NBC announced this weekend that Lindsay Lohan is to host the March 3 episode. It’ll be a big comeback episode–for Jack White, whose band broke up last year! For, you see, Ms. Lohan, a three-time host, never really left–as skits about her public persona made up a big chunk of the mid-2000s on SNL.
In 2004, Ms. Lohan appeared with her Mean Girls costars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in a “Weekend Update” segment, during which the comics held a fake intervention for her youthful high spirits and she defended herself against charges of not eating. She concluded by threatening to visit host Colin Farrell’s dressing room. She had previously hosted the show that year with a monologue wherein she mocked her fellow teen stars Hilary Duff and Avril Lavigne, as well as her own and others’ habit for revealing a bit too much of her body.
Ms. Lohan and Ms. Fey were publicly friends in 2004, appearing together in palling-around fashion on talk shows. By Ms. Lohan’s second hosting gig in 2005, Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler held a non-joking intervention backstage; Ms. Fey’s writing staff also wrote a monologue for Ms. Lohan in which she confronted her future self, having been ravaged by drug and alcohol use. Funny stuff!
Ms. Lohan got one last hosting shot in 2006, just before Ms. Fey left the show. In a cold open, Ms. Lohan–who was not promoting any current projects, with A Prairie Home Companion still months away, played a “mean girl” White House staffer, coasting on fond 2004 memories.
By the 2010s, with Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler departed, hosts Emma Stone and Miley Cyrus took to impersonate an easy target in the form of Ms. Lohan, with Ms. Cyrus claiming “the Los Angeles Courthouse just gave me my own parking spot.” It is with her upcoming hosting job, for which Ms. Lohan reportedly lobbied producer Lorne Michaels, that Ms. Lohan hopes to reclaim her own image. The show had long documented her trajectory, after all, and appearing on the show once more means there is a trajectory at all upon which to comment.
