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Saturday Night Live Welcomes Emma Thompson to Late Night

ALSO: My Dad Wrote a Porno, Homekilling Queen, The Real Story of..., Restaurant: Impossible, and more
  • Emma Thompson hosts Saturday Night Live tonight, with musical guest the Jonas Brothers
    Emma Thompson hosts Saturday Night Live tonight, with musical guest the Jonas Brothers

    It seems almost perverse that Emma Thompson has never hosted Saturday Night Live before. This is a woman who won an Academy Award for Best Actress over 26 years ago. Since then, she's made movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kate Winslet, Will Ferrell, and Tom Hanks. She's played a witch, a Man in Black, and an incredibly thinly-veiled Hillary Clinton. She's played a Mary Poppins knock-off and the writer of Mary Poppins. She's even filmed the single greatest scene ever.

    And through it all, she's regularly been very funny, in her roles but also just as herself. Have you seen this woman give an awards-show speech? Did you ever see the episode of Ellen where she plays "herself" as a fraudulent Brit who's really from Ohio? The point is this: it took 26 years for Emma Thompson to go from Howards End to Studio 8H. We cannot let the same thing happen to Olivia Colman. Petition for Olivia to host next season's premiere starts here!

    NEW EPISODE: Along with host Emma Thompson, Saturday Night Live will also welcome musical guest the Jonas Brothers. Thompson is promoting her new film Late Night, where she plays a late-night talk show host (apparently the film is science fiction, because it features a woman as a late-night host, har har). 11:30 PM ET on NBC

    SERIES PREMIERE: HBO's My Dad Wrote a Porno is the network's latest attempt at translating a popular podcast to television. Series hosts Jamie Morton, Alice Levine, and James Cooper deliver a comedic reading of the show's central premise: the erotic novel written by Morton's father. Our Chris Feil says that in addition to being very funny, the show harkens back to a bygone era of HBO late-night porn. 10:00 PM ET on HBO

    WORLD PREMIERE: The Lifetime original movie Homekilling Queen stars Kaitlyn Bernard (Netflix's 1922) as an entitled and fearsomely determined high-schooler hell-bent on becoming Homecoming queen, and Ashley Jones (The Bold and the Beautiful) as her competitive and deranged mother. Tale as old as time! 8:00 PM ET on Lifetime

    SEASON FINALE: The docu-series The Real Story of... takes viewers behind the scenes of famous movies and tells the real story they're based on. Past movies revealed have been Goodfellas, Zodiac, and The Social Network. For the show's season premiere, viewers will get the real-life story of the Boston Strangler. 9:00 PM ET on REELZ

    ALSO TONIGHT

    • Premier Boxing Champions Special airs on FOX, featuring the matchup of "Swift" Jarrett Hurd vs. Julian "J-Rock" Williams. 8:00 PM ET on FOX
    • Night School stars Kevin Hart as an unemployed salesman who must go back to school to get his GED and Tiffany Haddish as his feisty teacher. 8:00 PM ET on HBO
    • Restaurant: Impossible ends its 14th season with an attempt at redeeming the Cooper Steer Steakhouse. 9:00 PM ET on Food Network

    Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.

    TOPICS: Saturday Night Live, NBC, My Dad Wrote a Porno, Emma Thompson