SNL is facing a delicate balancing act after President Trump's coronavirus diagnosis

New York Daily News

Up until Trump's diagnosis, the big news of the week was the Trump-Biden debate. Now there will likely be a frenzy of rewrites in the next 24 hours to tackle Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis for the first cold open of Season 46. “It’s a big blow to their preparation because by Thursday night, they’ve generally got at least a basic sense of the structure of the show,” says Robert Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. "It’s certainly not exactly where it’s going to be performed on Saturday, but by Thursday there’s an idea of what it looks like. I am sure when this news came in, it had to have thrown this entire outline and lineup for a loop. I have no knowledge of what the sketches were, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that an awful lot of what they had already been prepared had to probably be completely thrown away, and other stuff overhauled.”