‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Is Officially Mastering the Most Important ‘SNL’ Formula

Published Sep 12, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT

Greer Riddell is a London-based culture journalist and critic writing on film, television, audience behaviour, and the wider media industry. She is a Writer and Social Media Coordinator at Collider and TV Editor at FILMHOUNDS.

Her recent collaborations include Netflix, Warner Bros., DC Studios, Hulu, and Disney+, producing features on titles including Saturday Night Live UK, Severance, Sitcoms, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Stranger Things. Her recent reviews include Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85’, Scrubs Season 10, and The Boroughs. Her work has also included coverage of UK film festivals and features published in Film Stories Magazine.

“I think of the show each week as a heist,” says Saturday Night Live UK’s Jonno Johnson. “But those heist movies very rarely end with everybody sat there with the haul and then going, 'Oh, I've just remembered I booked us in for another seven heists.'"

After spending August performing his first-ever solo stand-up show Here Comes Mr Funny at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and revealing the secrets behind launching SNL UK at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Johnson is back at “school” ready to start Second Year. The co-head writer, now sharing the role with Laura Claxton (The Cleaner, Make That Movie), exclusively joined Collider on the Friday before Season 2’s premiere to lift the curtain on the UK’s buzziest comedy.

‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Season 2 Starts In A Very Different Place From Season 1

Image via. Sky

Saturday Night Live UK burst onto the screens of Sky subscribers, Peacock in the U.S., and everyone else’s social media feeds earlier this March. From the outside, it looked like an unprecedented success, especially against the tidal wave of armchair critics whose culturally embedded cynicism convinced them that an American format populated by British comics was doomed to fail. That reaction clearly underestimated the strength of a more-than-50-year-old institution and the level of untapped talent on the UK comedy circuit, all just waiting for their bite of TV. This “fluke” had actually been five years in the making — the UK team and SNL’s omniscient overlord, Lorne Michaels, had been talking since the pandemic. Now, just four months after its debut, SNL UK is back to do it all again, but this time with confidence, a flow and a lack of freshers’ fear.

Johnson is back to do it all again too — only this time, he’s letting us in on what actually happens behind the scenes. For those who don’t thrive on treading the boards, the whirlwind week required to put together an episode of Saturday Night Live sounds like voluntary psychosis. Yet for those inside the machine, it’s electric. Johnson, who has a background in single-camera shows (Siblings, Parlement), says there is no other TV series that can really prepare you for the practicalities of SNL. “There was a sort of two-month period of us acclimatizing to the process for the first season.” Yet Season 2 “just… feels kind of like a ninth episode,” so for the most part, it’s business as usual just with a 12th cast member.

Business as usual at SNL means starting from scratch every week, and Mondays are for brainstorming. The writing team and cast meet with the week’s host and float their ideas. Some arrive with topics they’ve noted down in advance, while others feed off the room and throw out suggestions spontaneously. Yet “everybody’s sort of privately hoping somebody else says something funnier so you can jump on their sketch instead,” admits Johnson.

“It's very, very much that vibe of we're all sort of…helping do each other's homework.”

The host has a surprising level of initial control over the ideas that are taken forward into development, but perhaps not in the way you might think. Rather than favoring ideas linked to their careers or interests — as one might have assumed from Season 1, Episode 4’s abundance of sports-themed sketches for Jack Whitehall, given his appearances on Sky’s A League of Their Own — threads are expanded if a host laughs. Their personal sense of humor helps frame what sort of show it’s going to be that week. We’re ready for the surrealism that comes with Jeff Goldblum now.

That weekly reset is precisely why they rarely rely on ideas from the past. Johnson reveals that they occasionally have ideas banked “just in case there’s a week where we run dry,” but in practice, that’s a last resort. When Monday comes around, “you’re so excited by the new week and the new vibe, and you’re just like, that is last week’s thing,” and a banked idea may not suit the new show or the new host.

The pitching session eventually reaches a natural lull, with 35 ideas greenlit to be worked on and offered up for consideration at the table read on Wednesday. From there, the writers have free rein to work in whatever way they find most productive and stay as late as they wish. All first drafts are written on Tuesday.

The ‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Writers Need To Leave Preciosity At The Door

Image via. Sku

Saturday Night Live UK’s relentless schedule requires a particular kind of writer. Ahead of Season 1, Johnson had to condense 1,800 applications, alongside 10 panelists, into a skilled team who also needed a superhuman level of resilience. If 35 sketches are written each week and only six ultimately make it through into production, individuals have to be comfortable seeing their ideas canned at the last second, sometimes after hours of hard work.

Perhaps the reward for that sacrifice is the unusual level of trust given to the writers on Saturday Night Live. It is something Johnson feels is truly unique to the format: “The one thing that is very, very different about this show… certainly in my experience on TV in the UK… is there’s far more control for individual writers.” They are ultimately responsible for their sketch’s fate. Johnson and his senior writers, including Joseph Moore (Taskmaster NZ), Keith Akushie (Avenue 5) and Humphrey Ker (Welcome to Wrexham), are there to offer advice, but if a writer decides to go the other way and “it dies on the table, that’s okay. That’s [their] call.”

It’s the table read that makes Wednesday the most exciting and emotional day in the Saturday Night Live UK diary. The whole team comes together for the first run-through, which Johnson found “fairly intimidating” during the initial four weeks of Season 1. It was “excruciating…when you’re all trying to impress each other,” says Johnson. However, immunity starts to kick in, and the thickening of the skin is helped by the team’s euphemistic acronym: PDS, or Pin Drop Silence. There are enough writers on the team for “everybody to take a big swing," Johnson encourages. They just have to be comfortable with the fact that “some of those are going to be incredibly embarrassing misses.”

We’re going to trust you to see this from the first draft through to, like, producing the sketch on, like, the studio floor.

Even after the table read, the week's most important sketch has still not been decided: the cold open. An episode’s first scene needs to immediately hook a viewer into staying beyond the title, rather than succumbing to something fronted by Romesh Ranganathan on the other side. It has to be topical, timely, and set the tone. So it only starts to be written on Thursday night, and Johnson takes that responsibility on himself. “A lot of my Thursday afternoon and evening is spent sort of hiding from people… because I’ve got every department asking what the cold open’s going to be.” Consider it the SNL version of “Are we there yet?”

At the same time, Johnson and the rest of the senior team huddle together to decide the final layout of the show. Even that decision has to be delivered quickly. ‘We will send a photograph of the board,’ Johnson explains. Once the sketches are locked, a chain reaction starts across the rest of the production. Kevin Fortune, Head of Wigs, Hair and Makeup at SNL UK, explained at the Edinburgh Television Festival that the writers have a hand in dictating the look of the sketches. So his team of makeup artists, prosthetists and wig-makers effectively go speed-dating with them to work out what needs to be made before going live — whether that be severed hands thanks to Paddington Bear or a giant crab man. Comedy doesn’t usually use the same methods as blockbuster film-making, but Saturday Night Live UK really is its own beast. Fortune confirmed that his department has life-size face scans of each cast member, which they use to gauge fit and placement due to time constraints. That could mean crafting up to 50 wigs in just three days, and they’re only fitted at the dress rehearsal!

The set design team is working almost simultaneously. As the writers describe a sketch, a 3D model of the location needed for it is being built on a screen. And by Thursday, it is like Christmas morning for Johnson, “The most miraculous things have happened over the night… people have started putting things together that you can’t begin to imagine how they started on.”

With the physical world of the sketches taking shape, the focus shifts back to the performers. Thursday and Friday are for working out the blocking, writing cue cards, rewriting jokes, and shooting any filmed sketches that need to happen away from the studio. Johnson reveals that there are constant set changes during the cast’s rehearsal: “Somebody will be pointing at a bureau that isn't there and then the first time they run through a sketch and then the third time they run through a sketch, it is there.” It really is a 24-hour production.

