And Your Host…
Miles Teller starred in one of the best cold opens in years the last time he hosted, revealing the star of Whiplash and Top Gun: Maverick to not only have a surprisingly effective goofy steak but also a not-inconsiderable knack for sketch work. It’s always a pleasant surprise when an A-lister is so evidently willing to get down and silly.
This time around, there wasn’t anything as good as that self-referential season opener, although once more Teller appeared front and center in the cold open New York mayoral debate, essaying failed former mayor/failed former Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo. I’ll get to the sketch itself down below, but Teller channeled his impression of the brusquely corrupt and handsy Cuomo with the same glint of eagerness and commitment that marked his Peyton Manning. And if his tossed-off monologue wasn’t anything special (SNL having apparently given up on monologues for non stand-ups at this point), Teller at least bravely expressed his love for the Roxbury guys, complete with long ago Kattan-styled Halloween costume.
Shame then that this was a largely pedestrian episode. With the swath of surprise offseason firings and Lorne Michaels’ hints about shaking things up, Season 51 has been putt-putting along with a resolute lack of urgency or drive, and tonight’s show was another illustration of the concept of… “fine.” A game show here, a couple of guest star ringers there, a studious avoidance of controversy everywhere, episode 4 felt less like a new season trying to find itself and more like a mid-season rut come months too early. Teller was in there swinging—he’s one of those movie stars able to translate their presence to live TV—but the show itself rarely roused itself.
The Best and the Rest
The Best: On a decidedly lukewarm night, the only sketch that broke through with any sort of loopy energy was the police press conference sketch. Since SNL has long worked to deprive sketch writers from getting credit for individual pieces, I’m just going to guess that this was another Dismukes joint, as he not only took the lead as a reporter with a side hustle but the sketch’s happy veer into absurdity has that ‘Mukes feeling. A serial killer is at large, with James Austin Johnson and Miles Teller’s mustachioed coppers fielding press inquiries about the latest crime, only for journalist Dismukes to persistently ask for feedback about the recent rejection letter he got from DC Comics concerning his creation Gar-Girl. (“She’s a half gargoyle, half girl, all justice—a crimefighter with the powers of a gargoyle and the problems of a teenage girl.”) With an impressive ‘stache of his own, Dismukes’ reporter asks his follow-up questions (“Sound like a hard pass?” “So do you think they want a rewrite?”) with the staccato deadpan cadence of his fellow reporters, the straight-faced silliness gradually sweeping all assembled cops and journos up in his tale of a hybrid, gargoyle-based vigilante. Blessedly, the comic turn isn’t elaborated upon at all, allowing the absurdity to ramp up according to its own escalating weirdness. (Queried as to why Gar-Girl’s origin story includes a radioactive accident victim masturbating into his toilet and thus contaminating the city’s water supply, Dismukes replies matter-of-factly, “He was excited to be alive.”) Throw in Ashley Padilla’s reporter getting so swept up in the tale that she explodes in high-pitched fury at the skeptical cops, and this is the sort of 10-to-one style sketch I could watch fill up an entire show.
The Worst: On the other hand, the newsroom sketch suffered mightily from both over-emphasis and slack execution. A new newscast format (the kind where employees attempt to look natural doing their work in the background of a live broadcast) is explained up top by anchor Chloe Fineman. And then by guest expert Kenan Thompson. Meanwhile, the background shenanigans (pratfalls, anime porn on computer monitors, a small fire) play out one by one in isolation, never racking up the momentum the gag requires. (The series of pre-tapes employing the foreground seriousness/background wackiness concept has been executed much better over the past few seasons.) Here, the on-air talent dutifully comments on each successive background gag, just in case we didn’t catch Mikey Day spilling an entire carrier tray of smoothies or Jane Wickline losing control of the copier, and it gets pretty deadly. It’s not a terrible sketch, just a deeply ordinary one, but its very bland competence serves to underscore Season 51’s whole vibe so far.
