‘Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels Pays Tribute To Weekend Update’s Norm Macdonald As NBC Show Picks Up 86th Emmy Win

Saturday Night Live picked up its fifth straight win in the Emmy Variety Sketch Series category on Sunday.

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The long-running NBC comedy series beat HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show. It takes SNL’s Emmy total to 86 wins.

(Update: Some confusion as to the previous count of 81 as the Academy hadn’t previously included NBC’s Saturday Night, the show’s original title, in its win total).

Macdonald anchored Weekend Update for three and a half seasons and was on the show for five seasons between 1993 and 1998.

“Weekend Update has been part of SNL for 46 seasons and here I’d like to pay tribute to one of the best we ever had, Norm Macdonald,” said Michaels.

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Michaels also talked about how the show coped during the pandemic and the election.

“We began our last season with six live election shows in a Covid bubble with everyone wearing masks and a small audience of exhausted first responders. No better way to do comedy. Jim Carrey was Biden, Maya Rudolp was Kamala, Alec Baldwin was Trump and Kate McKinnon was mostly everyone else. Dave Chappelle’s Foo Fighters show was the last of those shows and it happened on the Saturday the election results were announced. Fatigue soon turned to exhilaration and we got to work. The cast, the crew, the writers and the entire production team all rose to the occasion and that show won this Emmy,” he added.

SNL scored 21 Emmy nominations this year and last week, the show picked up a number of awards at the Creative Arts Emmys including for Dave Chappelle as Guest Actor, Maya Rudolph for Guest Actress, Production Design, Directing and Lightning Design.

Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant and Cecily Strong were also nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series but lost to Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham.

Similarly, Kenan Thompson and Bowen Yang were nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series but lost to Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein.

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It comes as the late-night series returns on October 2 for its 47^th season. Michaels has been in conversations with a number of key cast members over who will return as well as bringing in a number of new cast members.

The category itself was decimated due to rules changes around the number of submissions. There were only nine submissions in the category, which meant as a result of the Television Academy’s sliding scale rule there were only two spots.

However, the two shows are grateful that they’re not competing with the late-night variety talk series after the Academy reversed its decision to merge the two categories.

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