed the reveal in episode three that Leslie Bibb’s character, Kate Bohr, is a Republican. “I do think people like Meghan McCain and her community are really gratified to see a conservative person on television,” Coon said.

The characters are bad, yes, but it's a thin line between satire and representation. In conjunction with going on a conservative podcast and using anti-trans terminology, there is a sense that Mike White is at best naive and negligent, and at worst bigoted.

Regardless of Mike White's character, meanwhile the anti-trans movement is claiming White Lotus for themselves and using the show to help push AGP into the public consciousness, are attempting to use the moment to promote their junk science ideas that trans women are just fetishists.

https://nypost.com/2025/04/09/entertainment/new-girl-creator-elizabeth-meriwether-reveals-if-shed-ever-do-more-episodes/