KATSEYE Went Back to 'Dream Academy' on SNL, and the Joke Cuts Deeper Than It Looks
On the Season 52 premiere, SNL turned KATSEYE's own origin story into a sketch. The gag lands. The more interesting story is what a purpose-built SNL sketch says about a group not yet three years into its career.
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Saturday Night Live opened its 52nd season on September 26 with New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson hosting and KATSEYE as the musical guest. The night's sharpest moment was not either of the group's two performances. It was a pre-taped sketch, detailed by NBC Insider, that sent the group back to "Dream Academy," a parody of the very competition show that created them.
The premise is the punchline
KATSEYE was assembled through The Debut: Dream Academy, the HYBE and Geffen Records survival competition that whittled thousands of hopefuls into a six-member group in 2023, a process later chronicled by Netflix in the docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE. The sketch imagines a chaotic new season of that same show, with the members returning as polished season-one champions who have to evaluate a fresh crop of contestants with no business being there.
New featured player Grace Reiter, making her SNL debut, plays a hopeful who apparently believed the academy would teach her how to control her dreams. The comedy runs on the gap between the contestants' delusion and the group's strained politeness, per Stereogum's recap.
At a glance
- The event
- KATSEYE appeared as musical guest and in a pre-taped "Dream Academy" parody sketch on the Saturday Night Live Season 52 premiere, September 26, 2026, hosted by Jalen Brunson.
- The parody target
- The sketch spoofs The Debut: Dream Academy, the HYBE and Geffen Records survival competition that formed KATSEYE in 2023.
- The meta layer
- That same formation was documented in the 2024 Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, so the group is parodying the exact show that made it.
- Grace Reiter
- New SNL featured player Grace Reiter made her debut in the sketch as a contestant who thought the academy taught her to control her dreams.
- Who appeared
- Four of six members took part: Daniela Avanzini, Lara Raj, Megan Skiendiel, and Yoonchae Jeung. Sophia Laforteza and Manon Bannerman were absent, both on wellness breaks.
Our read: the sketch is a bigger deal than the performance
Here is the part worth sitting with. A musical-guest booking is a milestone plenty of acts reach. A sketch written around your group, by name, using your actual origin story as the engine, is a different tier of arrival. SNL does not build a scripted bit around an act it expects viewers to shrug at. For the joke to land, the audience has to already know that KATSEYE came from a reality competition. The show is betting that they do. For a group not yet three years into its career, that assumed familiarity is the real headline, more than any chart position.
The meta layer keeps folding
There is something almost dizzying about the setup. A group manufactured on a survival show, then documented by Netflix as it was being manufactured, now performing a parody of survival shows on the most established sketch program in American television. Each layer is the machine commenting on itself. You can read that as savvy, a group and its label leaning into the artificiality instead of hiding it, which is more honest than most pop mythology. You can also read it as the same commercial apparatus getting paid to sell the story of how it sells things. Both readings are true at once, and that tension is exactly why the bit is more interesting than a straight performance would have been.
The absence in the room
One detail the comedy glides past deserves a mention. Only four of KATSEYE's six members took part: Daniela Avanzini, Lara Raj, Megan Skiendiel, and Yoonchae Jeung. Sophia Laforteza and Manon Bannerman were absent, both stepping back for wellness reasons, as NBC Insider notes. A sketch that mines comedy from the grind of a pop factory, performed by a lineup thinned by two members who needed a break from that grind, carries an irony the writers almost certainly did not intend. It is the quiet reminder underneath the gag.
Megan Skiendiel, one of the four on camera, is a Honolulu native who worked as a child actor on Disney Channel before the competition. Even a group "built from scratch" was built from people who had already spent years inside the industry. The reality-show framing sells a clean origin story. The résumés underneath it are messier and, frankly, more interesting.
Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site with no affiliation with Saturday Night Live, NBC, KATSEYE, HYBE, or Geffen Records. Every factual claim above is drawn from the outlets linked in the text and listed below. The opinions are ours.
Sources & further reading
- NBC Insider: KATSEYE Went Back to Dream Academy in Saturday Night Live's Parody with Grace Reiter
- NBC Insider: Who Are the Members of KATSEYE?
- Stereogum: KATSEYE Perform On SNL Season Premiere, Appear In Dream Academy Parody
- NBC News: Jalen Brunson kicks off the new season of SNL
- Netflix Tudum: Pop Star Academy, Who are the KATSEYE Members?
- Wikipedia: Megan Skiendiel
