Nate Bargatze Fought Hard for the ‘Washington’s Dream’ Sketch
In the minutes before the dress rehearsal for his first time hosting Saturday Night Live in October 2023, Nate Bargatze was thinking about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin’s show about an SNL-like workplace that aired for one season on NBC from 2006 to 2007. Besides watching SNL as a kid, Studio 60 was the main way Bargatze engaged with the television-sketch institution. So there he was, in Lorne Michaels’s office choosing sketches for dress, glancing at the curtain over the window that looked out to the studio, when he said what he had been thinking all week. “Dude, this is just like Studio 60.” And Michaels did was he has done for decades: ignore a random thing a nervous celebrity said.
Bargatze was in a very Aaron Sorkin–y situation: He was a white male protagonist, at the moment of truth, who needed to stand up for what he believed in. In this case, it was that “Washington’s Dream” was on the “maybe” column of Michaels’s board of potential sketches for the episode. It bombed at the table read on Wednesday and generally didn’t have much momentum going for it all week. It was also the biggest costume change of the rundown, so cutting it would make the night a lot easier. Bargatze thought to himself, I don’t want to ruin your 50 years of television because I watched Studio 60. But when Michaels asked him for his thoughts on the sketch, he stuck up for it; he felt that once it got in front of a live audience, the timing of the sketch would lock in. So Michaels moved the sketch from the “maybe” column to the very end of the dress-rehearsal rundown. And at dress rehearsal, it destroyed — so much so that Michaels moved it up to the second live sketch after the monologue. The rest is history and over 17 million views on YouTube.
Looking back at that moment on this week’s episode of Good One: A Podcast About Jokes, Bargatze says he didn’t realize that “you do have a lot more say than you think you do at SNL.” That’s why, when he returned to host in October 2024, he made it a point to champion sketches that other writers and cast members had been struggling to get on the air. One was “Golf Tournament,” which was written by “Washington’s Dream” writers Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell, whom Bargatze also collaborated with on CBS’s Nashville Christmas special this month. The other was Michael Longfellow’s sketch about a guy dying at the top of a waterslide and debating whether he should be pushed down the slide or carried down the stairs, which was the only thing Bargatze kept talking about all week. Back in Michaels’s Studio 60–esque office between dress rehearsal and the live show, Michaels asked what Bargatze was thinking. “What about ‘Waterslide’?” Michaels, like a father who had been hearing his son unsubtly make the same request over and over again, shot back, “‘Waterslide’’s in. Don’t worry about it.”
“Washington’s Dream 2,” however, didn’t require a negotiation with Michaels; it was Bargatze who needed to be convinced. “I had a buddy that goes, ‘Do not do another one,’” he remembers, even though the original sketch was the biggest moment of his career to that point and the thing fans mention to him the most. He was nervous to ruin its legacy. What he would later learn is that Day and Seidell had already started writing it over the summer when they were working on the Christmas special. So when he returned to SNL, Bargatze read the script and had a realization: “It’s not about what the jokes are. It’s just about the George Washington character. People just want to see that character come back.” And they did — the video for “Washington’s Dream 2” currently has more than 7 million views. It prompted such a positive response that Bargatze won’t need to be persuaded about future installments. When asked if there will be more, he said, “After the second one, yeah.”
Listen to or watch this week’s episode of Good One, in which Bargatze, Day, and Seidell share everything you ever wanted to know about “Washington’s Dream.”
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