‘SNL’ Suffers Serious Sound Issue During 50th Anniversary Special

One of the sketches during Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special faced a rare technical issue. In one of the night’s best sketches, the lapel mics began to malfunction, sending the SNL audio team scrambling to salvage the segment.

The issue occurred as Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph went into a revival of their old recurring sketch about a talk show called “Bronx Beat.” The stars’ audio was seriously messed up, with loud “pops” and static being heard over the NBC/Peacock live feeds. On-screen, the pair continued as normal, but a boom mic’s shadow was visible as a worker rushed to reposition themself to pick up an alternate audio feed.

Late Nighter uploaded a clip of the moment from the live feed to X, and the damaged version is still on Peacock as of press time. However, NBC has since shared a version of the sketch with clean audio on YouTube.

While errors are always a risk with live TV, SNL typically doesn’t have glaring issues like this one. Smaller errors in recent years include a 2022 cold open with out-of-sync audio and a 2021 “Weekend Update” graphic mess-up.

The Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special and its coinciding concert celebration are streaming in full via Peacock. Individual segments are available on the SNL YouTube channel.