Sabrina’s First SNL

Sabrina Carpenter is in New York this week, preparing to double as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. This will be her first time hosting the show – does that feel as weird to you reading that as it was to write it? Like I know this is a fact, that she has never hosted the show before, but it doesn’t seem true, because she’s been on the show so many times. 

In May 2024 she was the musical guest. She also made a cameo, multiple cameos actually. And of course she opened the 50th anniversary special with Paul Simon, all of it happening in the space of a year. Obviously Lorne loves her, and if he’s seen her Netflix holiday special last year it would have been confirmation for him that 90 minutes of sketch comedy, while singing and dancing, is 100% her lane. 

This, to me, is one of the keys to her appeal. Sabrina is just 26 years old, is fully of her generation but not just of her generation. Somehow she seems exactly her age but also older – and it’s more than the styling, although that’s a small part of it. The way she has crafted her own celebrity, adept on social media, fully immersed in the trends and vernacular of the times, but also corny in a way with the innuendo and the puns like how a teenager’s quirky aunt might be, she’s been able to straddle demographics. Plus, of course, that theatre kid energy. Always trust a theatre kid host in a live environment like SNL because their DNA is coded to “the show must go on”, even when no one is laughing, you can just laugh louder and harder. If the jokes aren’t funny on Saturday night, if the sketches are bombing, you won’t see it on her face because she’s built to keep it moving. 

How long, then, before Sabrina becomes a member of the Five Timers Club? I know we aren’t even technically at the first hosting appearance yet, and Jon Hamm shows up practically every week and still only has four so it’s entirely possible that Sabrina might have to wait too. But SNL is due to anoint their favourite girl for this generation. If Emma Stone and Justin Timberlake were the top girl and boy for millennials, it’s Sabrina and Bad Bunny for Gen Z. 

Here she is in a yellow sweater dress at the Tuesday night tradition dinner.