Connor Storrie and a pared-down Saturday Night Live barely overcome a deadly first half

Is Saturday Night Live finally approaching a manageable cast size after years of flirting with (and sometimes surpassing) record numbers? With Bowen Yang gone (and not counting the sketch-light Weekend Update anchors, despite Colin Jost logging more sketch time this season), the show currently has seven main-cast performers and seven featured players. On this week’s Connor Storrie-hosted episode, Chloe Fineman didn’t appear to be there—she wasn’t in any live sketches or the pre-tape segment, and I didn’t catch her at the goodnights—and a few other cast members (Andrew Dismukes, Kenan Thompson, and Jane Wickline) didn’t show up live until the last two sketches of the night. So for most of the episode, it felt like the show was suddenly leaner, if not especially meaner, drawing from a pool of ten performers for the first hour’s worth of live material.

From that group of ten, only Mikey Day is a long-timer, and the sketches seemed to be underlining the smaller crew’s relatively youthful bent. Intentional or not (and it was probably not), this was weirdly noticeable: Host Connor Storrie is youngish, but at 26, and best-known for a TV show where he plays a professional hockey player, there’s no particular reason he would need to play a teenager in multiple sketches. Yet twice he was cast as the hunky (well, obviously that’s understandable) popular kid, with a third sketch premised on his character urging a bunch of co-workers to at least act like teenagers (or, depending on your point of view, characters on Severance).

The real surprise of the episode was how little this small-cast, young-character energy actually paid off, especially in a deadly opening half-hour. The episode gained some steam after Weekend Update, with a series of silly if kinda sloppy sketches that brought to mind the late 2000s, where fans might have to suffer through a bunch of big-character nonsense and wet-noodle political commentary upfront before the good, weird stuff would emerge in the second half of the show. Through Update, I was wondering if we were watching the weakest episode of the season unfold.

For the first hour, it was close! The cold open is often a lost cause and the monologue isn’t really meant to be a LOL highlight, but I’ve rarely felt quite so stone-faced, and then quite so anguished, as during the first proper sketch of the night, with Marcello Hernández as a… teacher who has an accent? I’m sorry, maybe I’m thickheaded, but I was utterly mystified by what, who, or why that character was supposed to be. Sometimes the show has done neat behind-the-scenes videos about sketches that score particularly well, like the Ashley Padilla haircut bit from a few episodes back. I’d actually love to see one of those for this sketch. How would it be described? What was the genesis for it? How did it manage to be deeply strange as a piece of comedy writing yet not get a single laugh from its strangeness? (I think I have the beginnings of an answer to that: It was the rare strange comedy sketch that didn’t actually seem to realize it was strange.) What was the process that led to it leading off the night? Granted, the audience seemed to like it pretty well, but didn’t it just seem like they were laughing at the “funny” voice? I want a full-scale investigation of how that sketch happened.

Storrie’s other teenager-centric sketch fared only somewhat better. He played a jock won over by a nerd (Ben Marshall), who proceeds to lose the room all over again with an extremely off-putting thank-you song. Storrie held up his end reacting to this, and the uncommented-upon absurdities of the sketch (like the lighting changes and the ubiquity of Marshall’s cheap silver top hats) got some laughs, but I’m not sure if Marshall has been put to best use on the show so far. As much as I didn’t care for some of Please Don’t Destroy’s videos, his energy does read a bit better in pretapes than in a live setting.

Storrie had a much stronger chance to show off in the final sketch of the night, where he played a stripper who continues his mission to entertain a bachelorette party despite being hit by a “small car” shortly before crawling through their doorway. He did some dexterous physical comedy, punctuated by the varied reactions of the ladies played by Jane Wickline, Sarah Sherman, Ashley Padilla, and Veronika Slowikowska. It felt like the exact right pitch for Storrie’s oddball-heartthrob sensibility—only slightly marred by another form of youthful vigor. This time, it wasn’t really the show’s fault: The audience was so excited to see Storrie ripping off his clothes that their delighted shrieks stepped on some of the jokes. Similar noise greeted a passable sketch with a couple’s relationship issues overshadowed by a trio, then quartet, of fortysomething men having a confusingly great time at an ice rink; It was difficult for the foreground/background choreography to land when the crowd got so repeatedly worked up at a glimpse of the cameoing Hudson Williams.