The Rest: The Dismukes-Padilla team had a big night, which is fine by me. Andrew Dismukes and Ashley Padilla are two of the performers I most look to these days for original ideas (him) and compellingly lived-in performances (her) and if the hockey commercial sketch was just one long, not particularly hilarious bad taste joke, at least they brought some prickly presence to the bit. As a pair of puffed-up commercial directors helming a seemingly benign NHL community service campaign, Padilla and Dismukes inhabited their caricatures in the way very good sketch performers can. Dismukes rebuffing Teller’s objections by boasting in contemptuous rapid fire, “Did you get an avail check to AD a Justin Long Chobani commercial?” is a much funnier conceit than the central joke. And if we see that joke coming a mile away (Teller’s player hails from the Nashville Predators after all), well, that’s what the hockey league gets for choosing that name.
Whenever a joke is so on the nose (“I am a Predator in my community,” etc), there are choices in execution to be made. Sadly, SNL so often opts to underline jokes like this with the boldest, thickest marking pen, either so nobody in the cheap seats will miss them or, more likely, because that’s the most lazy and obvious way to go. Looking back at the press conference sketch, the thrill there comes from the sketch daring to trust us to keep up—we don’t need our hands held by a character stating something to the effect of, “Hey, whoa, the outrageous comic premise you just introduced is outrageous!” Here it’s Teller’s player who constantly interrupts to remind the directors that having him say things like, “As a Nashville Predator, I work in hospitals to make sure sick kids feel touched” is problematic, and yeah, we already got there. There’s a smidge of rewarding escalation (I liked the unfortunate testimonial from the little boy calling Teller “the Predator that forever changed the course of my life”) all undermined by a joke structure SNL just can’t quit.
America’s love of breathless streaming true crime documentaries got a moderately amusing takedown with the Netflix program about three desperate husbands whose dramatic accounts of their wives’ disappearances turn out to be not all that dramatic. The trailer sees Teller, Kenan, and Ben Marshall’s hubbies all relate the crimes, only for it to be gradually revealed that they simply didn’t pay attention to what their long-suffering wives had had planned. (Business trip, family visit, and taking a dump, respectfully.) It’s just a “dudes never listen” joke, but there are some funny escalations, as when Kenan’s bereft hubby is shocked at “the two small men” suddenly demanding dinner before hesitatingly speculating to the police that his wife may have disappeared to “the boob store.” Nobody delivers like Kenan.
The game show sketch was… a game show sketch. As fun as Kenan Thompson is as the host, the deployment of a funny name (here “Gay Fopay”) right out the gate suggests a certain desperation, as do the “wacky” costumes the bleary players are still wearing. Not a good sign for your first sketch of the night. Anyway, the premise here is that the three hungover contestants have to try and remember what they did on Halloween night, a so-so idea Kenan did his best to prop up with some nice underplaying. There’s nothing special whatsoever here, although the sketch did some curlicue callbacks to vary things up a bit. (Veronika Slowikowska’s sexy cat lady’s penchant for blackout biting returns in the hidden camera footage of Ben Marshall peeing into an ATM.) I mean, there’s a workmanlike craftsmanship to the piece, but if you’re going to do another game show sketch, it has to have more of a reason to exist, especially as a show-opener.
Weekend Update Update
Colin Jost and Michael Che approach the ever direr news of the week as if nothing has changed. It’s an increasingly infuriating comic strategy to me, but I see plenty of viewers claim that their Update is the best part of any week’s show, so the longest-tenured Update anchors in SNL history clearly know their SNL audience. Che, for his part at least, went for and attained the sort of gasp-and-groan responses he thrives on. His joke about Trump showing off the newly-remodeled Lincoln bathroom might not dig into Trump’s lavish vanity spending while he’s plotting to cut off food assistance to millions, but Che does speculate that he’s just glad the tacky all-tile floors look very slippery, so I give him a pass.
Che also took aim at the possible SNAP cuts (several judges with human souls seem to have thwarted GOP starve-the-poors plans for the moment) by showing a picture of a handgun and extolling the Second Amendment as hungry peoples’ plan B. (Cue those gasps.) And he turned MAGA mediocrity Kid Rock’s defiant use of an ableist slur back on the stringy little bigot, so good on you, Che.
