Seeing news about SNL and Elon Musk online has been kind of weird. I haven't even thought about SNL since the early 90s when I only watched it rarely since my friends and I were more into In Living Color. So it has been strange seeing people talk about a show that I've largely considered dead or irrelevant for some time now. Which got me thinking about if that's just my own bias, which it largely is, or if there's something more to it. To try and puzzle that out I pulled up a cast/write list for SNL on wikipedia to see which names I could recognize. Going back to when the show first started in the mid-late 70s I see some very well known names, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, although I know all of those from films, going into the 80s I see Gilbert Gottfried, Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Damon Wayans, Jon Lovitz, Dana Carvey. Getting into the 90s I see Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, Chris Farley, David Spade, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Norm Macdonald, Will Ferrell. Coming into the early 2000s I can recognize: Tracy Morgan, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and 2010s I only notice Bill Hader, all the names after that I don't know at all. So it feels like SNL has really gone downhill in the last 10 years or so. Maybe I'm wrong and the current cast are great, but they've done nothing to penetrate the media filters and algorithms that would make me notice them and I've only seeing the names for the first time due to SNL getting Musk to be the guest and doing a tiny bit of research. Although the viewership looks down from the 80s and 90s it's up from the lull around 2006 where it dropped under 7 million, and has been over 8 million or a bit under since so it does still seem to be doing well enough for itself. I suppose it's not as irrelevant as I thought.