What does “Saturday Night Live” look like without professionally crafted costumes, sets or hair and makeup? Without a studio audience or the ability of its cast members to be in the same place at the same time? This weekend, for the first time in the show’s 45-year history, audiences got the chance to find out.

Beginning with this week’s opening sketch, which showed all 17 cast members joining in a video call from their home quarantines and ended with Kate McKinnon exclaiming, “Live from Zoom, it’s sometime between March and August!,” it was clear this would not be your customary episode. Still, the show did all it could to keep things familiar, bringing in Tom Hanks as a guest host and Chris Martin as a musical performer and drawing upon its roster of famous alumni and celebrity pals.

It was a little over a month ago — March 7, to be exact — that “S.N.L.” broadcast its most recent live episode from its usual home at Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center. Daniel Craig (whose new James Bond movie, “No Time to Die,” had been postponed four days earlier) was the host; the Weeknd was the musical guest; and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had just dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, made a surprise appearance in the show’s cold open.

There were even a couple of sketches that joked about how the spread of coronavirus could have unexpected effects on our lives. We laughed at the time.