Bad Bunny is the first Saturday Night Live guest officially booked on a season finale to then be booked on the following season’s premiere. (I thought maybe Buck Henry or Steve Martin had managed this in the ’70s as hosts; close, but no dice. Often one would take the finale and the other would host the premiere.) This is both a neat piece of trivia and a perfect emblem for the behind-the-scenes changes made at the show over the summer. Cast changes are nothing new for SNL—just a couple of years ago, there was a big post-COVID turnover—but with only 90 minutes of OK and familiar TV to go on, it’s easy to focus on the weird on-paper push and pull of these particular changes.
Like, for example, losing five cast members, which even with sadder departures can at least allow the ensemble to breathe a little more… only to hire five more featured players and keep the cast at a swollen 17. Or bringing in five new people without a single woman of color to make up for losing Ego Nwodim. (Nwodim seems to have decided to leave after the new hirings, but still.) Or keeping among the holdovers the four longest-tenured cast members (Kenan gets a pass, but still). Or losing several folks with stand-up backgrounds and hiring several new stand-ups in their place. Given all that, it makes sense to take the musical guest from last season’s uninspired final stretch and make him your marquee name for the different-yet-same show in its premiere—and just to make it clear how cosmetic these changes are, kick things off with Colin Jost, a Trump sketch, a game show sketch, and a restaurant sketch. Later, Jost and Michael Che joked about how long the past nine months of Trump have felt well into their second decade doing the fake news on Weekend Update.
None of this is Bad Bunny’s fault. It’s sort of heartening, actually, that the show will go so all-in on a bilingual musician who performs largely in his first language of Spanish, even if there’s a distinct sense that Lorne Michaels might erroneously think of the guy as his own special discovery. Two hosting gigs in, there’s still a sense that SNL is still writing around Bad Bunny’s limitations to some degree. But that can be a fun exercise, especially when he seems so enthusiastic about bounding into live sketch comedy to play a would-be spontaneous sperm donor or hardcore KPop Demon Hunters fan.
The problem is more that the Season 51 premiere also felt a bit like the show was taking Bad Bunny for granted as automatically delightful, a fixture who can elevate even pedestrian sketches about not knowing how to play Jeopardy! Fair enough that the live audience seemed to agree, and that none of the night’s weakest sketches (the Jeopardy! thing, the sperm-donor thing) went on long enough to tank the episode. It is, however, a neon blinking sign advertising the drawbacks of such a large cast and the blind spots of the show in general, when Bad Bunny’s regular presence on the show still mostly just involves him doing sketches where he either works as the designated oddball against a small group of performers who can do more interesting stuff, or works in sync with Marcello Hernández specifically. Just what the 2020s need: a new Timberlake ‘n Fallon duo.
Still, at its best this episode had some back-to-basics fundamentals. It only featured one pretape—the funny if oddly overcrowded ad for ChatGPTio—and half a dozen live sketches, one of which was carried almost entirely by good old-fashioned sketch acting. Doja Cat was fun. Some material that might have been eye-rolling at the end of Season 50—Bowen Yang in elaborate makeup at the Update desk, Kenan mugging and wigging his way through a series of barely-there characters—was like seeing a bunch of old friends back at school. That’s the show’s eternal comfort and curse, isn’t it? School isn’t really supposed to last for half a century.
What was on
Ashley Padilla is clearly very talented and exactly the kind of sketch-comedy pro who can help hold the show together during transitional or uncertain times. I’ve also sometimes felt that hardcore SNL fans are a little eager to anoint cast members the new so-and-so like that bit from Season 6 when Bill Murray hosted and tried to cheer up the dejected new cast. One of the best things about the sketch where Padilla played a stern school administrator who immediately pivots to awkwardly girlish flirtations once she meets a troubled student’s handsome parent (Bad Bunny, naturally) is how immediately it felt like hers. Obviously plenty of other folks could have played this part well, but she took such ownership of the specific mannerisms of the piece, sometimes too subtle to get a big in-studio laughs.
On the other side, I have to admit the shameless hijacking of KPop Demon Hunters, complete with actual guest shot from Huntrix, pretty much worked for me, especially with the mini-game of the weird misfortunes that Bad Bunny’s character persistently ignored while thinking about the Netflix sensation. (Sarah Sherman was only on Epstein’s island for a layover!)
What was off
Both the Jeopardy! sketch and the sperm donor sketch felt like they were about to take off into something weirder and funnier, and they really just left it at “you have to answer in the form of a question” and “donating sperm is kind of a weird idea, huh?”… which is to say they left both sketches in, oh, I don’t know, 1988 maybe?
As for the obligatory Trump thing, as much as I quietly sighed when a new cast member was quickly supplanted by Jost in a sketch turn (way to turn the page, guys!), having someone else take a crack at something besides “Trump interrupts” as the focus of a political sketch isn’t such a bad idea.
Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime-time)
For actual numbers, you’d have to give it to Marcello, but Ashley Padilla had a perfect one-for-one.
Next time
Amy Poehler! For my money, one of the best to ever do it, and not as frequent a return host as Tina Fey or Maya Rudolph. I hope she won’t feel obligated to revive a bunch of old characters or invite a bunch of 2000s-era SNL pals (besides the one who still works there, of course). I want to see her doing weird sketches with Dismukes and Yang. And while I used to find it a little cheesy when they’d get an old Update star to guest-anchor, yes, having someone who merely did Update for four years back at it would count as hugely refreshing at this point.
Stray observations
- • Hi, I’m Jesse and I’ll be your SNL recapper for the second season running. As you can tell from this or any of my other reviews, I obviously hate the show with a fiery passion and/or am ridiculously easy on what is clearly television’s greatest crime. Usually this depends on what you think of the show and does not involve me one way or the other. Anyway, I love this gig and I’ll try not to repeat myself too much over the next 20 episode reviews.
- • How’d the New Guy Do? This is the part of the recap where I spotlight one of the new cast members and ask how they did. With four a half new people, there should be plenty of room for that for weeks to come. For example, Ben Marshall of Please Don’t Destroy, the designated half-new cast member, couldn’t use his years of experience at the show to muster a real live-sketch appearance of any substance this week. But Kam Patterson took the obligatory new-stand-up-guy-on-Update slot with a meta bit where he asks Jost when he (Patterson, not Jost) can say the n-word that apparently features prominently in his act as a Black guy from Florida. So how did he do? He was pretty funny! He started rambling about what people on the internet think of him (OK? Maybe he was just inspired by all the success Taylor Swift has had in this area) in a way that sort of lost the plot on his bit, but he got some laughs.
- • Where the hell was? Here’s the part of the recap where I ask where the hell was a bunch of cast members, old and new, who barely appeared in this episode. Greetings to Tommy Brennan and Jeremy Culhane! (One or both of you were on screen, but who’s to say what you did?) Miss you, Jane Wickline!
- • Before the summer break, some of you were kind enough to suggest some SNL sketches to show to my fifth-grade daughter. I can report back that when asked to name a favorite cast member, she goes with Vanessa Bayer, very likely influenced by how funny she is in Freakier Friday. I will definitely be showing her the KPop Demon Hunters sketch on Sunday.
