Saturday Night Live‘s 17 best moments from season 47

Behold: the SNL sketches (and one performance) that impressed us the most during the show's 2021–2022 run

By Dennis Perkins, Michael Martin | October 1, 2022 | 4:00pm

TV Lists Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live‘s 17 best moments from season 47

Cecily Strong, Colin Jost, and Michael Che on SNL Photo: Will Heath/NBC

With SNL’s 48th season premiering tonight with guest host Miles Teller and a troupe of fresh new faces, we thought it would be a good time to look back at the sketches (and one noteworthy performance) that stood out from the show’s 47th season.

Of course, evaluating an entire season of Saturday Night Live is tough. With some 180 sketches (not to mention monologues, Weekend Updates, musical performances, and all the rest) over roughly 20 episodes, a season of SNL can blur into a hazy wash of sound, fury, and questionably necessary recurring bits. But with so much output, there are bound to be some truly memorable moments.

Here then, is a look back at the best stuff from SNL’s 2021–2022 run, which turned out to be a swan song for plenty of cast members, many of whom figure prominently in the clips that follow.

This list is in chronological order. A season finale version was published on May 23.

SNL inaugurates a new President (Episode 1)

with a doubly refreshing changing of the guard, as newly hired featured player James Austin Johnson’s Joe Biden elbowed Alec Baldwin’s beyond-tired Donald Trump off of the cold-open stage. And while SNL’s political satire continues to dish some weak sauce, Johnson’s Biden is at least as much of an upgrade as the actual Biden is over Trump. The noted impressionist’s take on the new POTUS is a masterpiece of subtle observation in comparison to the broad caricature we’ve been stuck with (in real life and as an SNL character). Johnson immediately established himself as this cast’s Darrell Hammond, a meticulous craftsman whose Joe Biden is equal parts cantankerous, folksy, and already exasperated at the parade of Republican loonies he’s suddenly tasked with corralling into some semblance of functional governance. [Dennis Perkins]

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