Saturdays on ‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Come With a “Cheat Code”

Around 300 people work on Saturday Night Live UK each week. Alongside the 12 performers and 20 writers, roughly 1,000 audience members pass through the studio on a Saturday. Liz Clare, Director of SNL UK, described the experience at the Edinburgh TV Festival as closer to “live theatre” than traditional stand-up or film-making, and that is nowhere more evident than the dress rehearsal.

At 6 p.m., the dress begins in front of a full live audience, giving the team their first chance to see the entire show played out for the punters, and for Johnson, it’s “like a cheat code.” Within the first few moments of a sketch, you can tell whether it has hit home, and you can identify what needs to be refined before 10 p.m. That information is especially useful for the monologue, where you can remove a joke without dismantling the rest of the show. They are “clean lifts,” as Johnson puts it. If something isn’t working, you can take the joke out like “magic” and move on.

With the buzz around SNL UK, it’s hard to remember that the team has completed this immense cycle only eight times. ‘I’m not used to having the opportunity to do it again after you’ve heard what people think,’ says Johnson. “We're still trying to…figure out what the difference is between a table laugh and an audience laugh…we're getting better at spotting it.” They may still be learning the patterns, but they haven't had to learn entirely from scratch. Two SNL veterans, Tina Fey (cast 1997 to 2006) and Seth Meyers (cast 2001 to 2014) visited the production ahead of Season 1 to give the team their “potted history." And this is something Johnson and the team carry with them as encouragement while SNL UK finds its own feet: “We sometimes speak as though we have far more experience than we actually have doing this because it’s sort of borrowed experience to an extent.”

Your brain sort of shuts down, gives itself a few hours, and then... you're just going again, fully going again.

Between the dress and the live broadcast, the team huddles together and makes the final cuts, usually losing two more sketches that have worked least well. Then, at 10 p.m., it’s showtime. A new audience comes through the studio doors and the nation sits at home with high expectations. When Johnson was asked during the Saturday Night Live UK Masterclass at the Edinburgh TV Festival whether he had figured out a formula for the perfect SNL sketch, his answer was surprisingly simple: get to the joke quickly. The audience needs to understand the premise in the first 30 seconds, so they know whether it is for them. That applies to the audience sitting in the studio and the fans watching at home, but following Lorne Michaels’ one note to Lead Producer James Longman, the live audience takes precedence.

Then there is the audience that isn’t in the room at all. At the Edinburgh TV Festival, Saturday Night Live UK was called ‘a sketch show for a new generation,’ and with its internet humor and Gen Z performers, its clips rack up tens of millions of views on social media each week. For Johnson, the audience response online is perhaps an addictive means of reassurance that he cannot help but read: “It's not particularly to inform what we'll do next week. I do it just… out of a sort of need to be liked.” He is a comedian after all. Johnson also admits to checking the response as the titles roll to see whether his big topical swings in the cold open connected, “Absolutely shouldn't be doing that. Not healthy.” In recent weeks, it has been hard to go online without seeing clips of Jack Shep as Princess Diana or Paddy Young yearning for BTS in Weekend Update, so reaction is unavoidable.

Then, after six days of pitching, writing, cutting, building, and rehearsing, the heist is finally complete. The credits roll, and somewhere around 11:15 p.m., 300 people can finally breathe. For 24 hours. Monday morning brings another host, another round of new ideas, and another sprint toward Saturday. Johnson and his writing team may have moved into Second Year, but each week feels like “you’re doing a different show.” So while they know they can reach the finish line, they can never quite predict what it will take to get there. “You’re not going to carry many things over other than the experience,” but at least you know you’ve “pulled it off before.”

That relentless reinvention is part of the unspoken magic of the Saturday Night Live format. It’s not just seeing a cast of talented performers depict the events from the news each week, or watching an A-lister, like a fish out of water, get stuck in ridiculous scenarios. There’s a palpable excitement in knowing that what you’re watching is the result of an entire team working tirelessly from Monday through Saturday to get the show to air.

Saturday Night Live UK returns for Season 2 on September 12 with the first six episodes, followed by additional shows in early 2027.

Saturday Night Live UK