Still, the duo seems more at home the more they can riff on themselves and each other and move off of the heavy stuff as soon as possible. It’s their thing—to care too much just isn’t compatible with being cute and clever. Jost’s take on all things Trump this week is to show clips of him at the White House trick-or-treat photo op. And, sure, it is genuinely illustrative and alarming to watch Trump decide that placing full sized candy bars atop the heads of costumed children in an “oh, this dude’s literally lost it” sort of way. But I’ll just point to people like Josh Johnson on The Daily Show doing a killer 9 minutes on the shutdown and suggest that comedy can still be both hilarious and effective in times of encroaching fascism and move on.
The Dismukes and Padilla show paid off once more tonight with a wonderfully executed two-hander in the Two People Who Just Hooked Up. Ostensibly there to comment on that ongoing government shutdown totally not happening so the GOP can continue to block release of the Epstein files, the piece was just an excuse for the disheveled pair to fetchingly channel two smitten, post-coital smoochie-faces, their character work yoked to enough weird little detail to make this a tandem standout. That the pair had sex in Jost’s office is one thing, but the running (and baffling) revelation that “door” was their favorite trysting spot kept making me laugh. The two of them were so endearing, weird, and funny that I’ll even forgo any complaint about Update raising a genuine, pressing issue and then ignoring it completely. (Whoops. Apologies.)
Political Comedy Report
The cold open took on the upcoming NYC mayoral election, a home town concern that, like every election under a second Trump regime, doubles as a referendum on whether white Americans are still into this whole democracy thing. (What with Trump openly threatening to illegally withhold money earmarked for the city if Democrat Zohran Mamdani wins and all.)
It was an all-cameo debate as it turns out, since, apart from an amusing turn from Kenan as NY1 moderator Errol Lewis (“the least famous person to be impersonated on Saturday Night Live“), the three candidates were brought to life by Teller (Cuomo), former host Ramy Youssef (Mamdani), and fired-in-disgrace almost cast member Lorne Michaels keeps insisting is a thing, Shane Gillis (GOP nutcase Curtis Sliwa). I’d complain about the cast being robbed of some juicy roles, but at least in the case of Mamdani, the current cast is largely monochromatic enough that bringing in the game Youssef was a necessity. (Emil Wakim, this was your moment.)
As noted, there’s a lot riding on this election, with the rise of charismatically progressive optimist Mamdani contrasted with the monied establishment’s sweaty backing of sour, status-quo sex creep Cuomo, whose increasing also-ran bitterness has seen him plunge eagerly into some depressingly predictable gutter bigotry in the campaign’s final stretch. (So has Sliwa, but he’s genuinely as beanie-capped nuts as he is irrelevant.) So there’s plenty for New York institution SNL to work with here—and the show does virtually nothing with it.
All of Cuomo’s fear-mongering racism is ignored, unless you count the running joke about pronouncing his Muslim opponent’s name as “Norbit Damndaniel” and so forth. Trump and hatchet-faced hatched-man Stephen Miller’s ICE assaults on literally anyone walking New York while brown gets the most fleeting mention. And if Youssef playing up Mamdani’s incessant social media presence and Gillis’ Sliwa’s hyperbolic tales of rough-and-tumble NYC drama (he claims to have been attacked by gang The Lords of Flatbush) have their moments, the whole enterprise deflates in a puff of flabby irrelevance.
And that’s even before Trump shows up. James Austin Johnson’s been candid about his evolving approach to his most high-profile impression, noting recently that it’s becoming harder to play up Donald Trump’s buffoonery when he’s so rapaciously pursuing genuine evil with the help of his cadre of gung-ho white supremacists and ethnic-cleansing thugs. Sadly, if JAJ intends to shade in the darker hues of his Donald Trump going forward, tonight’s cold open appearance was the same old fluffy fascist, complete with a Phantom of the Opera closing number(?) There’s a potent confluence of the local and the national in this election, but Saturday Night Live is so top-down dedicated to its signature middle-road satirical ethos that there’s no sense of stakes. Plus, it just wasn’t particularly funny.
