It makes sense that Birthday Girl Dakota Johnson rose to fame in a series of movies that are descended from Twilight. While she hasn’t yet proven herself as terrific an actress as Kristen Stewart—it’s hard to picture Johnson nailing three parts as different as Spencer, Personal Shopper, and Certain Women—she strikes a similar contrast between the locked-in character-specific ennui of her indie work (A Bigger Splash, say, or Cha Cha Real Smooth) and a more restless, discomfited form of it in more mainstream fare. The main difference is that Johnson can appear more actively hostile toward material she seems to find subpar. (Stewart seems to have long since decided to either not do that material, or have fun with it.) And this is exactly what makes Dakota Johnson a surprisingly strong Saturday Night Live host.
No, that’s not a crack at the sometimes shaky quality of SNL writing. Nor is that to say that Johnson is one of those stars who comes on the show seemingly excited to prove they can do anything, like Emma Stone or Johnson’s current Verity co-star Anne Hathaway. Over her three episodes as host and especially in her latest outing, Johnson has gravitated toward a couple of highly specific character types: a chilly deadpan beauty (perhaps a girlfriend who is mean and/or scary?), and a parody of 21st century, vaguely entrepreneurial femininity who is barely concealing some kind of mania or brokenness beneath her suspicious enthusiasms. The contempt or boredom that might flash across her face during a mediocre movie gets channeled into some genuinely unhinged characters.
Accordingly, Johnson was most convincing in this latest episode hawking guns for women that resemble female anatomy even more specifically than regular guns that can stand in for penises, or playing a niche content creator getting ready for various severe and often outdated mental health treatments. Johnson can never be accused of overacting (well, maybe her endless fiddling with soda cans she seemed to refuse to drink from in Madame Web), which on SNL serves as an ironclad guarantee that she won’t shatter the illusion of her weirder characters with excess mugging. There was an even a strange continuity, intentional or not, between this episode’s sketches and some of her other appearances: Her gossip-hungry nurse arrived toting a Big, Dumb Cup, while her attempts to sell guns or L’Oreal partnerships recalled her faith in a bizarre Shark Tank t-shirt. And though Tall, Plain Boyfriend wasn’t presented in a Johnson-hosted episode, or any episode at all—it was cut for time and seems only to exist on YouTube shorts—Mean, Scary Girlfriend nonetheless felt like a companion piece, and similarly focused on repackaging antisocial tendencies as a commodity. Not a bad metaphor for certain forms of stardom, come to think of it.
The drawback of Johnson’s performance style is that it doesn’t pair well with just anyone—in fact, sometimes it seems wholly unsuited to live sketches in general. In pre-taped pieces, which tonight were the episode’s two best-formed sketches, it’s probably easier for actors to modulate to similar levels, or adjust their contrasts as needed with multiple takes, or get bigger laughs from edits and asides that don’t really play in a live setting. On the live show, pairing, say, Johnson and Ben Marshall as Game of Thrones-inspired characters can make a sketch feel centerless, with an offbeat-in-a-bad-way rhythm. (Cool dragon puppet in that bit, though!) It’s not just Marshall, either; Johnson also felt a little out of sorts playing straight woman via a non-impression of Elizabeth Banks hosting Press Your Luck, flummoxed by a contestant (Ashley Padilla) too excited by the rudimentary gameplay to walk away with her absurd winnings.
At her worst, Johnson can come across as blasé, slowing sketches to her own pace without any particular pathways to laughs in mind. There was a bit of that in her monologue, too, even as she made self-deprecating jokes about Madame Web, looking for attention, and dating musicians. That last part turned into the the focus of the segment, and I couldn’t stop thinking: Wait, am I supposed to be nodding with recognition at Johnson’s reputation for dating rock stars? I’m vaguely familiar with her having dated Chris Martin from Coldplay for a while, but does that count as notoriety? Did no one stop and ask whether material about dating rock stars and bothering Taylor Swift might seem kind of alien?
Still, on the balance, there’s a consistency between Johnson’s episodes so far, even when some of the segments flop, that make her the perfect every-few-years host, a stealth asset who doesn’t overstay her welcome. She has yet to find a really good mainstream movie franchise for her style. Maybe Saturday Night Live is accidentally it.
