One of the pleasures of longtime Saturday Night Live viewership is discovering the alternate reality some hosts create for themselves, a corner of their career that sometimes has almost nothing to do with who they are the rest of the time (at least to us as viewers). Scarlett Johansson has an underrated range as a movie actor; her distinctive vocal tone has led some to misdiagnose her affect as flat, but she’s given a specific vocal-only performance, as a de facto robot no less, that’s as expressive and varied as you could hope for, and she’s found plenty of full-bodied variation both within her strange niche as a woman who transcends space and/or time and outside of it, in movies like Lost In Translation or Marriage Story. What she hasn’t done a lot (at least not as an adult) is the traditional broad comedy, to the point where her work in Don Jon (with her Jersey accent) and Rough Night (opposite Kate McKinnon) felt like extensions of her SNL appearances, rather than the other way around. She’s also semi-quietly become the most frequent female host in Saturday Night Live history, and most of those episodes came before she married Colin Jost, not after.
This is all to say that a ScarJo episode of SNL feels like a no-pressure affair; it’s not about her creating a counternarrative to her movie career (though it very much does do that), or writers nervously assembling sketches about how she’s like, uh, physically attractive, perhaps more so than a regular person (though that’s happened, too). There are certain types of characters she seems especially comfortable doing, particularly of the brassy and New York Metro Area type, perhaps informed by her upbringing her, but she also seems fine with just being random.
There was a little bit of the former on the Season 50 finale, through a Please Don’t Destroy video about a first-class flight from LaGuardia to Newark, and a little bit of the latter in the form of a last-slot Victorian Ladies sketch in the tradition of Mr. Willoughby. Mostly, though, this felt like failed SNL comfort food, as signaled by the agreeable “Piano Man” (Hader-as-Lorne voice: Why now?) monologue, only not quite as chummy as that nearly-full-cast curtain call was. Instead, there’s a victory lap for Miss Eggy (deserved, if unavoidably lacking the original spark), a super-sized edition of the annual Weekend Update Joke Swap (fun, but why did Johansson just kinda have to sit out there for part of it? Weird staging!), a retread of “Bowen’s Straight” (he’s not, though! Get it?), and a couple of sketches that honestly felt like first drafts called up at the last minute.
That’s not how things actually work, of course, but on the other hand, how else do you explain a sketch built around the can’t-miss elements of “Mike Myers has been around,” “Kanye West is still alive and saying horrible things,” “Kenan does not have a Kanye at all,” “Myers and West famously shared TV screens literally 20 years ago” and, in a final coup de grace, “elevator”? It all adds up to the perfect opportunity for Scarlett Johansson to… be in an elevator and then leave as the sketch flops around for several more minutes. This is one of those weeks that makes me yearn for that extra 30 minutes or so of dress rehearsal. Surely there was talk at some point of Myers doing something besides that or, failing that, nothing at all.
In a minor irony, West (whose off-reservation shittiness is deceptively difficult to genuinely satirize) was indirectly responsible for a highlight of the evening: The creative staging on Bad Bunny’s two musical performances. It sounds weird to say so, but West essentially invented redressing the SNL music stage in the 21st century; the attempts at grabby one-upmanship have livened up the show considerably over the years. It was definitely an asset on the finale, which, to be clear, wasn’t all bad. A couple of broad journalism parodies—Johansson’s hapless nightly news anchor trying out puns on a morning show in a lead-off sketch, and the “TV Talk” sketch where Johansson and Yang played interviewers asking a barrage of off impossible questions to cast members on a TV series with one major exception—fired off their jokes with winning quickness, even if both used well-established frameworks and joke styles. (Have they actually done the TV Talk gag before? It felt beyond even the normal levels of familiar.)
And just like that, the SNL 50th-anniversary season closed out, capping a surprisingly underwhelming streak of episodes. Maybe with Johansson directing her own movie (Eleanor The Great, which is debuting at Cannes this month), appearing regularly in Wes Anderson movies (The Phoenician Scheme, also debuting at Cannes), and clocking in for blockbuster dinosaur-chasing (finally, she can get a closer look at those random dinos!), SNL isn’t the same kind of career outlet it used to be, especially now that it’s her partner’s workplace. That’s the thing: This show is always a treasured institution and someone’s weekly grind, and sometimes you’re seeing both at once.
What was on
Part of me thinks that the Please Don’t Destroy video might have been better off as a music video or a piece about airplane paranoia or a more absurd bit about the nonexistent LaGuardia-to-Newark vacation pipeline, but the morphing gags gave it a reason to play out as a pre-tape and had plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, like Johansson’s confusion over who the PDD guys even are, and Bad Bunny as an air traffic controller politely asking the pilot to tell him what color the plane is. But the easy-layup highlight of the night was Johansson, Chloe Fineman, Sarah Sherman, and Heidi Gardner enthusing over their massive, grotesque Victorian lunch and its gruesome aftermath. It’s not any more structurally sophisticated than any number of less successful sketches; it’s just the kind of elaborately yet cleanly executed silliness that the show has been lacking over the past few weeks.
