To be sure, Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney are not (all?) “Gangnam Style”-irrelevant over a year later, but few could have predicted how much more turbulent the new 2013 season would be for the show. In addition to the above-mentioned, gone are reliable everymen Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. And when “Weekend Update” co-anchor Seth Meyers takes over Late Night early next year, as Splitsider notes, the remaining cast members will all have been born after SNL’s halcyon premiere year of 1975.

But you know the old saying: the more things change, the more they ObamacareshutdownDrunkUncleMileytwerk. Few television shows are as simultaneously resistant to and reliant upon rapid changes in casting, news cycles, and zeitgeists as Saturday Night Live, an ontological ebb and flow that owes largely to its liveness.  The first two episodes of the show’s new season capture this dynamic perfectly.

The season premiere began with a cold open addressing the political theme of the week, a routine the program began at roughly the same time Jon Stewart proved the demographic utility of mixing comedy and news.  Host Tina Fey’s subsequent monologue lightly hazed the five new cast members in order to set up that most SNL-iest of sketches, the gameshow whose premise wears thin right after its title card.  “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?,” however, seemed less about further embarrassing freshmen cast members than it was about reminding them (and viewers) of the show’s proud place in the American television heritage.

If SNL’s season premiere re-asserted its right to self-importantly navel gaze, last week’s Miley Cyrus-hosted follow up found the show manically reaching outside its comfort zone for relevance.  With more familiar faces behind the impersonations, sketches like the “50 Shades of Grey Auditions” or the Piers Morgan Live parody might have felt a little less slapdash. Instead, the episode struggled to turn its instantly dated cultural references into a proper showcase for both the veteran and new performers.

Certainly, given the dearth of competition at the timeslot combined with the growing size of its cultural footprint, SNL isn’t going anywhere despite a pretty forgettable start to the season.  What is clear from the early returns, though, is that this season marks one of those once-a-decade changings of the guard.  The show will additionally have to find an original way to engage with digital media culture, and it cannot continue to ignore its absurdly high quotient of white dude-ness.  Yet for all these changes, SNL will return this weekend, putting forth an effort very different from, and yet somehow fundamentally similar to, what it has offered for almost 40 years.  Doing so–even in today’s time-shifted, cross-platform, demo-obsessed media milieu–continues to make it a key case for understanding American television culture.

Earlier this week, E! Online unveiled the video for Miley Cyrus’ new single, “Can’t Be Tamed,” a track from her upcoming album Robot. In it, as a rare breed of something called an Aves Cyrus (which E! explains as a “sexy dancing pop star bird”), Miley spreads her wings and steps out of her cage, proclaiming she can’t be tamed.  For the 17-year-old Disney Channel star, the metaphor couldn’t be more obvious – or strategic.

The fourth and final season of her hit show Hannah Montana is set to air later this year, and after the season three finale, “Is Miley Saying Goodbye?” the transition out of her role as childish tween star has been on its way for some time. After several Hannah Montana soundtracks, Cyrus released a cross-over pop album, aptly titled Breakout, under her own name on Disney’s Hollywood Records in 2008 and starred in the feature film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ love story, The Last Song (from Disney’s Touchstone) in March of this year. But despite the conglomerate’s best efforts at built-in transitions (ahem, the Best of Both Worlds), the move away from her kid TV moniker hasn’t been easy. Between candid photos of her exposed bra, news of her 20-year-old underwear model boyfriend moving in with her family, and the outcry over her photos in Vanity Fair, Cyrus’ star image signals just how much American culture values the discursive construct of childhood innocence and the denial of young female sexuality. Her Disney Channel show, Hannah Montana, may be a prime example of “girl power” pop feminism or Angela McRobbie’s concept of post-feminist masquerade (as Morgan Blue has insightfully written about), but Cyrus’ own struggles to be taken seriously as something other than young innocent girl signals the complexities of such configurations. She at once upholds the good girl/bad girl binary while also trying desperately to negotiate beyond it.

“Can’t Be Tamed,” then, is a significant rhetorical contribution to Cyrus’ cross-over star persona. As part Lady Gaga meets Night at the Museum, part “the Couple in the Cage” meets Britney Spears’ Circus, the video uses extensive costuming, make-up, and metaphor to add another angle to Cyrus’ image. And it seems to be working (for the most part) as a transitioning mechanism. Entertainment Weekly hails the video as the official “death to Hannah Montana,” reminding readers that Cyrus is, in fact, almost 18 years old;  AOL’s entertainment blog PopEater sums it up as a “move that she had to make,” and even Perez Hilton, who frequently refers to her with the nickname “Slutty Cyrus,” seems to like the video, saying that it “screams Britney circa her golden years, and we’re not mad! …It’s hot, hot, hot.” Directed by Robert Hales (who’s also worked with Nine Inch Nails, Gnarls Barkley, Janet Jackson, and of course, Britney Spears), the video’s sets, costumes, and loads of eye-shadow certainly construct a vivid, contemporary aesthetic, but the actual song is mediocre, and even the best costumes can’t hide the fact that Miley can’t really dance that well.

What does Cyrus herself have to say about the video? She told Ryan Seacrest recently that “yes, it’s a sexy video. But it’s also about explaining the song and living the lyrics…it’s about I don’t want to be in a cage, I want to be free and do what I love…and make the movies or the music that I want.” But even if “Can’t Be Tamed” allows Cyrus to step outside the cage in which her star image was once contained and claim the performance of her sexuality, issues of agency and spectacle of course still remain. Many young (white) female stars go through similar moments of overt sexual performativity to transition from child/teen to adult star – Britney became a Slave, Christina Aguilera got “Dirrty,” Jessica Biel Gear-ed up, Elizabeth Berkley became a Showgirl … but while many young male stars experience hardships growing up in Hollywood, significantly fewer wrestle with having to at once claim ownership of and put on display their sexual identity (exceptions always exist, though. See: Daniel Radcliffe in Equus). To put it another way, regardless, I don’t think we’ll be seeing the Jonas Brothers or Zac Efron don a $25,000 corset with giant black wings and sing about breaking out of a cage to advance their star image. Although that would be cool. I think.

One thing’s for sure, though – the music video is alive and well. Between E! Online, YouTube/Vevo, and being embedded in blogs like this one, “Can’t Be Tamed” is another  example of how music videos are continuing their relevance in pop culture discourses. With significant distribution and buzz building on the internet – like “Telephone” – “Can’t Be Tamed” puts Miley Cyrus in the same sentence with Lady Gaga, a surprising feat unto itself, and one that opens up a plethora of other issues, ones you’re welcome to bring up in the comments. Now, if only GaGa could make it onto the Disney Channel…