The Broadway star turned Golden Globe winner is an enthusiastic host but this week’s material is patchy at best
Saturday Night Live returns from hiatus with a message from Joe Biden (James Austin Johnson). The President is weary and dismayed by our "cold, black winter" of the resurgence of COVID, but he knows how to stave off the virus: "Stop. Look. Spider-Man. Think about it: When did Spider-Man come? ? December 17th. When did everyone get Omicron? The week after December 17th. Stop watching Spider-Man!"
Fielding questions from a skeptical press corps, Biden adds to all our continuing woes over Spider-Man: Inflation? "Spider Man!" suffrage? "You think when Spider-Man's Aunt May is a smoke show people can focus on voting rights?" Russian troops advancing on the Ukrainian border? "If that doesn't sound like a job for Spider-Man, I don't know what is!"
Then we went from a different world within the multiverse to an alternate version of Joe Biden (Pete Davidson), who explains that our collapsing timeline "began as a joke in 2016 when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series". Was". He also revealed that everyone is better off in the "real world"... except Pete Davidson. "Your world is probably more fun for him," he says, offering zero in on the explanation (or punchline).
While not a major chill by any means, there is at least a genuine narrative arc. It certainly beats the gambling, walk-on Riddled Cold opens we were getting before the break. This makes it a step in the right direction.
West Side Story co-star and Golden Globe winner Ariana DeBos hosts for the first time. The young breakout actor is proud to represent not only the Afro-Latino community, but the Broadway community. Realizing that everyone "needs a little Broadway right now", he accompanied West Side Story super-fan Kate McKinnon (who, like normal audiences, stayed away from the film while it was in theaters) for many of his films. sings songs. DeBoss plays classic tunes, but unfortunately the whole thing is interrupted by McKinnon, who does nothing but sings a bit and shrugs his limbs. The show has given us a lot better as far as the sketches of West Side Story are concerned.
An NBA halftime show on TNT covers a game between the Brooklyn Nets and the Sacramento Kings, which currently scores at 268-1. All Sacramento players and coaches tested positive for Covid as the game was about to begin and had to be replaced by fans and custodial staff. The interview with the Brutal King's stand-in grows into the same beats and exhausting fast, but the show's hosts Charles Barkley (Kenan Thompson) and Yao Ming (Bowen Yang, playing Yang via Larch from The Addams Family) back and forth between. A constant source of entertainment.
Following the recently released trailer for his upcoming series Bel-Air – a dramatic reimagining of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air – Peacock has "one for the next to be given a serious, high-stakes remake about the '90s black experience." Teaser started" : Family affair. This new version, titled Simple Urkel, gives viewers "the goofy characters you loved in the '90s with absolutely no fun or charm". Steve Urkel (Chris Redd) is now furious from a broken home, trying to survive on the mean streets of "Chi-Raq", while neighbor Carl (Thompson) is the gritty cop with child-triggered anger. It's nearly impossible for SNL to properly parody Bel-Air considering how absurd it already is, but they do a solid job here.
Then comes an advertisement for Ron and Donna Lacatza's formal emporium, in which the husband and wife owners (Davidson and Sarah Sherman) of a girls' dress rental store spend all their time humiliating their teenage son Donovan (Andrew Dismukes). in, which is a strange thing. The nerd with constantly washed-up lips, a "dry, wet ass", and a violently unaffected love of the song subsides. The sketch is an admirably gross showcase for Dismux—quickly eclipsing Kyle Mooney as SNL's go-to dweb—but the other cast members don't exonerate themselves so well. Davidson's Adam Sandler impersonation is so distracting, while Sherman's one-note performance is completely indistinguishable from every other character she's portrayed so far (including herself during her Weekend Update appearance).
Next, Redd takes on the role of Eric Adams, the new NYC mayor and "most brilliant uncle at the barbecue," who is obsessed with bringing "swagger" back to his town. Opposingly fielding questions from the press, he defends various controversies already plaguing his administration, such as his decision to keep schools open amid the Omicron boom ("There are too many swagless parents out there who give their kids no swagger at home"), their disrespect towards "unskilled" workers ("by unskilled workers, I mean people with garbage jobs") and appointing their brother as the head of their security detail ( "JFK hired his brother... but unlike JFK, I'm not going to pop in the head, I'm gonna get something!"). Redd brings some more legitimate swagger to his characterization of Adams, but the impersonation is dead.
The musical guest of the night is Bleachers, which performs How Dare You Want More. On Weekend Update, Michael Che invites Sesame Street's Elmo (Chloe Fineman) to comment on his rivalry with pet rock Rocko. Elmo apologizes and tries to move on, until Che brings in Rocko, sending Elmo into a jealous rage.
This segment represents the show's worst quality today: its shameless resurgence of popular social media memes. It's downright outrageous to swoon and squeeze some more relevance into Saturday Night Live-ready jokes. The only thing keeping such a sketch from being outright plagiarism is the lack of authorship inherent in memes.
In the fourth Sound of Music parody the show has done since 2016, DeBoss plays the new nanny of the Von Trapp children. She attempts to teach this to children, using a random array of references to Homer Simpson, Queen Latifah, Peter Gabriel, IUDs, and more. There's a clear theater kid energy to the proceedings that should keep Broadway nerds entertained, even if it bores everyone else.
The Bleachers return to the stage to perform Chinatown. Then, Debos and McKinnon played the academically married game while giving a "sold out free lecture" at Cornell University on the ancient Greek poet Sappho. His peers question whether his translations of the newly discovered poems have been influenced by his personal life, noting that the verses include arguments with an ex-boyfriend named Nancy, "Helen of Generes" and Gillian Anderson and the Indigo Girl. There are references to the song.
The closing sketch is set on New Year's Eve at Texarkana chain restaurant Longhorn. Frustrated kitchen workers question why their shift manager adds "lurer" to the end of every sentence, leading to a fight and then a reconciliation. A completely laugh-free sketch where the sole objective seems to be to find out which cast member can pronounce the worst (DeBoss takes it by a mile). It's not particularly offensive in itself, but coming at the end of an episode that largely epitomizes East Coast superiority—what with the Broadway shows, toothless sketches centered around New York politics and liberal education—it Can't help but leave a bad taste in the mouth. It looks like a bunch of high school theater smug kids are making fun of the poor, dumb grasshoppers at their school.
The episode had some relatable moments—mostly courtesy of Redd, who continues to grow into one of the show's most believable cast members—but it did see a noticeable drop in quality around the halfway mark, From which it never recovered.