Here's Why a British Version of ‘SNL’ Feels Like a Bad Idea

This week, it was reported that us Brits are about to get our own version of Saturday Night Live. The London-based remake, according to Variety, will premiere in 2026 and faithfully follow the format of the original. No cast members or guest hosts have been announced for this coming season, but we’ve been promised ‘a core cast of the funniest British comedians around.’

While I am somewhat surprised that we haven’t tried to do this already at some point in the past half-century, I’m also 100% convinced that this is a very bad idea. It’s 2025 and the best we can do is yet another remake of a show that, arguably, does not work without its historic status keeping it afloat? I can’t see the landscape of British comedy - be it sketch comedy, political satire, or just outright weirdness - needing to make room for this intruder.

British comedy has tried to translate American properties to our tastes, although we’re more used to it happening the other way round, from The Office to Ghosts to the abysmal CW take on Taskmaster. One of the biggest shows on TV right now is the reboot of the remake of American Gladiators, because this is what recession-era entertainment looks like. We still have The Apprentice! But remakes of comedies aren’t quite as successful as doing game shows. There was a forgotten Golden Girls remake called The Brighton Belles, and a failed Married With Children one too.

More recently, ITV tried to bring the weekly late-night talk show format to our shores. In 2017, The Nightly Show featured a variety of guest presenters, from David Walliams to Bradley ‘never off the telly’ Walsh, trying to make fetch happen in the vein of the various Jimmys and Johnnys. It was a critical disaster. The Guardian described it as ‘an extravagant money pit of forced laughter and plummeting ratings.’ The jokes were bad, the audience’s reactions (or frequent lack thereof) awkward as hell, and everyone involved looked as though they knew they were on a sinking ship. The lack of a consistent host didn’t help, but the entire affair lacked the chemistry and spontaneity that makes both American talk shows and the king of the British format, Graham Norton, glisten. It was quickly cancelled.

That’s the failed experiment that first comes to mind when imagining a British SNL. Not every late-night talk show is the same but the big players do share a lot of stylistic similarities as well as preferred topics. There’s an earnestness there, even when they dare to go dark, although I wouldn’t say they’ve done so frequently. Plenty of British comedy can be as tooth-rottingly sentimental as our American friends are capable of but there’s an intrinsic meanness to the format that doesn’t always translate and I question how compatible it is with what SNL does. I don’t think it’s an impossible match. Wouldn’t it be intriguing to see political satire done with the same bleakness of a Chris Morris bit? The issue is that I don’t see the producers or Lorne Michaels letting that happen. We could use some viciousness but I fail to see it occurring under the brand that gave us Donald Trump dancing to ‘Hotline Bling.’

British comedy doesn’t have an exact parallel to SNL but it has plenty of alternatives in the various areas it covers. We’ve had decades of legendary sketch comedy, often in a variety show format, from Morecombe and Wise to Mitchell and Webb to Horrible Histories. We have political stuff from the likes of Have I Got News For You and the sorely missed Frankie Boyle’s New World Order. We have the unhinged wackiness of Taskmaster.

Frankly, I’m just not sure that SNL would be leading the zeitgeist if it weren’t part of the pop culture furniture. It just turned 50 and the celebrations of that incredible milestone were a hefty reminder of the legacy that the series has created. But that’s also what’s keeping it aloft in 2025, at a time when late night is floundering and the idea of the watercooler programme is increasingly irrelevant. If someone were to pitch the idea of a live sketch comedy series with a vague political slant and some live music to networks in 2025, nobody would pick it up. At the very least, it wouldn’t be possible to do so with a coterie of rising talents with no name value. Hearing that this British show is going to have ‘a cast of the funniest British comedians around’ makes me worry that it’ll be filled with the usual suspects who move from panel show to panel show (The British entertainment scene is borderline incestuous in its endless reusing of the same 16 faces and it sucks. Let Romesh Ranganathan and Daisy May Cooper take a nap, already!)

Ideally, a British SNL would cast off the shackles of Lorne’s demands and be a remake in name only. It should be nervy, weird, merciless, silly, maybe even off-putting. The cast should be unknowns with nothing to lose and a writers’ room full of people closer to Tim Robinson than Colin Jost. But then, if it was like that, would it even be SNL? Frankly, my hopes for this programme are low because I expect the weight of legacy and trademark strengthening exercises, combined with the worst excesses of the largely risk-free British entertainment corporate system, to get in the way. At the very least, if this is to happen, please just keep James Corden away from it.