Happy autumn! Remember earlier this year? Sure, technically Donald Trump’s weird soft spot for Zohran Mamdani was back in the news this past week, and yeah, if you ask a New Yorker about the Knicks, chances are they’ll have a fond memory of championship-season fever from this past June. But none of that stuff really seems like material on which to hang a welcome-back-to-the-grind group of sketches. That didn’t stop Saturday Night Live from taking a victory lap alongside Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson to kick off Season 52; having Brunson host felt a bit like an idea that might have hit Lorne Michaels in early July, right before he took off for the Hamptons, and that a booker might have fallen back on when Zendaya said no thank you or Tom Holland couldn’t make the schedule work.
Maybe I’m showing my anti-sports, pro-cinema bias here. But there’s just something listlessly retro about an SNL episode hosted by a low-energy sports star, with a barely-singing girl group as the musical guest to boot. Brunson actually probably exceed the performance mean for the show’s history of athlete hosts; he didn’t seem visibly nervous, especially awkward, or, well, on the downside, like much of anything, least of all excited to be there. He didn’t stumble over his lines too much (which is not to say he avoided stumbling entirely), but his whole vibe is kind of a laid-back deal that discourages mugging (that’s good!) while taking some of the natural gee-whiz charm that neophyte performers sometimes gain from playing themselves (that’s bad!).
Is it funny to see Brunson play an office worker who simply cannot sink a crumpled-up-wrapper-into-the-trash shot? Sure, enough. And is it a funny way into the sports star inevitably playing himself a couple of times a night to have that office worker be Jalen Brunson in a total non-disguise? Yes, a bit. So what do you do after that one (1) sketch is out of the way, along with a super-clunky Knicks-centric monologue and that opener about Trump almost having a crush on the mayor of New York City?
Actually, what you do is have a better-than-average season opener, at least compared to the recent openers featuring Bad Bunny and Jean Smart, though not necessarily in a way that can be reflected in its grade. (The gentleman’s C++? I think that’s something else.) But when Brunson himself doesn’t seem especially excited to be rehashing his team’s win several months ago, the justification for saddling the first episode of the season with a non-acting host seems less clear. It’s a viewer’s fallacy, probably discussed here before, that SNL has the “whole summer” to prepare a new episode; they take an extended break and resume doing episodes in the fall the same way they always do, going from almost nothing to something within the space of a week. This episode felt true to that ethos—only like they turned in a lost week’s worth of material from 10 or 11 weeks ago. Some of it was blessedly untethered from topicality anyway. But some unforced similarities (Mikey Day almost losing it; Ben Marshall playing the straight man) made them feel second-string anyway, despite plenty of laughs.
What was on
The pre-tape riffing on the creation of girl group and musical guest Katseye, with a group of music-industry pros inexplicably crashed by car-accident witnesses played by Jane Wickline and newcomer Grace Reiter, was probably the funniest sketch of the night. Though Wickline got a lot of the laughs just by doing stuff like, say, describing girl-group choreography in a weirdly blunt yet dispassionate tone, Reiter got a decent-sized part off the bat, went for broke as an occasionally nude and not especially dance-happy girl-grouper. This was also the major appearance of Reiter’s fellow newbie Saidah Belo-Osagie, though she had less to do. Excited to see more, though!
The other well-formed sketch was the night’s other pretape, where the next generation of High School Musical gets an education in what basketball (and singing!) performed by a non-white dude might look like. It went on a little long for what it was, but Jeremy Culhane picked up a lot of slack. The Shark Tank bit also gets credit for going way, way better than I was imagining it at the outset.
What was off
Is it time for Mikey Day’s supervillain arc? I was admittedly slow to warm to Day’s performance style, which hits certain notes (especially fake glad-handing in the face of obvious madness) pretty hard, but I have to admit that the guy has longevity, energy, and has written, oh, only dozens of great sketches—at this point probably a greater portion of the SNL canon than many of the acknowledge pantheon. So entering rarified air with his 11th season in the cast, Day unleashes… a sketch about guys making sexual noises because of airport massage chairs, which features Day himself saying “DAVID!” increasingly emphatically over the course of what seemed like about 37 minutes. It’s never great when a sketch seems most promising before it introduces its premise, but that was exactly the case when this one opened on Ashley Padilla and Andrew Dismukes playing a testy couple making a stressful phonecall in an airport.
