And Your Host…
The first three Season 52 episodes out of the gate have not stacked the comedy deck. Jalen Brunson brought the “traditionally overmatched athlete” energy to the premiere, Dakota Johnson was “low-energy previous host we’re comfortable with,” and don’t get me started again on Shane “how dare you question Lorne Michaels’ judgement” Gillis. Obsession star Inde Navarrette seemed a feint in the right direction when she was announced—buzzy new young star, outstanding breakout performance to fuel confidence, a first-timer potentially revealing unexpected live comedy gifts.
In practice, Navarrette was… fine. She certainly wasn’t shy about getting physical, doing spit takes and pratfalls, and donning a sad incel mustache to hump a game show podium. She even had some always-endearing cue card trouble at one point. But Season 52 continues to abort its takeoffs, as the episode around Navarrette was another choppy, uninspired slice of vanilla sheet cake. The fact that the show wasted one of its rare Halloween-on-Halloween episodes‘ potential just underscored how colorless the whole enterprise really was.
In her monologue, the host took a welcome shot at Gillis’ thuggish misogyny (even if she does swallow the line a bit), but the parade of cast costumes was such a limp slog through some current events would-be jabs that it left her looking abandoned. Through it all, Navrrette has nothing to hang her head about, nor is this the sort of coming-out showcase that reveals unexpected depths of comic talent to the world.
The Best and the Rest
The Best: Even newly risen SNL all-star Ashley Padilla has suffered under Season 52’s creative inertia. She’s got the ability to imbue some very thin material with a signature lived-in inner light, and she’s largely had to this young season. In a pair of sketches tonight, you can see the plane almost achieve liftoff thanks to Padilla’s authoritative huffing and puffing, but neither completely works.
Conceptually, I’m all for the “Uninterested Woman Game Show,” in which a woman just trying to get her morning bagel has to contend with come-ons from a trio of weedily self-involved internet bros. As host, Padilla evinces the sort of pent-up, barely controlled contempt the all-woman sketch cast can certainly relate to as she attempts to get the three obnoxious dudes (Navarrette, Jane Wickline, Sarah Sheman) to act appropriately when a married lesbian listening to her headphones is just minding her business.
As the three looksmaxxing manboys with facial hair you want to rip off and flush, Navarrette, Wickline and Sherman could be stronger, even if the host commits to some grotesque tongue work and Wickline brings a clueless earnestness to her douchery that’s almost heartbreaking. (When she speculates that Saida Belo-Osagie’s contestant might be a “bitch” for not being interested, Wickline’s genuine confusion is less malicious than uncomprehending.) But it’s Padilla’s sketch, set in stone once Navarrette’s creepy dude bulldozes through the woman’s utter indifference with a jeering, “She hasn’t met me, though!” (coupled with the aforementioned podium-humping). “She has,” Padilla snaps, holding her gaze—first to Navarrette and then to her camera—for just long enough that her steely exasperation speaks uproarious volumes. (For the other heroic Padilla near-liftoff, see the 10-to-one spot below.)
The Worst: Apart from one particular monologue, I haven’t found much to outright hate so far this season. More disappointed than angry, as mom used to say. Is that worse? I base level of uninspired competence isn’t going to earn you any enemies, but it’s sure not going to inspire anybody to care, either. The Delta commercial, where unruly passengers get their own sealed-off compartment, is a handsomely mounted single gag without a single elevating performance. (Okay, Mikey Day’s passenger screaming, “This plane is made out of Israel!” made me laugh.”) Loud without engaging the chaos switch, it’s joke (“some airline passengers suck” with a smidge of corporate greed) is a hook with nothing hanging from it.
The Rest: A couple of sketches tonight tried to wring some laughs from little bits of irrelevant business around the margins. That can work if the sketch itself is strong enough that these touches feel integrated (or are especially inspired). Otherwise it feels like writers trying to inject filler into a dish that isn’t rising. In the cold open, Jeremy Culhane kept getting irritated at date Grace Reiter saying she was about to pass out from fear (“Pass out, then!”), while in the ghost ship sketch, Kenan’s passenger kept making jokes about wife Ashley Padilla’s being so ghostly pale. Bringing a sketch character to life in their brief, mayfly existence on this earth is a delicate operation. Great sketches and great sketch actors integrate. Tonight, these moments stuck out, distractingly.
