Melissa McCarthy is in typically top form in a season-best Saturday Night Live

As a result, nearly all of it hit. You know the old adage: If the weakest-written sketch on SNL has Melissa McCarthy throwing a live bat into a house as revenge, you’re having a good night. It’s the kind if episode that simultaneously makes the case that McCarthy could have killed on this show at virtually any point in her career and also that maybe she’s just as valuable (and more special) showing up for a shot in the arm.

What was on

So much: McCarthy’s performance in the cheese-sample sketch, where you can audibly hear the audience’s sympathy alongside their laughter. Bowen Yang’s straight-faced correction that Yonkers is a village, not a town. (My Westchester-raised wife will love that.) The timing and ease of interplay among the women in the Truth or Dare sketch, and the dialogue that felt unusually patient as it built up the game of the sketch, in both senses of the word. But my two personal favorites came later in the show: the Dismukes sketch about Sunday supper, and the music video for “Cousin Planet.” Dismukes is a master of social discomfort, and his initial, more grounded disappointment with the rejection of his Sunday-supper overreach made the eventual appearance of a bindle, a can of gasoline, and a suitcase full of dress-up clothes even funnier.

“Cousin Planet,” meanwhile, was a Jane Wickline/Veronica Slowikowska team-up with some well-observed holiday-season absurdities about the weirdness of hanging out with family members you sometimes spend heavily concentrated periods with but don’t always know that well. It was a remarkably well-balanced video, not leaning too hard on its quasi-analog style, affectionate in its odd way, yet not so sweet it became toxically cute. All in all, a great use of Wickline, who brings a specific tone and energy to her musical material that some of the more traditionally comfortable sketch players can’t muster.

What was off

As mentioned, the UPS thing felt the most familiar, though it got plenty of laughs. The second-most familiar was the “Kindness” pretape with McCarthy as a lonely older woman who takes a shine to a sweet neighborhood boy and makes an increasingly dark series of attempts to produce a heartwarming holiday moment. It’s one of those spiritually recurring bits, here offering a variation on a pre-tape that Billie Eilish did with Kate McKinnon a few years back. In most episodes, this wouldn’t remotely qualify for the “off” category—as with the UPS sketch, it’s funny enough—but I think the fact that I immediately thought “oh, McCarthy is going to give him a gun” as soon as the kid is pelted with snowballs probably speaks to the slight creakiness.

Most valuable player

I mean, it’s actually McCarthy, but in addition to the now rock-solid Ashley Padilla, two even-newer cast members got some smaller-scale showcases: Jeremy Culhane in the cheese sketch and Veronika Slowikowska over on Cousin Planet.

Next time

Josh O’Connor makes his SNL debut in what feels like maybe the most inevitable host of the season so far, while Lily Allen returns for a second musical-guest appearance a full 18 years after her first. (I know when a show lasts for half a century, gaps that huge cease to be so strange, but as an Old I will probably never be used to the fact that there can easily be gaps between SNL appearances that last longer than the show had been on when I first started watching.)

Stray observations

• • I was not at all familiar with Dijon before this episode, but his group-forward performances exuded a real warmth that helped keep the episode’s good vibes going.
• • Do I just wish Jost was in sketches rather than entering his 40th season on Weekend Update?! Maybe it’s just the novelty or the (relative) break from Fake Trump or the glimmer of actual malice in the satire, but I’ve enjoyed his appearances as Pete Hegseth. It was kind of an odd fit in McCarthy’s episode only because his version of Hegseth is not too far removed from her Sean Spicer, and I was genuinely surprised that the show didn’t find a way to work her in as some other Trump administration stooge. Still: Some additional circumstances that helped this take the best-episode-of-the-year title.
• • There’s a fascinating if somewhat truncated-feeling recent profile of Sarah Sherman in the New Yorker where she somewhat pointedly describes the parts of the show that sometimes feel like obligations to her—the normie wigs, the reaction roles. She doesn’t quite say “and I’m in so many sketches where I’m sitting in a restaurant!” but she might as well. So it warmed my heart to see her clearly doing something a little closer to her own: playing a drunk raccoon on Update. Though, honestly, I think she’s gotten pretty good at normie parts, too! This will probably sound overly apologetic to the more staid and institutional aspects of the show, but sometimes the constriction it offers seems to really hone what’s interesting about a performer. The few online shorts I saw of Veronika Slowikowska didn’t strike me as terribly promising, but she pops on the show without that self-filmed dead air.
• • Nothing against Ben Marshall, but that Update bit felt like kind of a long way to go for “redheads sunburn easily.”
• • It’s probably easy to forget how funny McCarthy is because, like just about every big comedy star before her, she has made some pretty bad movies. Everyone knocks the movies she makes with her husband, but I will say, I gave The Boss a pretty good review here almost a decade ago (!), and I stand by it.