"Saturday Night Live" delivered a strong episode from a city digging its way out of hurricane damage, with a look at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's sign-language interpreter and host Louis C.K. as Abraham Lincoln.
You've seen Mayor Michael Bloomberg's animated interpreter -- but she had nothing on Christie's, played by Nasim Pedrad.
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C.K. did his monologue standup style, delivering a story about an old woman he met while stranded at an airport. Later he reimagined his FX sitcom, "Louie," as the story of a befuddled president with no black friends.
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As he prepared to shoot the episode, C.K. sent an email to fans in which he described working on the show "the middle of New York City, which was just slammed by a hurricane, leaving behind so much trouble, so much difficulty and trauma, which everyone here is still dealing with every day."
"Last night we shot some pre-tape segments in Greenwich Village, which was pitch black dark for blocks and blocks, as it has been for a week now," he wrote in an email, which he said he typed out five hours before going on air.
"I can't tell you how that felt," he added. "And you also had a palpable sense that inside each dark window was a family or a student or an artist or an old woman living alone, just being in the dark and waiting for the day to come back," he wrote. "Like we were all having one big sleep over, but not so much fun as that."
"This is how a lot of the city is still. I know people in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, New Jersey, all over, are not normal yet. And not normal is hard.
"And here at 30 Rock, these folks are working so hard this week. There are kids in the studio every day, because members of the crew and staff had to bring them to work. Many people are sharing lodging. Everyone is tired. But there's this feeling here that we've got to put on a great show. I'm sure it feels like that here every week. But wow. I feel really lucky to be sharing this time with these particular good folks here at SNL."