Saturday Night Live opens with Access Hollywood coverage of this weekend’s Oscars red carpet preshow. Between awkward shots of women’s feet, Mario Lopez (Marcello Hernandez) and either Maria Menounos or Kit Hoover (Heidi Gardner) interview the ceremony’s new head of security, “notoriously calm and sane person” Mike Tyson (Kenan Thompson); “refreshingly down to earth” nominee Jamie Lee Curtis (Chloe Fineman); incomprehensible Banshees of Inisherin costars Colin Farrell (Mikey Day) and Brendan Gleeson (Molly Kearny); Michelle Williams’ Jewish acting coach (Sarah Sherman); and finally, Tom Cruise – or, rather, George Santos (Bowen Yang) pretending to be Tom Cruise.
Given how fresh last year’s hilarious Oscar debacle still is in everyone’s mind – thanks in large part to Chris Rock’s brand-new Netflix special reigniting his feud with Will and Jada Pinkett Smith – SNL would have done better to center the entire cold open around it. Instead, they went with the standard scattershot rundown usually reserved for their political material, which doesn’t give any joke enough breathing room to truly land.
Actor and current it-girl Jenna Ortega makes her debut as host. The Scream VI star sprints through a monologue about her days as a child actor, her love of horror movies, and her dark and moody on-screen persona, before bringing on her Wednesday co-star and former SNL cast member Fred Armisen. Armisen starts to reminisce about his time on the show before she boots him offstage. While no fault of Ortega’s, this monologue is as rote as they come, lousy with the tired tropes we’ve seen so many times over the last several years: a clip of the host’s early gig, a story about how they once went on a backstage tour of Studio 8H, a shoutout to their family sitting in the audience. Not every monologue need be some grand production, but neither should so many of them feel so indistinguishable from one another.
On the PBS gameshow School vs School, a team of high school honor students find themselves squaring off against none other than the X-Men. Ortega’s moody, psychic-powered mutant and Day’s Professor X hardly even bother with the game, choosing instead to fight each other. Day gets some laughs by repeatedly yelling, “You’re not ready, child!” at his pupil, but it doesn’t build to anything. A decent high concept with no actual point or punchline.
On a new Please Don’t Destroy, a burnt-out Ortega tags along with Martin, Ben and John for “a beautiful cross-country road trip”. Their sunny musical disposition quickly turns sour, as small annoyances – missed exits, noisy Slurpee-drinking, obtrusive leg hair – leads to vehicular manslaughter. Another solid outing from the PDD boys, who seem to have found their groove again.
Behind the scenes of a new remake of The Parent Trap, Ortega runs lines with a member from the crew (Armisen), who proceeds to go inappropriately off-book. Another sketch that lacks any sort of narrative build.
Things improve slightly in the next sketch, as Ortega’s TikTok star kills the silly vibe of a viral video clip show by telling a couple of deeply upsetting stories, such as her cousin’s accidental decapitation by boat and her pet cat birthing a horrific “cat-ball” creature. Ortega is an ace at dark humor, and the material rises to meet her here, although the sketch, like each one before it, peters out at the end.
In the front parking lot of the local Waffle House, Ortega and Hernandez’s small town high school sweethearts go through a devastating but cathartic breakup, oblivious to the violent chaos unfurling inside the restaurant, where employees and cops battle several trashy, crazed customers. Fitting that SNL should follow up a sketch about viral videos by aping one. As is almost always the case, the show finds itself several weeks behind the social media curve, but at least this sketch has a solid conclusion.
On Weekend Update, Colin Jost brings on Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally (Kearny), who was recently caught leaving lusty comments on sexually provocative thirst trap posts from a young gay man. The married McNally, a “proud conservative” who has helped push the state’s anti-trans bills, tries to play innocent, claiming that he just likes giving positive encouragement his constituents and “talking to voters … or people who could vote in the future”.
The way that Kearny plays the character – so smirkingly cute and knowingly fey – highlights a massive issue with SNL’s political content. Anyone who watched the actual interview McNally gave earlier this week saw him as the dead-eyed, flop sweat-soaked, bumbling grotesque that he is. Not only does SNL’s version pale in comparison comedy-wise, but it also has the effect of sanitizing the sleazeball legislator’s public image. See also: the show’s recurring versions of Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, George Santos and, of course, Donald Trump.
At least when it comes to that last sleazeball, James Austin Johnson is doing an actual impersonation. The very talented Johnson pops in at the desk to fill the last two minutes of Update with a “stockpile of useless impressions I have nothing to do with”, including Adam Driver as Kylo Ren from Star Wars on the show Girls, Batman reading Where’s Waldo, Jay-Z and he’s downstairs, Trump waiting for a negroni, and finally, Bob Dylan’s cellphone on vibrate.
Ortega makes use of her scream queen bona fides in the next sketch, a parody of The Exorcist. Her demonically possessed teenager kicks up a blasphemous racket that awakens her family’s upstairs neighbor, the no-nonsense traffic guard Mrs Shaw (Ego Nwodim). Satan proves no match for the mean grade-schoolers she puts up with daily.
Then, in the final sketch of the night, struggling law firm Donalds & Dominguez seeks to drum up business by turning their hard-to-remember phone number into a catchy jingle with the help of white pop-funk duo Soul Booth (Johnson and Andrew Dismukes). The hard-to-follow musical demos don’t inspire many laughs, but Bowen Yang’s asides about getting absolutely “tanked at Luciano’s” make up for it.
There were more misses than hits on this episode, although things did pick up a little in the second half. Ortega didn’t particularly shine as host, but neither did she flail. The problems with the episode stem from the writing; while it’s unfair, given the show’s extremely tight schedule, to expect every sketch to be fully rounded, the lack of narrative propulsion and cohesion has become one of the most glaring issues with it these days. The same can be said for its defanged caricatures of real-life political figures.
Hopefully, Saturday Night Live can use the short hiatus it’s about to take to fix these issues before it returns on 1 April, if it returns, that is. With negotiations between its editorial team and NBCUniversal stalled, the prospect of a potential strike throws said return date into question.
