Teyana Taylor and Saturday Night Live don't quite sync up

Let’s start toward the end. The last live sketch of Saturday Night Live’s Teyana Taylor-hosted episode was a low-key two-on-two political sketch, with Taylor anchoring a PBS news analysis show, flanked by Kenan Thompson, while commentator guests played by Mikey Day and Chloe Fineman tried to make milquetoast points of vaguely centrist outrage about the ICE situation in Minneapolis and other Trump-era horrors. Taylor and Thompson responded with skeptical nonverbal murmurs, double-underlining their unspoken disagreement with the notion that this kind of law-enforcement terror is unprecedented, and flustering the other two into defensiveness.

Fair-enough premise, and something I might have argued in another week should have been the political cold open rather than another Trump sketch. On a day when the news was dominated by another ICE murder in Minneapolis, though, the sketch itself managed to feel as mealy-mouthed as the white characters’ reactions. After all, what better way for the show to speak its bold truth about an uncomfortable current event than… mumbling something about America’s legacy of violence while sneaking out the back of the episode?

Just in terms of the sketch itself, SNL has already gone to the well of having Black people beg to differ when white centrists get upset how “this isn’t who we are.” It’s obviously a barbed, potentially funny point, but reheating it via a pretty wan discontented-murmuring game, and then throwing in some stuff about white pundits not understanding why people go to church all feels pretty soft, even kind of wobbly-centrist itself, especially when deferring the top of the show to more Trump nonsense. At least the Trump Awards bit had the benefit of being written as something like an actual sketch this week, rather than a news-conference parade.

Regardless, it seemed like that last live sketch could have gone way harder, given its late-episode timeslot, or just gone out the door entirely if it suddenly seemed mistimed (or insufficient). Or did they use up their cut-for-sensitivity excuse last week, when Tommy Brenna’s first decent piece on the show got nixed? This may all seem like a portion complaint about low-quality food, but the sketch left a sour taste, bookending how the Trump Awards opener started off a little meaner than usual, only to finish on beside-the-point jokes about Marjorie Taylor Greene.

It’s a small but potent illustration of how to misuse a host’s gameness. Fresh off a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her steely yet complicated work in One Battle After Another, Teyana Taylor clearly came to emphatically do sketch comedy, hence her pulling faces, making broad gestures to accompany many of her line readings, and at one point essentially (if dexterously) recreating that old Six Flags ad with the dancing elderly man. And to be sure, there were sketches where that enthusiasm was winning, along with her charming monologue.

She was also carrying a lot as host. As mentioned in earlier recaps, the show’s stubborn refusal to find any women of color for the new configuration of their cast—which, given how quickly they responded to decade-ago criticism by hiring Sasheer Zamata and Leslie Jones, itself feels like a vague capitulation to the whole Trump II deal—means that Taylor was the first Black woman acting substantially in any SNL sketches all season. It made sense to put her front and center.

No wonder, then, that she went a little broad in that spotlight. Sometimes, as in the scattershot but amusing sketch about a pair of airline employees cheerfully singing their way through unhelpful announcements, her showy energy was just right. Elsewhere, as in the PBS sketch and the NFL sketch where she was given the side business of writing off the Denver Broncos at every turn, the shtickiness of the performance threatened to overwhelm the weaker passages of writing. Having her jump around like a more talented version of the Six Flags man made that seem less like an accident than the episode’s actual strategy. Maybe that’s why her final sketch, minor as it was in the scheme of things, managed to feel almost galling. It felt like the bad kind of getting away with something.