On the Bright Side, Kate McKinnon Created My Most Favorite Moment of Television Ever.

(I mean, aside from Jim & Pam’s wedding, of course.)

It could be that I’m still caught up in the collective heightened awareness of All Things Happening in America, or that I’m just a sap that cries at anything accompanied by live piano, but I appreciated the shit out of SNL’s cold open this week.

The beauty of it lies in how Kate McKinnon took a divided and hostile situation, layered on the death of a beloved musical icon, and out of that somehow created a feeling of unity and hope.

As I was watching and discovering that she’s not just one of the funniest humans alive, but can also play the damn piano AND sing, I felt a part of something. I had that feeling of a collective experience shared with millions of others at that exact moment in history. Much like the moon landing, or Kennedy’s assassination…but like if we had had the ability to pull up Walter Cronkite’s iconic wiping away of tears whenever it was convenient for us, on Hulu. You know, that kind of shared moment.

Saturday Night Live and Kate McKinnon could have done the predictable and panned out from the close up of ‘Hillary’ tickling the ivories to reveal Alec Baldwin’s Trump lounging across the top of the piano while being serenaded by his Nasty Woman, but they didn’t. And therein lies the beauty of what the detested, predictable Media can still bring to the table: content that evokes feeling and has influence on our perspective of the world we live in.

In that moment, it felt bigger than a woman in a pants suit playing the piano. I don’t care if you want to build a wall or if you’re still with her, this was bigger, dammit. This was the acknowledgment that we are all going through something. America is having an identity crisis, and while humor usually heals, we needed more than that on this night. SNL has the power to nudge our national conversations in certain directions and they used their power to help everyone sit back, take it in, and maybe calm the fuck down a little.

So bravo to Kate, Lorne, and Leonard too for having a hand in creating a delightful and unexpected take on the state of America on that particular Saturday night. No matter what side of this imminent and now metaphorical wall we individually feel we are on, we all needed it as a collective group of just plain humans.