Day also presided over a support group for guys whose romantic partners were pulled on stage during a Chris Brown/Usher tour, and honestly, when I heard “Chris Brown” and saw a support group, that’s not where I thought this was going. Not that I seriously thought SNL was about to get sobering or satirical about the accusations of violence against Chris Brown. But it is kind of weird to pretend they don’t exist, right? Especially in a sketch where he’s positioned as just a super-hot guy that all the girls love?! The sketch was almost worthwhile just for Kam Patterson’s line about why a just God would allow for the existence of talented lightskins before being gently warned off by Brunson’s character. But mostly it felt like a questionable idea spread thin.
Most valuable player
Jane Wickline shone in both the pre-tape Dream Academy bit and in her Weekend Update appearance as the CEO of Anthropic. On the other hand, you can’t (always) be the MPV without doing a live sketch. So that leaves Jeremy Culhane, who was especially good in the High School Musical pre-tape and his Weekend Update appearance as Tucker Carlson, which… oh, shoot. But Culhane did come in with a timebreaker via that bizarre Shark Tank sketch about glasses outfitted with an alarm that sounds anytime the (male) wearers look at (presumably female) breasts. So Culhane takes it!
Next time
Dakota Johnson doesn’t have a great reputation as host, but she’s done it twice before and her deadpan affect can really hit the spot under the right circumstances. It does feel like Anne Hathway would have been the natural choice were she not in the late stage of a pregnancy, given the mega-year she’s been having, but this actually ties Johnson up with Hathaway with three episodes each. I guess they needed to smooth that out to make their face-off in Verity believable.
Stray observations
• Congratulations to Colin Jost and Michael Che on their record-setting 100th season doing Weekend Update!
• I previously knew Katseye as a girl group who seemingly had a hit where they just keep saying the word “gnarly” over and over—one of those songs where it seems like someone is either being sarcastic or sincerely doesn’t know the meaning of the word in question but I can’t discern which it is. (I was also faintly aware that somewhere between one and five additional members have quit and/or gone missing.) Their lead-off song “Animal” feels like way more of a traditional pop song that’s designed to turn up in movie trailers and stuff. On the other end of their work, if someone submitted “Hootie Frutti” as a parody, I’d say it needs more work.
• A brief follow-up on a plotline from last season: Usually I’m writing these pieces from New York City (albeit nowhere particularly near Rockefeller Center), but tonight I come to you from Hartford, Connecticut, because I did wind up getting Olivia Rodrigo/Wolf Alice tickets, albeit on the secondary market. .
• Because I’m in a hotel with my family, this was the first SNL episode my almost-11-year-old daughter has ever watched live and in full, after a couple of years of watching curated YouTube selections. She was excited to see it because she was already familiar with Grace Eire from her appearances in American High sketches on YouTube Shorts. As far as I can remember, the only instances where I was consciously familiar with a new hire before their debut were the ill-fated and short-lived Michael McKean, Chris Elliott, and Janeane Garofalo additions of the mid-90s. (I was always rooting for Jack McBrayer to turn up before he got 30 Rock, though.) What say you, commenters? Were you fans of any cast members before they got their SNL break?
• In other summer-break news, I spent one of my free Saturday evenings catching Jane Wickline’s show Dukes at the Soho Playhouse. It was mostly just a stitched-together collection of songs like the ones she does on Update, written and performed with fellow comic Liva Pierce, but I laughed a lot. In accordance with my wishes, she was promoted to full cast along Ashley Padilla, her equal.
• Chloe Fineman left the show over the summer without on-air fanfare, continuing a streak of non-goodbyes from the likes of Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim (and broken only by Bowen Yang’s big send-off last year). I know Fineman was somewhat divisive within the show’s fandom but I’ll miss her niche while appreciating that someone needed to volunteer to step aside with that platoon of featured players they have going.
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