SNL Chased Shane Gillis With Inde Navarrette. It Ordered the Chaser in September

On October 10, Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live for the third time, and he did it the way a man from Pennsylvania mows a lawn: loudly, a little sideways, and with one word the neighbors heard. He lost his place on a cue card in a Green Eggs and Ham sketch, ad-libbed, and dropped the one word NBC still charges extra for. Mikey Day saved it by throwing him out of the house for saying a bad word. The monologue drew its own grumbling online, which for Gillis is less a controversy than a weather report.

This Saturday, Halloween, the host is Inde Navarrette. I'll be honest with you. I had never heard of her. I am a man who still thinks of Gracie Abrams as somebody's daughter, and she is the musical guest. So I looked Navarrette up, the way my grandfather used to look up a new preacher, hoping for scandal and finding only qualifications.

Here they are. She is 25, born in Tucson, raised mostly in Visalia, California, a Marine's daughter who went to eleven schools by fifteen, which is the kind of childhood that makes you either an actress or a spy. She was on 13 Reasons Why and Superman & Lois. Then she headlined Obsession, a horror picture that opened in May, won her a Critics' Choice Award and has Focus Features running an Oscar campaign. Marvel has cast her as Rogue in its X-Men movie. A great many people had heard of her. I was simply not among them, which is a club with a lot of members and no dues.

Now, you can see how the internet got its theory. One week SNL hands the keys to a stand-up who was fired from the cast in 2019 before he ever did a show. A few weeks later it hands them to a young actress who has never told a joke for money in her life. It looks exactly like a network sending flowers after a bad date.

It isn't. SNL announced Navarrette as the Halloween host on September 9, in the same press release that announced Gillis's return. NBC booked the hangover cure the same afternoon it booked the drink. That's either planning or the most cynical calendar in show business, and with Lorne Michaels, those have been the same thing since Ford was president. People keep thinking Lorne reacts. Lorne has never reacted to anything. When the Hindenburg came down, Lorne was already booking the next blimp.

And let's be fair to the theory's victim, which is her. Navarrette isn't a correction. She's a horror lead whose performance one critic set beside The Exorcist and Carrie, hosting the one week of the year when a scream is the whole act. Gillis was the comic SNL fired and then could not stop inviting back, like a man who keeps throwing out the same cat. Navarrette is the movie star SNL needed before her Marvel contract makes her too expensive to wear a pumpkin costume in a sketch about a haunted Spirit Halloween.

She told Variety she is super excited to keep everything under wraps, which is the only line from either host this month that nobody will have to apologize for.

So no, it's not a statement. It's a schedule. In America we like to believe every booking is a message, because that's more flattering than the truth, which is that somebody in an office picked two Saturdays off a list in the summer and went to lunch. Most of history works that way. The rest of it is people on the internet explaining what the lunch meant.