Over the goodnights of this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, it looked like a bunch of cast members dressed up as each other for Halloween. Tommy Brennan was outfitted in a clown-like Sarah Sherman outfit and her signature haircut; speaking of signature haircuts, Mikey Day was in a wig from Ashley Padilla’s famous “I like it” sketch, and mouthed that line to the camera; and Marcello Hernández appeared to be dressed as Jane Wickline. It was quite adorable, and probably just a fun little game for the end credits, but could have also been something to do with a last-minute cut sketch. It was hard to say for sure, because after the second Gracie Abrams performance, there was some vamping from the band where a final segment for the night would have likely gone with a little bit more time left. This also meant that the credits that are often (depending on runtime and affiliate) sometimes cut off rolled all the way to the end, leaving more time for the camera to catch the various outfits. Neat; also unsatisfying.
That’s kind of this week’s episode in a nutshell: Fun dress-ups in an episode that often felt mistimed and sloppy, particularly as it went on. Of course, SNL often involves outlandish outfits, so we can’t count every costume change as getting into the Halloween spirit. But there’s a certain kind of sketch that revels in the silliness of expending NBC’s resources to, say, dress up a big chunk of the cast as characters from the deathless Nickelodeon animated series PAW Patrol, here spoofed as PAW Patrol: Special Victims Unit. That title alone is pretty much the pitch and gets laughs on its own; the sketch itself, though, played surprisingly amateurish, like something YouTubers might throw together. The bizarre sight of host Inde Navarrette in an elaborate Ryder hairdo—for the blessedly uninitiated, Ryder is the seemingly emancipated minor who controls the private security firm PAW Patrol; oh, and Inde Navararette is the woman acting her ass off in Obsession—was more impressive than the actual jokes. (Those were stronger when Oscar Isaac played a beleaguered mayoral candidate running to take over Adventure Bay. So does a newer SNL staffer have a kid around the age of three, or what?)
Navarrette also flubbed several lines in that sketch, and tried her best to stifle laughter at her initial mistake. You could chalk that up to new-host nervousness—despite her years in the business, she’s really only done a couple of movies and a handful of TV shows—but for most of the episode, she threw herself into sketches with aplomb. Moreover, the cast flubbed a bit, too, in the home stretch. In the restaurant sketch that existed entirely as an Ashley Padilla showcase, for example, Padilla herself nearly broke a couple of times, and Sarah Sherman appeared to place the wrong emphasis on one of her lines early on. It felt especially noticeable because this was a night where there were only two sketches in the back half of the show, and neither came off with much precision.
I don’t say this to nitpick; in general, watching SNL with a magnifying glass for technical errors (also known as evidence that the show is in fact broadcast live) feels like a fool’s errand. But there are weeks where the old Lorne Michaels saw about the show going on because it’s 11:30 more than because it’s ready feels especially true, and this was one of them, despite a number of funny sketches. The show felt off from the jump, when the predictable return of Tom Hanks as David S. Pumpkins was bait-and-switched… for the umpteenth instance of Trump interrupting a sketch while everyone else in the cast has to freeze. To what end, though? To prove that there’s a whole other, unexpected way to make a third David S. Pumpkins sketch a tired retread?!
Similarly, the sketch where two actors on a telenovela fail to integrate the required product placement for a new flavor of Sprite zig-zagged between a bunch of old standbys: the multiple botched takes during filming; Mikey Day pointing out unusual behavior; spoofs of exaggerated soap-opera acting; and the tag of a show or advertisement being sponsored by a competing product, not the one mentioned repeatedly in the sketch. It’s almost novel to see all of that rolled into a single fast-paced package, admittedly well-acted by everyone involved. Mostly, though, the gear-shifting writing left Navarrette and company spinning around (sometimes literally, given her multiple falls around a sofa) in its wake.
Yet there was a stretch of the show that felt strong enough to almost get it over that thumbs-up line. The “Uninterested Woman Game Show” sketch, flanked by two solid pretapes—the ad for “Delta Disruptive” and Dan Bulla’s long-way-to-go-but-I’ll-allow-it short “The Inventor’s Wife”—made good and varied use of Navarrette, who seemed to purely enjoy herself more than any of this season’s other hosts so far. Perhaps more importantly, those sketches (and scattershot as it may have been, the leadoff sketch about ghost children on the Queen Mary) didn’t feel like the show was jumping back and forth between Doing The Thing and Not Doing The Thing. For about half an hour, the show just put on its costume and went for it.
