Dear Saturday Night Live,
You are almost certainly my favorite show of all time. I have been watching you since the second grade, never missing more than two or three episodes in a row before finding a way to return to a habitual weekly dosage. If planning to go out on a Saturday night when a new episode is set to air, you can be certain I’ll set my VCR timer first, or at least download the episode the following day. Your annual fifteen-week vacation from my pop-culture life is probably the single worst thing about my experience of summer. To say that I am your biggest fan might not be an overstatement.
Where the vast majority of my friends and family have demonstrated, at best, a fairweather allegiance to you, I have demonstrated the most resolute and virtuous fealty. Let’s face it: not all of the years have been good. Verily, I have weathered every nightmare you thought to conjure, including the lamentable stint of Colin Quinn in the Update chair, what seemed like a decade of Molly Shannon, and a single episode hosted by Deion Sanders ca. 1995 that took years off my life. Undaunted, I have hung in there, always certain of the next renaissance, defying the vagaries of critical and popular opinion, abhorring MadTV, baring my fangs at any who dare to suggest that your time has passed, or that your utter supremacy in the domain of TV-cool is at all a matter of opinion.
And with my feet firm in the bedrock of fond boyhood memories, my eyes aglow in the luminescent genius of Robert Smigel, and my heart already in the hands of Kristen Wiig, I stand by you now as proudly as ever.
Now listen carefully. If you ever run Deep House Dish again, you and I are fucking done.