Michael Che’s ‘Shot in Minnesota’ Is Streaming Now on Netflix: His Third Hour, Taped Live at First Avenue

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2026

Michael Che has stepped away from the desk — for an hour, anyway. Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, the Saturday Night Live star’s third solo stand-up special for Netflix, is streaming now, released worldwide today. Taped at First Avenue in Minneapolis and directed by Che himself, it is his first new hour in five years, and it lands at a very Che moment: he and Colin Jost have just begun a record 13th season co-anchoring “Weekend Update” — and the first clip Netflix released from the special is, naturally, a joke at Jost’s expense.

02 Four shows at First Avenue

The special was recorded at First Avenue, the downtown Minneapolis club, across four performances on August 28 and 29. Che had been building the hour on the road, and LateNighter first reported back in July that First Avenue would host the taping. Four shows over two nights is the classic special format — multiple audiences, multiple takes, one seamless hour in the edit — and the room doubled as a workshop, with Che running the material in front of live crowds until it was ready for the cameras.

First Avenue is not just any room. It is one of the most storied stages in American live music, the club Prince turned into a landmark in Purple Rain, and its low ceiling and brick walls give the special a club intimacy a theater taping can’t fake. The building started life as a Greyhound bus depot and has been a music room since 1970, its exterior walls painted with stars honoring the acts that have headlined it. Che also took more control than he has on any previous special: he directed Shot in Minnesota himself and serves as executive producer alongside Matthew Vaughan, with production company Rotten Science. Netflix’s official billing for the hour says Che takes aim at racism, marriage, free speech and everything in between — fair warning for anyone who only knows him in a suit, behind a desk, reading other people’s punchlines.

03 The first look comes for Colin Jost

Netflix announced the special on September 28 with a first-look clip, and the streamer led with the relationship Che’s television audience knows best. In the clip, Che says what really bothers him about his co-anchor being married to Scarlett Johansson is that Jost acts like it’s normal — like it isn’t a miracle. The bit builds from there into Che explaining why the women he dates would make questionable dinner guests at the Jost–Johansson house. That is the premise, and it is all we will retell: the rest belongs to the special.

The choice of clip is strategic, and the AV Club said the quiet part out loud: Jost material is catnip for “Weekend Update” fans, the enormous audience that knows Che primarily as one half of the desk’s insult-trading duo. But Che has always treated stand-up as the main job and television as the detour — the form he started in and, by his own account, the place he can actually let loose. This hour is the standing test of that claim: sixty minutes, one microphone, no desk, no partner, nowhere to hide.

04 Five years between hours

Shot in Minnesota is Che’s third solo hour for Netflix. Michael Che Matters arrived in 2016, when he was two seasons into the Update job and still, first and foremost, a stand-up on the rise; nearly a decade on, it remains the fan favorite. Michael Che: Shame the Devil followed in 2021, to a cooler reception. In between hours he co-headlined the 2024 Peacock showcase Colin Jost & Michael Che Present: New York After Dark, taped live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, and fronted two seasons of his sketch series That Damn Michael Che. The pattern across the decade is a comedian who treats the network job as a platform and the stand-up stage as the point — which is why a five-year gap between hours reads less like neglect than like a man waiting until he had something to say.

It is a crowded release day at the streamer. Netflix also dropped TYSON, its four-part documentary series on Mike Tyson, today — if you are building a Tuesday-night queue, start with the laughs and end with the reckoning. You can find the artwork, details and tracking for Che’s special on its Previously title page.

05 A record run at the desk

The timing is no accident. Saturday Night Live opened its 52nd season on September 26, with Che and Jost beginning their 13th season together behind the “Weekend Update” desk — the longest run of any pairing in the segment’s history. The pair took over the desk in 2014, Che barely a season removed from the writing staff, and they have outlasted every anchor combination that came before them. Netflix announced the special two days later. Che has joked for years about leaving the show; instead he keeps re-upping, and the desk job that was supposed to be a chapter has become a record.

That tension — the club comic holding the most visible desk job in comedy — hums underneath everything in Shot in Minnesota. Whether the hour starts a more regular stand-up cadence or begins another five-year wait is up to Che. For now, it is live: Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota is streaming now on Netflix.