The Property Brothers pre-tape saw the ubiquitous HGTV twins dragooned into planning and executing Trump’s demolition of half the White House. It’s interesting how, amidst the incessant outrages against actual human beings under this jackass and his minions, the sight of the people’s house being despoiled is what’s sticking in so many craws. And I admit, there’s a metaphorical horror in the spectacle that’s hard to ignore, which seemed to imbue the whole sketch with an eerie audience chill.
Teller’s brothers bickered a bit for chuckles, but it was JAJ’s Trump once again pulling focus as he and Chloe Fineman’s Melania happily plotted each day’s new wrecking ball. Jokes about Trump’s Saddam-like fondness for garish, gilded everything and the brothers’ offhand remark about Trump’s taste turning the White House into “outdoor seating at an Olive Garden,” paired with real footage of the White House being ripped apart at the whims of a tacky old sex criminal produced an effectively jarring tone. Trump’s offhand hints about never leaving the house he’s transforming into another boorish private golf club and his frustration that all the non-white day laborers have been rounded up by his secret police likewise played to queasy laughs, with him ultimately siccing ICE on the Canadian TV stars in lieu of payment. If the cold open left JAJ beating the same, tired old beats, this Trump at least channeled some of that darkness he was talking about.
Recurring Sketch Report
Bowen Yang brought back his purse-lipped, pathologically lying George Santos, an impression I generally find funny enough to—say it with me—almost forget the bigger issues the bit is ignoring. (In this case, an unrepentant convicted fraudster being pardoned once he slavishly kissed Donald Trump’s backside to Trump’s satisfaction.) Yang loves a catty weirdo, and the ludicrously untrustworthy former GOP representative’s absurdly obvious lies and occasional bit of pickpocketing gives him plenty to sink his choppers into. The intermittent addition of a phony prison phone prop to talk to fellow high-profile jailbirds like Diddy, Ghislane Maxwell, and “twunk murderer” Luigi Mangione likewise allows Yang to drolly goof on one of the most overtly ridiculous Republican figures in memory, even if… eh, you know what I’m going to say.
Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings
Just promote Ashley Padilla already, Michaels. Her sensibilities are matching up with Dismukes to great effect, which should boost them both, but she’s proven herself fully capable of carrying sketches in a way we haven’t seen in too long. Do it.
On the other hand, the predicted emergence of featured player Jeremy Culhane didn’t happen, again. Veronika Slowikoska got a decent role in the first sketch and Kam Patterson popped in a couple of small parts. As ever, hang tough new kids. It’s a rough first season for almost everybody.
10-To-Oneland Report
It’s no “Belíssima,” but it tries. Marcello Hernandez got his one appearance right at the end as one of a pair (with Teller) of accented Italian waiters fawning over Chloe Fineman’s diner while slighting her flustered date (Mikey Day). The timing tonight was off toward the end of the show, but this one didn’t warrant much more time than it got. The pair’s pun-happy gibberish was low-key amusing, even if the briskness led to some logical leaps as Day intuits that the waiters are “acting like I’m not good enough” for his date. Still, his suspicions are borne out with the one great line as Marcello extols the red wine he’s brought the blushing Fineman while plunking down for Mikey, “some purple stuff that I found.” By all rights, Gar-Girl should have been in the final spot, though.
Stray Observations
That closing “Get the focaccia!” food pun in the last sketch was some genuinely startling standards-baiting. Thought we were heading for another Sabrina Carpenter FCC fine there.
Lorne’s plan to court the young yahoo male demo continues apace. Gillis and Patterson run in the same dubious bro-comic circle, and if this tack winds up with Joe Rogan hosting SNL this season, I’m going to have to learn how to type reviews and projectile vomit at the same time.
Brandi Carlile kicks all the ass, as ever. Her mid-song spoken word breakdown on “Church & State” was more impactful than any of tonight’s SNL political material. (Also dig the lines, “They’re not gonna live forever/Burn tomorrow, never say/They’re here today, then they’re gone forever.”
Carlile was also flanked by the Hanseroth twins, as ever, making it look like she was playing guitar in between two The Edges.
Episode Grade: Another B-Minus effort.
Next week: Host Nikki Glaser, who’s got plenty of non-Riyadh material, and musical guest, the all lower-case sombr.