What was off
That Mike Myers/Kanye sketch was the nadir of the night; it might be the worst single sketch of the past couple of months. But you know what had a more classical and fully-formed sketch premise and was still quite bad? The sketch where Marcello Hernandez and Bad Bunny play Spanish-speaking boyfriends whose girlfriends (Johansson and Ego Nwodim) try to goad them into fighting; instead, they secretly commiserate in Spanish about their “crazy” girlfriends. It’s a funny-enough idea, but kept circling the same jokes over and over, especially when it comes time for the girlfriends to speak Spanish they don’t actually understand. That was the sketch’s one opportunity for escalation, and it just relentlessly plateaued. And while the piece was undoubtedly well-executed within its intentions, it was particularly disappointing to make the last pre-tape segment of the entire season just “Bowen’s Straight” but this time… no, actually, there wasn’t really any difference besides swapping out Sydney Sweeney for Johansson.
Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime time)
In a relatively even-handed show, Sarah Sherman stood out getting pants-shamed and fake-fired in the monologue, devouring jellied eels in the Victorian Ladies sketch (where she sounded slightly wistful about the eel that escaped her body and returned to the ocean), and barely keeping it together during that extremely half-baked intimacy-coordinator sketch.
Next time
Well, nothing but emptiness for at least four months. (Remember a time when SNL’s break constituting a full third of the year felt extra-long? Now 20 episodes a year feels like a luxury.) But it’s never too early to start speculating about who’s hosting the premiere. Usually that depends on who has a breakout summer, but I’m going to throw in a guess for Margaret Qualley, which I imagine people have been guessing regularly for the past two years.
Stray observations
- • The Update Joke Swap was, like a lot of long-held annual traditions, hard-pressed to recapture its former freshness. However, the actual Update segment was leaner and funnier this week, with good shots at sewage-infested RFK Jr. and the “McJournalist” burger.
- • Where the hell was? Here’s the part of the recap I haven’t been doing that often where I ask where the hell a particular cast member was. Technically, no one qualified for this category, given that all 15 non-Update cast members were front and center during the monologue song, but as prophesied during that segment, Michael Longfellow was barely there this week, and Chloe Fineman continued an extended near-absence, only really showing up at the very end (albeit for the best sketch of the night).
- • Where the hell will be? Here’s the part of the recap where I ask who might not be here in Season 51 and hope no one messages me to ask me what the hell my problem is. While it’s always possible that some of the newer cast members might not re-up, either out of frustration or the sometimes-cavalier whims of the show, none of the longer-time players that some have thought might leave (ahem, Heidi Gardner) got any whisper of a farewell on this episode, suggesting more of a Cecily Strong-style will-she-or-won’t-she than a hard out for anyone. For whatever it’s worth, Season 41, the last time the show followed a big anniversary year, also had no major changeover (one single-season new hire; no one left). On the other hand, Jost and especially Che have made noise about leaving before, and this super-sized Joke Swap certainly could have functioned as an unofficial goodbye. But surely the longest-serving Update anchors ever would have some on-air acknowledgment when they leave, right? Maybe they’ll set a mid-season farewell next fall. Or maybe they’ll just Irish-goodbye it, like everyone used to (probably not always by choice).
- • The Best of Saturday Night Live: The best episodes of the season for me were John Mulaney, Lady Gaga, and, I almost can’t believe it, the one where Timothée Chalamet was the musical guest (and also the host). The worst, in case anyone was asking, were Shane Gillis, Jean Smart, and Mikey Madison. But mostly Shane Gillis.
- • Per my grades, and despite my feeling that this was a disappointing outing, this last episode matches the season average, which comes out to roughly a B- and, as you all know, indicates that I hate the show and everyone on it with all of my heart. (I will say, I’m a big believer in how even individual grades can encompass a variety of reactions, but that Charli XCX and Ariana Grande episodes from back in fall probably deserved a notch better than a B- in retrospect; this certifies all of my other grades as correct and entered on the Saturday Night Live transcript.)
- • Thanks for anyone who was following along all season! This is truly a dream gig for me as a three-decade fan.
- • My almost-fifth-grader has gotten into doing rounds of SNL sketches on YouTube, so I imagine that will be my main SNL content over the summer. (That, and the documentary about the Julia Sweeney character Pat that’s playing the Tribeca Film Festival in a few weeks. I did not make this up.) I’ve shown her plenty (anything that was on the Christmas or Thanksgiving specials in recent years, she’s probably seen), but suggestions for not-that-wildly-inappropriate favorites always welcome!
