Sometimes “Saturday Night Live” mocks the news, and sometimes it makes the news.

Under normal circumstances, the biggest question heading into this weekend’s episode of “S.N.L.” — its first new broadcast in three weeks — might be how it would address the fraught final days of the 2018 midterm campaign. But this was no normal week, and these current events were overshadowed by some very visible developments in the off-camera lives of one of the show’s cast members, and a frequent guest.

There’s the ongoing fallout from the breakup of Pete Davidson and his pop star ex-fiancée, Ariana Grande, which Davidson poked fun at in a recent “S.N.L.” commercial. (Looking past Jonah Hill, this week’s host, Davidson turned to Maggie Rogers, the musical guest, and asked, “You want to get married?” She answered, “No.”) That seemed to prompt some scathing tweets from Grande, who wrote to an unnamed subject: “for somebody who claims to hate relevancy u sure love clinging to it huh.” (Shortly before the broadcast, she also released a new song called “thank u, next.”)

There was also Friday’s arrest of Alec Baldwin, the show’s longtime special guest and resident impersonator of President Trump, after a dispute over a parking space near his Manhattan residence. Police officers responded to a 911 call following an altercation between Baldwin and another driver. The other driver, who was not identified, was taken to a hospital and treated for an injury to his jaw, and Baldwin was given a summons for misdemeanor assault and harassment. (“The assertion that I punched anyone over a parking spot is false,” Baldwin later wrote on one of his Twitter accounts.)

Would “S.N.L” address these incidents on the show? Well, sort of.

Baldwin did not appear in this episode, but his arrest was briefly acknowledged in the show’s cold open, which parodied Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program, “The Ingraham Angle.”