Miles Teller steps into a centerless Saturday Night Live dominated by featured players

I’ve long resisted the idea that Saturday Night Live needs a spotlight-pulling star at its center. The show essentially made its second-season bones by rejecting that notion outright, surviving and thriving after Chevy Chase’s departure, and as much as figures like Eddie Murphy, Dana Carvey, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and Kate McKinnon have seemed like The Main One over the years, it’s really only the Murphy era where that kind of favoritism actually serves the show. Ferrell is one of the best to ever do it in part because of his ability to slot into the most seemingly thankless roles, not because he solo’d everyone else off the screen every week.

But there are certainly times when it feels like SNL is lacking a strong center, at least in terms of personality; Lorne Michaels will always provide an overemphatic political center for those in desperate need of that. Both of those problems emerged immediately on tonight’s episode, during what should have been a fun shake-up from the Trump-interrupts routine: a “third, final, and fictional” mayoral debate sketch that seemed to immediately apologize for any confusion it might cause out in God’s Country. (Have a lot of other debate sketches needed to explain that they were made up? Or was the show just admitting that some of their presidential ones have featured cast members just rephrasing stuff the candidates said?) Despite that narrow targeting, the mayoral race is still great fodder on paper, not least because the candidates all have shtick, whether vocal or political, that invite broad impressions.

Maybe not this broad, though, and that’s where the show’s lack of a center figure comes into play. While it was neat to see the episode’s host in the actual cold open, Miles Teller does not particularly have an Andrew Cuomo; here in New York, at least, a bunch of subsequent ads featuring the real thing’s reedier, more condescending goombah-of-reason voice made that clear throughout the episode. The sketch was rounded out by a guest-appearing Ramy Youssef, who doesn’t especially have a Zohran Mamdani, powered by writing that lacked a sense of what could be funny about his millennial energy; and Lorne’s apparent lost love Shane Gillis, not exactly a range-y impressionist, who the writers then gave a single Curtis Sliwa idea that might have been outsourced to social media: He’s sure got some crazy stories! To bookend the sketch’s initial hesitation about playing to the heart of the east coast, James Austin Johnson’s Trump did wind up interrupting to do a little shtick of his own, after newbie Kam Patterson popped up as Eric Adams. Again, no real impression there from the third guy to play Adams on the show; must have given Chris Redd and Devon Walker some measure of private satisfaction, though.

Normally, a flop opening sketch from Saturday Night Live is easy enough to ignore; it’s often the least interesting part of the show. But here it led into an episode that, like that opening, tried its best to lead with something new, only to stall out repeatedly. At least the rest of the show relied on the new actual cast members. Mainstays Bowen Yang, Mikey Day, Sarah Sherman, Marcello Hernández, and especially Kenan Thompson all appeared, but Veronika Slowikowska, Ben Marshall, and especially Ashley Padilla all showed up more (or at least felt more prominent, especially in the pre-Update material). Andrew Dismukes was the only veteran to get a lot of face time.

Dismukes was actually front and center for the best sketch of the night. But before he introduced the world to his written-and-drawn-on-spec graphic novel GarGirl, Teller was largely playing off of Marshall, Slowikowska, Padilla, and himself, in a series of sketches that felt reconstructed from a hazy rundown of some inauspicious episode from five to eight years ago, leaving the newest cast members often feeling like they were at some kind of comedy karaoke night.

For example: “What Did I Do Last Night?” was another social-faux-pas game-show sketch, mixed with the drunken Halloween shenanigans better-depicted in past October segments. The somewhat tortured hockey charity ad was another keep-calling-cut structure with the main joke (there’s a hockey team called the Predators!) visible from a distance well before it double-backed and repeated itself a few times. The sketch about the news broadcast with an office staff wholly unprepared for their background duties to become clearly visible had a couple of champion-level pratfalls from Mikey Day; it was also not that different from a live version of those seemingly Day-beloved filmed pieces where a bunch of colorful characters go nuts in the background of an earnest teen drama. Even Teller’s presence felt a little warmed over; after playing a hungover mess, an office creep, a real-life sexual predator, and a hockey player forced to erroneously identify himself as one, it was a relief to see him play a generic police detective in the aforementioned GarGirl sketch.