What was on
A bit more on the Uninterested Woman Game Show: For much of first-term Trump, there seemed to be a real push to have women play various figures in male drag, and it was hard to shake the feeling that the show was vastly overestimating the consternation this might cause in the Trump White House. But when the show relaxes into that technique, it’s a lot of fun. The sketch in question cast Navarrette, Jane Wickline, and Sarah Sherman as three different guys refusing to take the hint that a married, gay woman (Saidah Belo-Osagie) wants no more than, at best, polite conversation.
Admittedly, the sketch didn’t really deepen or twist after immediately introducing its premise, making it all the more imperative that the performers carry it. Luckily they did, nailing the best bits of writing like the compulsive mentioning of heights (“six foot negative three”), immediate self-delusion (“we have plans later”), and questionable yet plausible personal habits (“I moved my computer to the garage and every time I come out my opinions are a little different”). This is the kind of silly/pointed balance modern-day SNL can do really well, and the evident joy of performing it is a big part of why. The flipside to Ashley Padilla stepping on her own magnificent slow burn by almost cracking up is the obvious pleasure everyone (including Padilla!) was taking here.
What was off
Besides the missed opportunity of that PAW Patrol sketch, oof, the non-guest portions of Weekend Update were back to business as usual this week after hitting a high point last time. Maybe Jost and Che deserve some credit for unifying genuinely cornball jokes (like the banana split line) with faux-edgelord pieces like Jost’s “Hear Me Out” sidebar. The thing is, though, those seemingly different joke styles are actually yoked together perfectly; they’re both almost unbearably self-conscious, focused more on an audible reaction than just regular old laughter. Last season, I didn’t talk much about Weekend Update some weeks, because it simply wasn’t very interesting. This season, it’s been too dire to ignore.
Most valuable player
It really feels like it should be Padilla, and she scored some big laughs even when appropriately struggling to stay straight during her latest installment of Woman Tries to Keep It Together. But that sketch ultimately felt way too familiar, even reviving her flatulence embarrassment from a previous version of this same type of thing. As such, I have to shout out Ben Marshall for his amusingly strange take on Pennywise the Clown on Update, part AI bro and part smarmily concerned friend of Che staging an intervention. That, plus his willingness to get his penis ripped off and blasted into space by a robot in “The Inventor’s Husband.” Even his thankless role as the guy seeing ghosts on the Queen Mary was pretty strong; he sold the idea that he was sincerely disappointed by how the bizarre ghost children had “overhyped” their dad’s swimming costume.
Next time
Like it or not, the show will be trying something new by having Druski, a bona fide Content Creator, host. But if you want to hang on to a pre-Content Creator era, the Strokes will join the five-timers club (is that a thing for musical guests?).
Stray observations
• OK, I didn’t much like the PAW Patrol sketch, but James Austin Johnson, true to his specialist nature, does have a pretty decent Mayor Humdinger (though honestly, it was probably a little too restrained).
• Gracie Abrams got into the Halloween spirit by dressing up in matching Romeo + Juliet costumes in her performances: Claire Danes in the first, Leonardo DiCaprio in the second. Well done! Her songs, unfortunately, still pretty much sound like a poor man’s Taylor Swift has been listening to a lot of a poor man’s Phoebe Bridgers. (I can’t expect the SNL music bookers to share my prejudices or be up on perceived fandom feuds, but booking Bridgers and Abrams two weeks apart is kind of weird.)
• I’m not saying a Halloween-broadcast episode with the star of Obsession is required to go full spooktacular mode and having the cast don costumes in the monologue and during the goodnights helped with the holiday vibe. But a smidge of David S. Pumpkins, four old-timey ghosts, and one Pennywise ultimately felt a little paltry, given how infrequently the show is actually airing directly on Halloween.
• Bobby Moynihan returned as Drunk Uncle on Weekend Update! I was solidly sick of Drunk Uncle by the time Moynihan left the show, but whether through his long absence or Moynihan’s presence, this appearance was delightful.
• I admit, it also delighted me to hear James Austin Johnson’s Trump shout out Riblet and the “pepper” guy, both from Moynihan’s repertoire.
• The monologue’s scattered mix of a half-assed Halloween costume bit, the obligatory Obsession “no, no, no!” reference, and some other miscellaneous jokes matched the episode’s overall vibe, but I did take some satisfaction in Navarrette’s reference to putting on her “whore” outfit to go to the gym.
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