Why Adele Owes Her ‘Overnight’ Success to Sarah Palin and ‘SNL’

If Sarah Palin hadn’t made her infamous cameo alongside Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live in 2008, would Adele be quite the massive star she is today? That’s just one of the many questions director Questlove tries to answer in a sprawling new documentary about the history of music on SNL.

To celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary, a new documentary premiering Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC (and streaming the next day on Peacock), Ladies & Gentleman… 50 Years of SNL Music, looks at how the show has incorporated music with comedy throughout its five decades—and made stars out of many of its musical guests.

Adele was tapped to perform the October 18, 2008 show, but she wasn’t yet the megastar she’s become in America. It was her SNL performance that took her career to enormous heights “overnight,” she says in an archival clip from the doc—just because Sarah Palin had a schedule change.

“The whole country was watching for other reasons,” SNL boss Lorne Michaels says in the documentary, “It just happened to be that Sarah Palin was on.” Adele has long credited Palin’s appearance on the same episode for the boon in her career, telling the BBC in 2015 that Palin was actually supposed to appear in the episode the week after her.

“Something came up in the campaign,” she explained, and “she came and did [SNL] the week I was doing it.” She added, “It was one of the most watched SNLs ever and then it was two weeks before the Grammy ballot, which is when people decide what songs they want to maybe nominate, so, like literally the stars aligned for me.”

The massive exposure was all the singer needed to shoot to the top. Bill Hader recalls in the documentary, “I remember sitting at the rewrite table and not a lot of us had heard of her. And she started singing and it was, like, we all stopped. We opened the curtain and everybody looked in and went, ‘Who is that?’”

Michaels sheds more light on just how quickly the singer shot to the top after the show. “Adele went to the afterparty, and then went back to the hotel, and then went to British Airways for the 8 a.m. flight,” he says. “She said when they were on the runway, [she] checked her computer and she was at number 45 [on the music charts], and when they landed, she was almost to number one.”

“It was just meant to be like a normal show, just me and Josh Brolin—I was the musical guest and he was hosting it,” Adele says in an archival interview used in the film. “It ended up being a huge show…That saying, like ‘overnight success.’ It was overnight, literally overnight.” She told the BBC, “I was nominated for a Grammy, and I won,” soon after her SNL appearance. “I mean it was a joke. It was a joke. All thanks to Sarah Palin.”

Adele slyly referenced her experience when she served as both host and musical guest in 2020. “Now I don’t know anything about American politics, I mean, I’m British, you know?” she said then. “And I don’t want to say anything too political so I’ll just say this—Sarah Palin, babes, thanks for everything, yeah?”