Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 6, 2026
I was very hard last week on the Jamie Dornan episode of SNL: UK, but that was only because it sucked. It was absolute trash. Granted, there have been countless trash episodes of SNL in America, but the UK version had only one other episode with which to compare: a better-than-OK outing featuring Tina Fey.
Thankfully, SNL: UK’s latest episode, featuring host Riz Ahmed, is the new standard bearer for the series. It was, by all accounts, a pretty good episode. Granted, the Cold Open — another sketch featuring a wishy-washy Keir Starmer being ineffective — was lousy, but no more lousy than the 100,000 Trump-led U.S. cold opens we’ve all quietly agreed to endure.
The monologue, however, topped even Tina Fey’s, which was no small feat. It felt like Riz Ahmed probably wrote this one himself. It’s a layered bit about an actor navigating an identity crisis while promoting his new show, Bait, which is about an actor navigating an identity crisis — a meta-loop that somehow doesn’t collapse under its own weight. He also took aim at how relentlessly bleak his filmography tends to be, and then he went on a genuinely delightful riff about Britain’s deep cultural affection for things that are just a little bit crap.
I won’t recap the entire show this week, except to say that “Update” was dramatically better despite clocking in even longer than last week’s. A 13-minute “Update” doesn’t announce, “This is the strongest segment of the episode.” It announces, “We don’t have anything better lined up, and we’ve made peace with that.” That said, Ania Magliano was much more self-assured this time around, and both she and Paddy Young went there with a few jokes — and stuck the landing.
There were also two standout sketches. The first was a parody of UK Traitors, which gleefully mocked the baffling tendency of Traitors players to vote out faithfuls while a traitor sits right in front of them radiating traitor energy. In this case, the assembled cast couldn’t quite suss out the identity of the Great Big Crab Man — despite the presence at the roundtable of, and I cannot stress this enough, a great big crab man.
But my favorite sketch of SNL: UK’s entire run — so far — was this one, in which Riz Ahmed sits down to play a game of Operation, only to get sucked into a spiraling obsession with mastering it so completely that he nearly loses his job and his family in the process. It’s the kind of premise that shouldn’t work and absolutely does, and the climax is vintage SNL at its most committed and ridiculous. I loved it unreservedly.
The episode wasn’t as good as this week’s Jack Black episode of SNL in the U.S., but Jack Black has hosted more episodes of SNL than exist of SNL: UK. That said, I’ve also gained a newfound appreciation for last week’s Jamie Dornan episode: the UK version has taken up America’s proud tradition of delivering an absolute egg of an episode right when expectations are highest. It means that last week’s episode wasn’t an aberration; it was a rite of passage.