The sketch itself was dulled by indifferent performances and an overall lack of inspiration. Passengers keep seeing Sarah Sherman’s ghostly lady trying to explain where her secret treasure is hidden, only for a couple of obnoxiously peppy kid ghosts to obsess about the ship’s swimming pool and their father’s bathing costume. It’s, again, a single joke that could serve as launching pad for inspired digressions, but this one never finds its feet. The living passengers aren’t invested enough and Marcello Hernandez and Navarrette’s ghost brats son’t gin up anything surprising. (Navarrette gamely crosses her eyes at one point.) Only Mikey Day manages to goose things up a bit when his preening one-piece swim dad bellows that no one’s admiring his costume enough but, well, it’s not enough.
Dan Bulla’s been tinkering in his Midnight Matinee lab to bring us his first filmed piece of Season 52. As ever, there’s a lurking mischievous glee in making us wait for the twist, as here Navarrette’s widow discovers that her distracted inventor husband has left her an impossibly adorable robot pal named PD-44. Music tinkles with subtle, hopeful heartache as widow and robot bond through the empty house, still littered with the late inventor’s Wallace & Gromit-style gizmos, and the lonely woman turns to her mechanical companion for company.
Now, this could go any number of ways, always considering that Bulla’s going to pull the rug out from under the sentimental premise. Will the widow fall in love with the robot? Or will will little PD-44 reveal some sort of sinister mission of toxic masculinity from beyond the grave? It’s the last one, as “Petey” reacts to the widow’s six-years-later entry onto the dating scene by literally snatching courtly date Ben Marshall’s dick off and shooting it to the moon after unfolding its true, Transformers-style armored glory. The real twist is Bulla playing on the late, obviously psycho husband’s deadly possessiveness, and the widow’s placid reaction to her realization that her husband actually loved her—at least enough to explode any man his neglected wife turns to for comfort into red goo. It’s a handsomely staged, well acted, exquisitely puppeted morality tale from the depths of buried male inadequacy and terror. Honestly, it’s the one piece tonight that took the Halloween vibe and ran with it.
The product placement sketch, where telenovela stars Marcello and Navarrette fail to make Sprite’s new hot pepper-infused sugar water seem appealing, features the two leads smacking each other over the furniture, across the face, and with mouthfuls of soda. For all that, it never finds the right rhythm, even if everybody’s giving it their all. (Plus, this sketch actually had an ending, a rarity tonight.) With soda reps Padilla and Day vainly trying to squeeze some branding into El Corazón Que No Siente‘s overheated melodrama, Navarrette and Hernandez keep undermining the process, whether assuring viewers that only fat perverts drink Sprinte’s new concoction, or that the stuff is a guaranteed abortifacient. There really needs to be a sounder foundation to the shanenigans here—are the actors deliberately sabotaging the corporate meddling, or are they just dummies? All the flopping around is energetic without being especially precise or funny, and Padilla is left once more trying to shoulder a middling sketch, her exec finally blurting out that she knows lemon-lime, cherry and habañero is a terrible idea with wild-eyed fervor. The saving grace is the ending, where Mikey Day strips off his business attire to reveal he’s been working for “Siete-Up” the whole time.
“Weekend Update” Update
Hey, there’s election in three days that will at least hint at whether Americans are really cool with murderous fascism. So maybe Jost and Che want to get all into that? No? Just gonna lead with Trump’s whole addled ass obsession, huh? Well, that’s one way to go. Honestly, it’s the only way these guys go.
A Colin Jost-Michael Che “Update” is what it is. Dueling cleverness is primary, and whatever “edgy” topical stuff they deliver is in service to their own, long-tenured images. Che got his one-per-show laugh-gasps when he explained that the large turnout for Israel’s in-progress elections, “is great to see, whether you’re on the right side or the left side or the geno-cide.” Jost mugged dutifully in his “aww, Michael’s so naughty” way before delivering his next joke, but this Update doesn’t sustain anything resembling a coherent weekly theme or satirical mission. They’re just two clever dudes making each other chuckle.
