The staple of US television – Saturday Night Live (SNL) – has made a debut here in the UK. I will admit at the front end I haven’t seen the British version as yet. But I have read a number of the critic’s reviews and the reception has been fairly mixed.

One of the more positive reviews, mustering up a whopping 3-stars – was Lucy Mangan for the Guardian. Whilst she ultimately insisted the show “worked”, it is hard to escape the fact that she damned the whole thing with faint praise. For it was she who asserted ‘It could have been a lot, lot worse. And it could have been a lot better.’ That is leaving out the specific points she insisted really were properly awful.

Ed Power in the Daily Telegraph said the show was “shockingly competent” and gave it a four-star review. All of which sounds promising until we read that certain bits had a ‘whiff of hastily written student sketch’ and chunks of the show were ‘hit and miss’.

The majority seem to land somewhere around a 2 or 3 star review, suggesting the programme was not excellent. Charlotte Ivers for The Times sums up the overarching mood when she says, ‘the spark is not there yet’. There were those who were much harsher in their critique. Baz Bamigboye called it ‘painful’ and ‘beyond seriously unfunny’.

It is worth reminding ourselves that SNL is a mainstay of American TV. It is also worth reminding ourselves that TV does not always translate well overseas. For every example you can find of The Office – successfully sold abroad the world over – you have a Whose Line Is It Anyway, which really flopped in the UK. Sometimes formats don’t translate well, sometimes programmes as a whole don’t translate well, sometimes thing just need a bit of a tweak and they’re good elsewhere.

The reason this caught my eye is it mirrors something of what occurs in the church with frequency. Just as TV formats don’t always translate well, church models, media and practice don’t always translate brilliantly across contexts either. Not every planting model is appropriate in every place, not every Christian course is helpful in every place, not every form of what we do at our church is appropriate in every place.

Sometimes things will be replicable and sometimes they won’t. Sometimes we can take something done elsewhere and replicate it lock, stock and barrel in our context. Sometimes we can take a thing and, with a few adjustments to our context, make it fit for our purposes. Sometimes we can try to follow what others do and it just won’t work on any level for us.

It seems there is a task that TV producers and church leaders have in common. Namely, we must think carefully about our forms and practices and work hard to contextualise them. Sometimes we will adopt models and programmes from elsewhere that work wonderfully for us; other times they will be utterly incompatible for the people we are engaging. Working out which is which is both difficult and the entire trick!