'Saturday Night Live' Headed To Primetime With Weekend Update This Summer

People can't get enough of Saturday Night Live these days (well, most people), with the Trump administration material and frequent guest star turns rocketing the show to its best ratings in over 20 years. There have been rumors that the Powers That Be at SNL have been planning to expand Weekend Update into primetime someway or another, and now it seems they have figured it out.

In August, Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update will jump to primetime with four half-hour episodes during what is otherwise a pretty dead month for television. The first episode will air on Thursday, August 10th at 9:00 p.m.

NBC said in a press release, "SNL is having its best season in a quarter of a century—how many shows can say that?!—so we didn’t want them to take the summer off. We’re thrilled to have Colin Jost and Michael Che continuing their unique brand of news with fresh ‘Weekend Update’ shows in primetime this August." In addition to hosts Jost and Che, other cast members are also expected to appear on the show.

This isn't the first time the Jost/Che team stepped out of the Saturday night time slot for some Weekend Update fun—last summer, they did bits from both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

Not everyone is as excited about the SNL surge as NBC—former cast member Noël Wells, who was only on the show for the 2013/2014 season, called SNL the "comedy establishment" in an interview with Vanity Fair. “I think telling SNL that they have to accept us is just going to water us down,” Wells said regarding fellow castmembers who didn't last long on the show. "We’re much stronger doing our own things. Don’t we want to make rock n’ roll? Why are we all trying to be accepted by all these comedy dinosaurs? SNL has become what it was always trying to make fun of. It’s become this big machine. I don’t want to be plugged into a machine."