The only other nod to the Halloween season was an murky turn from Ben Marshall’s visiting Pennywise the Clown, here reimagined as a semi-reformed tech bro pitching his new AI venture (sponsored by Draft Kings). The makeup’s fun, and I suppose the easy segue of Pennywise from sewer-dwelling child eater to gains-chasing, motivated young Christian alongside his “sober, predatory tech guys” works as an indictment of sorts.
And then there’s Drunk Uncle. I mean, if you’re going to fly Bobby Moynihan out for the cold open from the Reggie Dinkins set, it’s only polite to let him do a Drunk Uncle with the world champion Milwaukee Brewers. I’m on record as appreciating Drunkle (as I call him) far more than his now 16 appearances should warrant. After all, as far as recurring bits go, there isn’t a lot of variation—he spouts some incoherent insults mixing up pop culture trends of the youth and the supposed sissification of ‘Murica before his inner misery erupts in self-indulgent sozzled weeping. But Moynihan—one of my all-time underrated team—owned the role’s slyly trenchant social commentary amidst all the booze-swilling slurs. Here raising a mug to the fact that ” a beer won the World Series,” Bobby launches some typically confused right-wing talking points (“There’s only one gender!,” he shouts at the concept of Mrs. Met) before the Brewers miss their cue to bring out the big trophy and deliver some athlete-stilted half-jokes. (Apparently people thing DH Christian Yelich looks like Pete Davidson? I do not see it, but whatever.)
Recurring Sketch Report/Political Comedy Report
So, David S. Pumpkins and Donald Trump. I suppose bashing two extremely tired concepts together and sifting through the wreckage is one way to liven both characters up—not exactly high art, or bristling with artistic ambition, but at least it got Tom Hanks out of the house. Sometimes an SNL sketch doodles around the margins of something that once worked, putting little flourishes and curlicues in the vain hope that nobody will notice the fiddly recycling. At least not too much.
When I saw the carnival ride, I was suspicious. When Pumpkins and his skeletons (including a visiting Bobby Moynihan) showed up, I was vindicated by the recognition applause that Saturday Night Live and its audience have entered into an unspoken agreement over the decades that the nostalgia factor for old bits is good enough for both. The first DSP was (for all its borrowed glory) a hoot. The second was… there. That SNL produced an animated Halloween special that has decidedly not gone on to become a holiday broadcast favorite was an act of chutzpah that you have to tip your cap to. Part of the joke is that there’s no more joke to tell, and that Oscar-hoarding Hanks would don the silly getup only to freeze in place for James Austin Johnson to do his Trump/Zack Morris freeze time schtick. I’m in favor of the show turning its past, threadbare glories inside out, but only when the exercise reveals something new.
JAJ, bless his heart, does his thing as Trump. I’m long past my impossibly naive dream of SNL digging insightfully into the wretched Trump-GOP phenomenon of simpleton populism and white supremacist psycho-sexual displacement, so here’s to impeccable impressionist Johnson for doing what he can. That SNL leans so utterly into the sundowning idiot buffoonery rather than Trump’s tracing-paper authoritarianism isn’t Johnson’s fault, and he’s stellar at what he does. 2026 Donald Trump is a shambling carcass babbling about taut Republican man-ass and exhibiting the sort of tetchy cruelty at any pushback parents of overtired toddlers recognize all too well. So JAJ plies his trade with grace as his Trump delivers writers’ would-be clever asides like he and Pumpkins being “loud, orange and annoying” (and tiresome even in 2016) as if they were satire.
Johnson’s funnier wen his Trump’s just a clown because SNL steadfastly refuses to grapple with anything more substantial. There’s a ticklish resonance of Trump’s 2015 hosting debacle in JAJ’s off-the-rails hijacking of the cold open into the meta (“Bobby flew in for this” he notes about the pointlessness of the Pumpkins of it all), but these “political” sketches leave so much potential on the writers room floor that all I can do is admire JAJ’s craftsmanship and write another show opener off as criminally irrelevant.
