With digital shorts like this consistently serving as some of SNL’s most popular and successful bits, Eugene Lee and his team can undoubtedly devote more time to establishing more intricate sets that will work better for an admittedly smaller in-studio crowd.
Of course, knowing how much the set design impacts the size of the audience presents an interesting thought experiment about the importance of crowd size for Saturday Night Live.
It’s a tradeoff, but it seems to have worked so far.
While a big and active audience will always be essential for the show’s increasingly live performances, prerecorded skits like Bern Your Enthusiasm continue to become some of the show’s most talked about segments.