Connor Storrie and a pared-down Saturday Night Live barel...

What’s Happening

Let’s talk about A slightly smaller cast and host Connor Storrie gave Saturday Night Live a boost of youthful energy this week, some of which was promptly squandered.

C+ Connor Storrie and a pared-down Saturday Night Live barely overcome a deadly first half In a throwback touch, the show saved most of its good stuff for the final half-hour Jesse Hassenger — By Jesse Hassenger | | 2:48am Photo: Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC TV Reviews Saturday Night Live Copy to clipboard × Copy Link Copy Link — Facebook X Reddit Bluesky Email — 0 Is Saturday Night Live finally approaching a manageable cast size after years of flirting with (and sometimes surpassing) record numbers? With Bowen Yang gone (and not counting the sketch-light Weekend Update anchors, despite Colin Jost logging more sketch time this season), the show rn has seven main-cast performers and seven featured players. (wild, right?)

On this week’s Connor Storrie-hosted episode, Chloe Fineman didn’t appear to be there—she wasn’t in any live sketches or the pre-tape segment, and I didn’t catch her at the goodnights—and a few other cast members (Andrew Dismukes, Kenan Thompson, and Jane Wickline) didn’t show up live until the last two sketches of the night.

The Details

So for most of the episode, it felt like the show was suddenly leaner, if not especially meaner, drawing from a pool of ten performers for the first hour’s worth of live material. From that group of ten, only Mikey Day is a long-timer, and the sketches seemed to be underlining the smaller crew’s relatively youthful bent.

Intentional or not (and it was probably not), this was weirdly noticeable: Host Connor Storrie is youngish, but at 26, and best-known for a TV show where he plays a professional hockey player, there’s no particular reason he would need to play a teenager in multiple sketches. Yet twice he was cast as the hunky (well, obviously that’s understandable) popular kid, with a third sketch premised on his character urging a bunch of co-workers to at least act like teenagers (or, depending on your point of view, characters on Severance ).

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