Around the World in 13 SNLs

By
Hershal Pandya,
a Vulture staff writer who covers comedy

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: YouTube (Saturday Night Live, Team Coco, Above Average)

On April 10, it was announced that residents of the U.K. would be getting their own version of Saturday Night Live to ostensibly satirize the Royals, mock the Tories, and platform British actors campaigning for BAFTAs. According to reports, the Sky Max Now series will be produced by Lorne Michaels’s Broadway Video and feature the same rotating host and musical-guest format as the American original. But when the show premieres in 2026, it will immediately have two giant legacies to contend with: that of the original SNL, plus all the international SNL adaptations — 13 in total — that have come before it.

Since 1993, markets all over the world have attempted to replicate the success of the famed American sketch show for local audiences to mixed results. Of these 13 iterations, only Saturday Night Live Korea remains on the air; the majority were canceled in less than two years. (How formally these adaptations are linked to NBC and Broadway Video isn’t clear, as NBC declined to provide specific details on the nature of their relationship.) That so few of these adaptations have succeeded speaks to the unique alchemy of timing, talent, and resources that have made Michaels’s original such an unlikely cultural phenomenon. With the U.K. gearing up to try to recreate this miracle next year, here’s a look back at every country that has attempted to do so previously.

Title: RTL Samstag Nacht (RTL Saturday Night)

Aired: November 1993–May 1998

Seemingly, executives at German television network RTL Television watched “Sprockets” and thought, We Germans will make fun of ourselves, thank you very much. This is a fictional origin story, but given that the country’s version of SNL debuted in roughly the same era as Mike Myers’s classic sketch and predates the second global SNL adaptation by 13 years, it’s not implausible! Running for five years, RTL Samstag Nacht differed from the original SNL by being live-to-tape rather than live, but was otherwise similar in tone and format. It featured prominent German celebrities, occasional international guest stars like Mel Brooks, and its own version of “Weekend Update,” the title of which translates to “Saturday Night News.” Recurring sketches and characters included the innuendo-heavy “Kentucky schreit ficken” (“Kentucky fried fuck”), set in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant; and Ali Bengali, an Indian oracle who sits in a snake basket and predicts the future in rhyming couplets. The show was a hit locally, and it was briefly revived in 2005 under the name RTL Comedy Nacht — but that version was canceled after three months.

Title: Saturday Night Live From Milano

Aired: November 2006-2010; April 2018–May 2018

Next to no information is available online about the Italian adaptation of SNL, despite the fact that it ran for four seasons, making it a relative success. There is, however, a full episode available to watch on YouTube.

Title: Saturday Night Live

Aired: February 2009–May 2009

Lasting for only 12 episodes on local television network Cuatro, Spain’s version of SNL never really got a chance to find its legs. Part of that could be due to its confusing branding. Despite retaining the “Saturday Night” name recognition of its United States progenitor, the show aired on Thursdays. In addition to copying the original’s format, structure, and name, Spain’s SNL also borrowed the premises of many of the show’s classic sketches, simply tweaking the reference points to land for local audiences. Their version of “More Cowbell,” for example, swaps out the original’s Blue Öyster Cult with Spanish heavy-metal band Baron Rojo.

Title: SNL 코리아 (Saturday Night Live Korea)

Aired: December 2011–November 2017; September 2021–present

If the success of an international SNL adaptation is measured by time spent on air, then none have been a bigger hit than Saturday Night Live Korea. Its longevity makes sense on paper, given that South Korea’s star-filled entertainment ecosystem lends itself well to a platform for celebrity hosts and musical guests like SNL. It’s even attracted Hollywood guest stars like Tom Hiddleston and Chloë Grace Moretz. But everything hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the adaptation. It underwent a four-year hiatus and change of networks from tvN to Coupang Play, and it often finds itself at the center of controversy thanks to sketches that prompt online discourse and behind-the-scenes chaos. Most notably, in 2016, SNL Korea came under fire when three members of its staff were caught on camera groping the members of K-pop group B1A4 as part of what the show termed an “initiation” tradition. Format-wise, the show draws elements from the original, featuring sketches, “Weekend Update,” and even digital shorts. It begs the question: When will there be an SNL Korea version of the Seth Meyers and Lonely Island Podcast?

Title: Saturday Night Live

Aired: May 2012–October 2012

South American SNL stans didn’t even have to take to X to request that the show “come to Brazil” for it to set up shop locally. The country’s 2012 version of the sketch series, which on Sundays at 8:30 p.m on TV network RedeTV!, didn’t last long, but it featured some notable cast members, including popular social-media comedian Rudy Landucci and Brazilian stand-up pioneer Carol “Brocoli” Zoccoli. Portuguese-speaking readers interested in the Brazilian SNL’s sensibility can get a taste via this sketch, in which “several people try to make a TV spot about a cream-cheese brand, only to discover it tastes terrible.”