What was on
“Mean, Scary Girlfriend,” “Guns For Women,” and “Colorado Vicky” were all enough to keep the show above the level of last week’s premiere; Johnson’s lower energy levels are simply more sly and intentionally funny than a laid-back-seeming athlete. But let’s not count out the absurdism of “Amazing Tales Of Truth,” where host Andrew Dismukes introduces a comatose father (James Austin Johnson), his songbird of a daughter (Veronika Slowikowska, who can apparently real-deal sing), and a deeply silly punchline following an absurdly long and sincere set-up. I don’t want to oversell an insubstantial-by-design final sketch of the night, but it was the rare 2020s-era sketch that felt like it could have been performed in 1978 or 1991, when trust levels in this kind of thing seemed a lot higher.
What was off
The hospital-gossip sketch began promisingly only to dead-end into Character Doesn’t Know How a Social Convention Works territory. In the lead-off spot, that Press Your Luck thing kept zapping itself back to life through Padilla’s outbursts, equal parts funny (her insistence that it would be better to win a lot of Advil did make me laugh out loud) and troublingly Wiig/McKinnon-adjacent (that thing where a superhumanly talented woman is expected to knock what feels like a thin first-draft sketch out of the park).
But both of those minor failures pale next to the season’s first epic Weekend Update filibuster, screeching the show to a halt for 20 full minutes. No one needs to hear me picking apart more lazy Jost/Che newscracks; yes, they each really score at least once or twice per segment, but that doesn’t stop them from taking dozens of lazy, who-cares-if-this-connects swings, and then often doing unnecessary side commentary. Instead, let’s take a look at the surprisingly dire Update guest spots. First: Sarah Sherman innocent, even if I couldn’t tell what accent she was supposed to be doing as a puffed-up matchmaker. (Based on her saying “jorb,” I guess she went to high school with Riblet and by extension Michael Che?!) But this unofficial recurring bit where Mikey Day and Marcello Hernández scream and get in each other’s faces in different guises always drags on endlessly; I was in slack-jawed disbelief when Hernández’s Grand Theft Auto character bickering with Day’s Link from Zelda whipped out a bazooka a full minute after the bit should have ended.
Meanwhile, Kam Patterson’s own recurring bit about how it’s funny to think that he might care about something so stupid or gay, but is also the writers’ fault for not giving him the right material to show off his winning personality has also worn thin. It mostly plays like he ran out of stand-up material to repackage and now is coasting off various ideas about what he wouldn’t do. The only real upside of Update taking up roughly a third of the show’s actual airtime is that there will almost certainly be a decent cut-for-time sketch up later in the week. (Although for all my complaints about the supersized Update length, the show still managed to come in with a typical twelve segments. It probably helped that Turnstile plays fast.)
Most Valuable Player
This wasn’t an episode where any particular cast member dominated; instead, a few people stepped in for perfect little performances. So I’ll single out James Austin Johnson as the seemingly accommodating but actually severely troubled dead in the “Colorado Vicky” sketch, if only for the hilariously chilling way that his affable smile dropped from his face every time he turned to leave the girls’ sleepover.
Next time
Lorne’s One That Got Away comes back, again; Shane Gillis joins Johnson in the three-timer club, with musical guest Rosalía. The bar for me is a D+ so, you know, fingers crossed.
Stray observations
• Taylor Swift, everybody! I feel like if she’s as online as she seems, she could have made a better self-deprecating joke about her new songs, but maybe I expect too much from her.
• This is the first time I’ve seen a musical-guest performance on SNL start with a drum solo in… well, offhand, ever, though I’m sure it must have happened at some point. At the risk of sounding rockist, the sheer energy of Turnstile was also a major upgrade over the warmed-over 2000s pop we got last week.
• Jeremy Culhane is great casting as JD Vance. Now what if they—hear me out—wrote something satirizing Vance beyond “eh, people don’t like him that much”? And then, say, Culhane was encouraged to hone in on some particular aspect of Vance’s whole vile deal, in order to make fun of him? It might give James Austin Johnson and Colin Jost a little break from the endless round-robin between the two political impressions the show seems convinced actually work.
• OK, one more knock on Weekend Update: They admit that finding a joke in the story about campus rape at Cornell is tough, so they… do a super-insular bit joking about how Jost is the picture of preppy Ivy League privilege, so Che can smirk about essentially repeating jokes Sarah Sherman was doing about Jost five or six years ago?
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