“Saturday Night Live” sketches have famously tight turnaround times, with the writing process beginning on Tuesday and rehearsals not kicking off until Friday. Those rehearsals are especially tough for the episode’s guest host, who typically appears in most of the sketches. While cue cards are hold up off-screen to remind actors of their lines, occasional flubs are an inevitable part of the scramble to pull an episode together — not to mention the unforgiving nature of live broadcast.
With all that in mind, it takes a special kind of sadism to script lines like “I’m from the Bureau of Hotel Detectives Management Division Detectives Internal Affairs,” especially within a “Twilight Zone” riff that requires its actors to speak in rapid-fire Mid-Atlantic accents. But this week’s “Saturday Night Live” guest host Ariana Grande nailed the challenge, as did her “Hotel Detectives” co-stars James Austin Johnson and Andrew Dismukes. And the whole thing is capped off with a solid Rod Serling impersonation from Michael Longfellow.
The black-and-white film noir style is fitting for this sketch, in which Grande plays a dizzy dame who is apprehended by a hotel detective (yes, those were a real thing), only to turn the tables on him. And then the tables get turned a few more times, as they so often do … in the Twilight Zone.
The Twilight Zone and Saturday Night Live have something in common
“The Twilight Zone” and “Saturday Night Live” actually share the same curse of success: when you’ve been on the air for more than half a century, how do you keep coming up with fresh ideas?
For “The Twilight Zone,” it’s especially difficult since not only has the series been parodied countless times before this, but it’s also inspired similar anthology shows like “Black Mirror,” “Tales from the Crypt,” and Rod Serling’s own 1970s follow-up, “Night Gallery.” It’s no wonder that the most recent “Twilight Zone” revival proved disappointing, and resorted to remaking a classic episode that had already been remade once before.
With so many episodes under their respective belts, both “The Twilight Zone” and “Saturday Night Live” have had their share of hits and misses. “Hotel Detective” probably falls somewhere in the middle for “SNL,” but the cast deserve serious props for not tripping over all those tongue twisters.
