This past weekend, I attended Saturday Night Live (SNL) with host Emma Stone and musical guest Noah Kahan. I got in through standby. This article is going to be a completely honest review of the standby process and the show itself. Most people that you see online, either on Reddit, TikTok, or X, will give you a rundown on how to get on SNL, but in hindsight, I feel that there was a lot left unsaid about the process.
The Standby Process:
I found out about who the host and musical guest for this show were a couple of weeks ago via the SNL Instagram. My friend, Abby, and I both love Noah Kahan, and I’ve been a fan of Emma Stone for as long as I can remember, so we decided to try and get standby for this show because we didn’t get picked for the lottery. We had previously tried to do standby a few weeks ago for host Timothée Chalamet and musical guest boygenius, but failed miserably. This time, since I knew what I was doing, I hoped it would go smoothly. And, thankfully, it did.
At 10:00 a.m. on the Thursday before the show, I went into the SNL standby link. Right when it turned 10, I refreshed the page and clicked the date that I wanted for the show, which was Saturday, Dec. 2. Two links came up, one for the dress rehearsal show and one for the live show. I clicked the live show because that’s what we decided what we wanted to see. It took me to a page that asked for my name and email. I had my information saved in my computer already, so I auto-filled it and clicked submit. Once I submitted it, it took me to a page that said I was now in the queue. A couple of minutes later, I got my confirmation email that said to look out for another email that would contain my numbers.
By about 11:30 a.m., I got the second email which said Abby and I were numbers 35 and 36. By this point, I was freaking out because everything online said they let in about 40-80 people, so I was pretty confident we would get in. The email said to join the standby/reservation line the following evening between 6:00-7:00 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 1, so that’s exactly what we did. Once we got to Rockefeller Center, where the line was located, we were placed in our respective spots in numerical order. We knew the standby cards went out at 12:01 a.m., so we waited in line for about five or so hours. We got our cards just after midnight with new numbers: 26 and 27. People usually move up numbers because some people don’t show. The whole time, we were just thinking, we have our numbers, why can’t we just come and get our standby cards instead of having to camp out until midnight? The only thing I found online about it said that NBC wants to make sure everyone in standby truly wants to see the show, which makes sense, to an extent. We knew we were going to get in for sure at this point, but I was still nervous.
We returned to Rockefeller Center on Saturday just before 9:45 p.m., which was the deadline you had to check in by. They placed us back in numerical order inside the NBC store and we waited for about a half hour until they started to move the beginning of the line through security. We waited for about another 20-30 minutes in a stairwell. They finally moved us into the Peacock Lounge, which is where people wait if they secured tickets through the lottery, and we continued on to the final waiting location, where they gave us wristbands which confirmed that we were in. We went up through the elevator and made it to Studio 8H. To say I was filled with joy and relief would be an understatement. Not only was I seeing two celebrities that I loved, but I was finally on SNL and could cross it off my NYC bucket list. The whole standby process was incredibly stressful and we happened to get lucky with our numbers.
I learned that the numbers are really random because there is no way I was the 35th or lower person to have my reservation application go through. The website says they give the numbers out based on how they receive submissions, but with my slow Wi-Fi and shaky hands, it’s unbelievable that my application was submitted that fast. Also, know that if you don’t get a confirmation email just after 10:00 a.m., you won’t receive one. The NBC SNL standby website crashes pretty easily, so if it’s your first time submitting you might not know what to expect once you press done. I would recommend bringing folding lawn chairs or something to sit on because of how gross the New York sidewalks are. We just so happened to have to camp out when it was raining. Luckily, our part of the line was covered with tents set up by NBC, but the second part of the line had nothing to cover them. Honestly, I wouldn’t have bothered to line up if my number was worse than 100-150 because the studio has 285 seats, but most of them were filled by the time I got in with my number. The odds of getting in if your number is after 60 seemed to me to be pretty low, but to each their own.
The Show:
The show itself was great. I’m not going to come on here and lie, saying no matter what seat I had, I was happy with it or that I could see enough. Our seats sucked. As did most people who had standby. The studio is set up in a way that, from where I was sitting, you couldn’t see the musical guest at all. You also couldn’t see the host walk down or most of the skits fully. I had to watch the TV in front of me most of the time.
This isn’t to say I’m ungrateful. I’m still so happy that I actually got into the show and it was so cool to be there real time. I say this because everything I’ve read online has just been pros of getting in with a standby number. The whole time I was thinking that they should give the good seats — the ones right in the middle of the audience — to standby. Standby people were the ones that really wanted to be there to the point where they camped out in the cold rain and fought online two days before to get a number, while the people who had tickets just got lucky, because you don’t pick the show you win the lottery for. You sign up for the lottery throughout the whole month of August, but you can’t put your show preference because hosts aren’t even announced at that point. Most people don’t even get tickets for any SNL show. So the ticketed part of the audience might not even care about either guest, but they still have great seats and a perfect view of the skits and musical performances.
To be completely frank, I’m not the biggest SNL fan. It isn’t my type of humor and I’m usually not up that late to watch it or I have something else going on, so I really only watch it when I like the guests a lot. Most of the skits didn’t make me fall over with laughter like they did for other people around me. The off-air experience was really what made it good for me. It’s always so interesting to see the behind the scenes of moving actors around and the technical aspects of the show.
Noah Kahan was a great musical guest. He sang “Dial Drunk” and “Stick Season” from his most recent album Stick Season. I follow him on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, so I knew he was excited and nervous about this performance because it was his first time on SNL, but I think he had one of my favorite performances ever. He was so humble and excited on the stage, it radiated throughout the audience. Emma Stone was also great. She was the sixth woman to host SNL five times and was presented with her “five-timers” velvet robe by Tina Fey and Candice Bergen, who joined Stone during her monologue. She was great in all the skits and just seemed to be a genuine person overall. I was originally just going to write a review of the show and what I saw, but I decided that I wanted to share the entire experience for others that are thinking about doing SNL and aren’t totally sure how it works.