The problem with Elon Musk hosting SNL is that the show holds too much cultural relevance

https://www.vox.com/culture/2021/5/7/22421455/elon-musk-snl-host-saturday-night-live-controversy

"It’s easy to be cynical about Musk’s hosting gig," says Emily VanDerWerff. "SNL needs viewers, and controversy drives curiosity from casual audience members, and Musk will be sure to drive controversy, ergo. And SNL’s decision to let cast members who’d rather sit out the episode take the week off easily folds into this narrative. After all, what better way to get a certain subset of viewers all het up than being able to call some of the show’s cast members snowflakes or whatever? But I would argue we’re not being cynical enough. Every single SNL controversy is driven by the same basic impulse to ascribe the show with a power it simply does not hold. The latest SNL controversy has almost nothing to do with Elon Musk and everything to do with the baby boomer gerontocracy." VanDerWerff argues that SNL's outsized cultural relevance is mainly due to baby boomers still holding on to power, whether politically or in pop-culture (though, technically, Lorne Michaels and President Biden were born before the Baby Boom generation). VanDerWerff adds that "every few months the show becomes the most important TV story in the news makes me a little bonkers. The worst part is it’s nearly always the same controversy. SNL does something that comments (or seems like it will comment) obliquely on our political culture. There are many headlines about how bold and controversial SNL is. Then after a few days, nobody cares anymore....SNL is pretty great at inserting itself into the middle of the national discourse whenever it feels like it. Whenever the show casts someone as a presidential candidate or a vice presidential candidate, the move becomes headline news. And it spent most of the Trump administration offering up weak cold opens about the latest political news largely designed to assure its audience that, yes, Trump was very silly, but so is politics as a whole. We could still laugh about him! These, too, made the news, and 'Here’s what this week’s SNL cold open had to say about Trump!' became a mainstay for plenty of sites, including this one." As VanDerWerff points out, "the Musk controversy breaks down along familiar-enough generational lines — Boomers: 'You kids get mad at anyone you disagree with!' Millennials/Gen Z: 'The hoarding of wealth is destroying the planet!' Gen X: 'Why doesn’t anybody care about The Simpsons this much? — that I think it illuminates the main reason SNL can still dominate headlines. Baby boomers still control most of our levers of institutional power, and SNL is one of their most beloved cultural institutions. This is not to say that no young people watch SNL; the show has viewers across all demographics. But it is to say that SNL’s penchant for abruptly making news has less to do with SNL than with its perceived importance to the culture as a whole. And that perceived importance is a lot easier to believe in if you were there to watch its legendary early seasons in the mid-’70s than if you started watching it (as I did) in the late ’90s."