I think SNL has been great recently..the last year or so at least.
It's also annoyingly trendy to talk about how it's not as good as it was (insert your favorite lineups).
Right. I've been a regular watcher for about fifteen years, and either as random live episodes or in reruns I've seen quite a few episodes going back into the late eighties.
The one thing you always hear in these discussions, and which I agree with, is that people who complain about the quality of the current episodes have a recency bias, in that they see then entirety of newer episodes--warts and all--whereas they are remembering the very best of the older episodes. Even seeing episodes in reruns, they tend to be cut to an hour, so the worst sketches don't ever see the light of day again.
It's also easy at the time to make negative comparisons between newer casts and older ones because you don't yet know where the newer cast members are headed. Somebody complaining about the cast in 1998 and saying that they don't have anything on Bill Murray didn't know that Will Ferrall was on his way to becoming this generation's Bill Murray. Someone complaining about the cast in 2008 didn't know that Amy Pohler was going to be arguably the best comic actress on TV, or that Andy Samburg would star in a hit sitcom and win a Golden Globe, or that Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudakis and Bill Hader would be movie stars, or that Seth Meyers would host his own late-night show.