The September 13, 2008, season premiere of Saturday Night Live is best remembered for Tina Fey’s debut as Sarah Palin. But further down the rundown of the episode, hosted by Michael Phelps, was another debut worth remembering: a sketch called “T-Mobile Fav 5,” written by a 26-year-old John Mulaney in his very first week on the job.
Mulaney’s premise was deceptively simple: What if the characters in a real television commercial actually stopped to consider what one of them had just said?
The original T-Mobile ad promoted the company’s “MyFaves” calling plan, which allowed customers to select five people for unlimited calling. In it, a teenage boy reveals that he’s chosen five of his sister’s attractive friends. When his sister protests, their father takes the boy’s side, suggesting that maybe she shouldn’t have such attractive friends.
And that’s the joke. The commercial moves on.
Mulaney decided the conversation shouldn’t end there.
In his version, Jason Sudeikis plays the father, with Kristen Wiig as his wife, Casey Wilson as their daughter, and Phelps as their son. When Sudeikis repeats the line about his daughter’s attractive friends, Wiig does what the mother in the actual commercial didn’t: She asks him to explain himself.
The more he talks, the worse things get. Eventually, she discovers that her husband has included the same teenage girls on his own list of favorite contacts.
All the while, cheerful T-Mobile promotional messages continue interrupting the increasingly uncomfortable family confrontation. By the end, the father is headed for a hotel, his wife is demanding his phone, and the company’s upbeat “Stick Together” slogan has taken on a rather different meaning.
The T-Mobile sketch offered an early glimpse of what would become a Mulaney trademark: taking a familiar piece of pop culture and examining it with an almost unreasonable degree of seriousness.
Mulaney treats pop culture like a deposition. He’s the overprepared fan-turned-attorney who revisits something we’ve all seen and calmly establishes, for the record, that none of it makes sense.
In this case, he didn’t even need to invent a new punchline. He simply insisted that the original one be explained.
In a 2014 conversation with Martin Short for Vulture, Mulaney recalled his first-week success, explaining how he’d simply picked up where the original T-Mobile commercial left off.
“The sketch was just that dinner after the father said that,” he told Short, describing the mother’s incredulous reaction to her husband’s remark.
Getting a solo-written piece onto the air in his very first episode was no small accomplishment. Just ask Larry David, who famously got only one solo-written sketch on the air during his entire 1984–85 season as an SNL writer—and even that was relegated to the show’s final minutes.
Mulaney, by contrast, was off and running.
In a 2014 profile of Mulaney in the Chicago Tribune, Seth Meyers recalled how quickly the young writer went from asking for help to providing it
“I used to tell people he brought me stuff on his first day and, by his second, I was bringing stuff to him, to make it better,” Meyers said.
Bill Hader put it even more succinctly: “John arrived more fully formed than anyone else there.”
Mulaney returns to host SNL for the seventh time this Saturday, November 14, with musical guest Phoebe Bridgers.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