Oh, and Paw Patrol was back, indicating that the writers have children. If this were the first outing, I suppose it would fit in the hybrid recurring/politics heading but since I’ve committed to the bit, let’s just go with it for Paw Patrol: SVU. That’s the joke, complete with the all-dog crew (and Navarrette’s child handler) being unable to process a series of brutal dismemberment killings into their chipper cartoon worldview, and an Ice-T voiced cat shooting a bad guy while calling him, “bitch.” Along the way, we get some doggie-specific jokes that’d be at home on a Bob Hope special, the host flubbing some lines and getting all giggly, and James Austin Johnson doing his damnedest to pump up the darkness as his villain revels in the newfound series crossover freedom to actually get down and dirty on those darn dog cops. (I know his character has a name on the show but I don’t have kids and I refuse to look it up.) I guess the joke is that a sunny kids’ show about dog municipal workers and a hard-bitten sex crime procedural are tonally incompatible, which, you know, makes sense?
Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings
It was an Ashley Padilla sort of night. I do worry for her back if the show is constantly going to be put on her shoulders, but so far she’s bearing up.
I dug Kenan telling Trump he’s immune to Trump’s time-freezing powers. Seniority has its perks.
Saida Belo-Osagie didn’t have the flashiest roles, but especially in the game show, she radiated a calm confidence that could signal good things.
None of them had much of a showcase tonight, but the most recent Hot Ones showed the second-year featured players in a uniformly flattering light. They were like a bunch of happy, playful puppies. It was endearing.
10-To-Oneland Report
While we didn’t get cheated out of an actual 10-to-one sketch tonight, this is the other half-realized sketch where Ashley Padilla’s heroic efforts flounder in service of a half-realized (and warmed over) premise. One of Padilla’s gifts is to slip inside someone whose inner neuroses (or outright madness) yet must interact with the “normal” world. Here she’s Denise, the performatively brassy coworker so delighted to be the object of her colleagues dinner invitation that she attempts to laugh off an enormous tray of dishware shattering over her head. The best cringe comedy comes from tweaking recognizable insecurities into grotesque shapes, and Denise’s neediness mandates that she flip mortified waiter Mikey Day the hang loose sign while assuring everyone that she’s still the breezy, confident jokester everybody seems to like.
Padilla is in this to win this, smashing the remaining plates over her marinara-spattered head to prove that she’s breezy about the catastrophe. There’s one moment where she, after shattering three dishes in quick succession, pauses meaningfully before going for number four that was Padilla’s sketch confidence distilled. When she finally confesses she’s in pain, there’s a genuine hesitance, even when she admits she’s gone blind and hallucinated the Ninja Turtles. But then the sketch cribs from what was perhaps Padilla’s breakthrough sketch. You know—the fart one. After her companions can’t bring themselves to say she looks fine, the concussion-blinded Denise, thinking she’s alone, starts squeezing them out (presumably Steve Higgins still making the fart noises), Padilla interjecting self-encouragement like, “don’t get cocky,” and “land the plane” between each one. Now, even if I think Ashley Padilla can pull off a fart joke better than anybody, it’s been done. By her. Rather famously. Switching on the gas to end a sketch that ultimately proves not to have one, well, reeks of desperation.
Stray Observations
- Patrick Stewart only hosted once, and said in his autobiography that he thought he shanked it. But John Mulaney turned his innocent intro of the band that night into a piece of Saturday Night Live lore. So the beloved Stewart got not just the RIP card but a clip of him beaming while exclaiming, “Ladies and gentlemen, Salt-N-Pepa!” to remind bereft viewers just how cool a guy he was.
- In Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s still-riveting 1986 book about the early days, Saturday Night, they talk at length about Lorne Michaels’ principled aversion to “funny name comedy.” Those days being long gone, Padilla’s game show host is named Sephora Outlet.
- Wickline’s game show bro confesses he’s on the outs with his family since he moved his computer out to the garage and every time he comes inside, “my opinions are a little different.”
- Oh, as far as impossibly rich nepo babies go, Gracie Abrams remains quite good.
- In the Dan Bulla-verse, the Wall-E-esque PD-44 ranks just below Beppo in eerie adorableness. Nobody beats Beppo.
- During the goodnights, everyone dressed up, some with simple clown noses, but Mikey Day in a version of Padilla’s bad haircut lady (complete with flesh square.)
Next week: Druski! The Strokes! That’s happening.
Episode Grade: C-Plus.
