Who should host Saturday Night Live this season?

Top Gun: Maverick is the biggest movie of the year, so why the hell is Miles Teller our first SNL host this year? For one thing, as hard as it is to believe, Tom Cruise has never hosted the show. Not once. We know he can do comedy (he can will himself to do anything). His 2000 MTV Movie Awards sketch, opposite Ben Stiller and John Woo, proved he can do a filmed sketch. It’s time for Tom Cruise to take a break from trying to kill himself for our entertainment and host SNL. Unless he’s chicken. Maybe the one stunt he’s afraid to pull off is live comedy. Prove us wrong, Tom Cruise. Prove us wrong. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Quinta Brunson hosting SNL is a no-brainer (although what’s up for debate is whether NBC’s sketch comedy deserves her immense talent). She’s had a terrific year with Abbott Elementary and its well-deserved Emmy wins, so I’m actually surprised she wasn’t one of the first three hosts named this season. Lorne Michaels can rectify that error—and perhaps even take some writing advice from Brunson for her sketches. After all, she’s delivered in the past with terrific YouTube standup videos. [Saloni Gajjar]

I cannot believe Mindy Kaling has never hosted SNL despite her stellar track record from The Office to Never Have I Ever, and everything in-between. She would absolutely crush it with her comedy chops. Much like Brunson, she’s equipped with the kind of writing talent SNL lacks at the moment. Her input and performance will elevate the sketches. Perhaps her stint could be timed to the release of HBO Max’s The Sex Lives Of College Girls season two in November. [Saloni Gajjar]

He may be best known to American audiences as Laszlo in What We Do In The Shadows, but Matt Berry has been a fixture of British comedy for more than a decade, so he’s certainly got the chops for a hosting gig. But really I just want to hear him say, “Live from Newww Yaaak Citay, it’s Saturday Night!” [Cindy White]

With an Emmy under her belt, Jennifer Coolidge is primed for a hosting slot at SNL. Of improv troupe fame, she’s showcased her knack for comedic timing over and over again—despite her failed attempt to join the SNL cast in 1995. She’ll soon appear in the second season of The White Lotus, as well as the rom-com Shotgun Wedding and Legally Blonde 3, giving her a perfect time peg for this season. She’s a comedic force and a national treasure, dammit, and it’s her time to shine! [Gabrielle Sanchez]

Viola Davis has spoken frankly, as is her wont, about unequal opportunity when it comes to acting roles offered her. That she’s risen through the ranks to become an award-winning icon is a testament to her talent, but it’s a failure of Hollywood’s imagination that she’s synonymous mostly with intense nuance. Give this goofy sheep in dramatist’s clothing some sketch comedy! Davis would hit SNL out of the park like she did in the quirky Troop Zero or as bone-dry hilarious Amanda Waller in The Suicide Squad. And no shade to her history-making, Emmy-winning role, but it takes somebody with a firm grasp of camp to sell a long-running drama as ludicrous as How To Get Away With Murder. You can’t tell me the person responsible for this gif doesn’t have comedic chops. [Jack Smart]

How many times does Dave Bautista have to be great at everything (being serious, being funny, and I assume wrestling) before we as a society acknowledge that he’s great at everything? Not that hosting SNL should still be held up as some great honor, since they’ve had some real assholes taking that stage in the last few years, but Bautista would be incredible and he deserves the chance to put on a black hoodie and a fake goatee so he can play John Fetterman in a political sketch of some kind. He’s even got something to plug, with him appearing as the Dave Bautista character (a big guy with glasses who seems kind of sad) in M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock At The Cabin! [Sam Barsanti]

Has anyone proved themselves to be a perfect potential SNL host better than Tatiana Maslany? Orphan Black showed she can embody a range of characters with disparate accents and comedic sensibilities (plus, she can really work a wig). Her starring role on She-Hulk: Attorney At Law positions her as part of the biggest franchise in the world and gives her the cultural relevance necessary for a buzzy host. And by the way, she came up doing improv in her native Canada. The woman deserves a better shot at SNL than a bit part in a lesser-known Lonely Island short! [Mary Kate Carr]

Tim Robinson was never the best writer/performer when it came to fitting his very specific comedic sensibilities into SNL’s more prosaic rhythms—possessing an unquenchable and uncomfortable weirdness that’s gone on to make his Netflix series I Think You Should Leave one of the best sketch shows of the last decade, while SNL has continued to … well, you know. But what if he wasn’t the one who had to change? Why not have the show bend to him, as host, instead of the other way around? John Mulaney’s proved that these kinds of former-writer victory laps can pay huge dividends; if nothing else, the result of a Robinson-led Saturday Night Live would be an incredibly strange piece of TV. [William Hughes]

Now here’s a host who can out-write the writers’ room. Meg Stalter cut her teeth on strange and luminous impression work: think “the fourth Haim sister” or “every commercial for women” Now, she’s most recognizable as Hacks’ hilarious secret weapon, the confidently inept receptionist Kayla. With a semi-autobiographical HBO series on the way, it’s high time Stalter got the SNL treatment. Her stand-up is as resonant as her character work (promising a rare balanced episode) and her unique affect is mesmerizing on screen. Plus, who would dare argue with this audition tape? [Hattie Lindert]