Josh O'Connor recedes pleasantly in his Saturday Night Live debut

"Something that's genuinely unpredictable, sort of fun, and occasionally disorienting about Saturday Night Live 's current cast size is how the screentime balance can shift so much from episode to episode. Sometimes the effect is akin to watching different potential eras of the show test themselves out in real time. This week's episode felt as if we had suddenly fast-forwarded a year or two, to a time when Ashley Padilla had gone from the cast member with the strongest fundamentals to a Kate McKinnonesque"

"This form of time travel also randomly Butterfly Effected Marcello Hernández into a demotion, sending him back to Update for one of those barely-veiled bits where the new guy who hasn't been getting much airtime gets to do some of his stand-up at the desk. There's no shame in that, exactly, but I would have thought Hernández was way too popular to do such a grab-baggy routine in his third season, when there's a bunch of other less established stand-ups probably eyeing that spot."

"Regardless, it's not hard to imagine a version of the show dominated by Padilla and Yang; they're both naturally funny in sometimes-complementary ways. It's also a helpful reminder that simply shoving great performers to the foreground to take big swings isn't always enough. Padilla went first with a game show sketch that went the second of two ways SNL game show sketches tend to go: Either put the concept right"

SNL's current large cast creates unpredictable and fluctuating screentime balances that can make episodes feel like different eras of the show. One episode can fast-forward certain careers, moving Ashley Padilla from strong fundamentals to baroque-stardom while also echoing periods when Bowen Yang dominated sketches. Those shifts can relegate other popular performers like Marcello Hernández back to Update, where he performs stand-up bits at the desk. Strong performers can complement each other, but centering them alone does not guarantee consistently successful sketches. Padilla's game-show sketch used a Dating Game-style premise that abolished age limits, inserting an octogenarian as a match.

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