Title: サタデーナイトライブ JPN (Saturday Night Live Japan)

Aired: June 2011–March 2013

Imagine a world where, in addition to its updating slate of celebrity guest hosts, every episode of SNL was co-hosted by Kenan Thompson and Mikey Day. Such was the format of SNL Japan, where each episode was helmed by a celebrity and two permanent co-hosts: Koji Imada and Sanma Akashiya. The show, which aired monthly rather than weekly, began its run on terrestrial television network Fuji TV before making the jump to satellite channel Fuji TV NEXT Live Premium in 2012. Broadly, it was less political than its American forebear, with Imada explaining in an interview that “the relationship between comedy and news is very different than it is in the West,” and that Japanese comedians “prefer to create their own characters, their own world, and to set those up as antitheses to the real world.” But the Japanese SNL managed to follow in the footsteps of the original in one significant way: Per Imada, fans were constantly asking him whether the show was actually live.

Title: Суббота. Вечер. Шоу (Saturday Night Show)

Aired: September 2013–January 2014

It took 16 years for Ronald Reagan’s instruction to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” to apply to Russia’s sketch-comedy output, and even then they didn’t quite get it right. The country’s version of SNL was pre-taped rather than live and lasted for only six episodes on local network NTV. Episodes are available on YouTube in full, but if you don’t speak Russian, your best bet for imagining the content it contains might be to revisit the dispatches of Russian correspondent Olya Povlatsky on the American original.

Title: SNL Québec

Aired: February 2014–March 2015

In 2014, Québécois’s favorite comedy show, Just for Laughs Gags, got some competition in the form of a French-language SNL reboot. The show, which combined distinctly Canadian original sketch material — like parodies of hockey-commentary shows — with translated versions of classic SNL sketches like “Schweddy Balls,” lasted nine episodes on network Télé-Québec before being canceled due to budget cutbacks. It was later revived for a one-off special in 2018 hosted by French Canadian actress Magalie Lépine-Blondeau.

Title: Saturday Night Live Suomi

Aired: February 2016–April 2016

Reception to the Finnish adaptation of SNL was poor out of the gate, which might explain why the MTV3 show, which featured only four regular cast members, lasted just 12 episodes. Its comedy leaned heavily on recreations of classic American sketches, and the original material it featured seemingly failed to land. One critic wrote that it neutered the original SNL format so much that it became “early-night family entertainment,” felt like a retread of the country’s more successful sketch-comedy series Putous, and that the entire medium of live sketch comedy was outdated and superfluous. Hard to bounce back from that.

Title: ساترداي نايت لايف بالعربي (Saturday Night Live Arabia)

Aired: February 2016–January 2018

Unlike many of the SNL adaptations on this list, the Egyptian version of SNL wasn’t canceled due to poor ratings or budget constraints. With the entire Arabic-speaking world as a potential audience, the show had access to a much larger market than many of its counterparts. But that also meant it had to cater to this audience’s broad tastes and unique sensitivities, and was thus unable to venture into specific and risqué comedic territory. Its death knell arrived in 2018, when an Egyptian regulatory council suspended the show from broadcast for including “sexual implications” in its content. “The program has always used words, phrases and sexual implications deemed inappropriate to viewers,” the board wrote in its decision. In an ideal world, this would have been the start of the show’s journey rather than its end. What is SNL even if the government (or president) isn’t mad at it?

Title: Le Saturday Night Live

Aired: January 2017

Initially conceived as a series of specials rather than a weekly show, France’s version of SNL didn’t last beyond its first episode. That pilot, hosted by comedian Gad Elmaleh — known primarily to Americans for his unsuccessful bid to parlay his massive French celebrity into a Hollywood stand-up and acting career — provided hints about what the show would have looked like had it continued. It aired on a Thursday on television network M6, and like the Spanish SNL before it, adapted the classic “More Cowbell” sketch for a new audience. International versions of SNL have a fever, apparently, and the only prescription is more adaptations of “More Cowbell.”

Title: SNL Polska

Aired: December 2017–March 2018

Polish SNL belongs to a long line of failed TV projects that began with the full support of the network behind it. Maciej Sojka, managing director of paid platform Showmax, said in an interview ahead of SNL Polska’s premiere that the network was unconcerned with viewership. “It has to be funny,” he said. “People have to appreciate that something new and fresh has arrived. The viewership will come with time.” (The show copied several bits from the American version, including a “Drunk Uncle” desk piece and a “Star Wars Auditions” sketch, so it wasn’t exactly “fresh” or “new.”) Sojka decided to drop the first four episodes for free on YouTube to incentivize viewers to subscribe to Showmax to watch the remainder of the season, which was expensive to produce, behind its paywall. That didn’t pan out, evidently, and SNL Polska was canceled after its initial 15-episode run.

Title: 周六夜现场 (Saturday Night Live)

Aired: June 2018–September 2018

It’s unclear whether a Chinese adaptation of SNL could get off the ground in 2025, given the United States and China’s diminished bilateral exchange. But during the first Trump administration, this was seemingly less of a problem. Questions arose at the time about how the country, with its famously censorious government regulations, would adapt a show known for political humor. After just three episodes in 2018, none of which contained explicitly political material, the show was pulled offline by its network Youku. An anonymous employee of Youku told the New York Times that the episodes were removed at the request of the show’s production team pending “a rectification and upgrade of its content” and that she didn’t know when or if it would return. This, it turned out, was not a huge disappointment to Chinese audiences, who according to the Times report were unimpressed with the quality of the comedy compared to the original.

Around the World in 13 SNLs