Review: Finn Wolfhard (and Friends) Kick Off SNL’s 2026

And Your Host…

Speeding past the undeniable fact that his improbable moniker is straight out of a lost Kids in the Hall sketch, Stranger Things‘ Finn Wolfhard proved an able and amiable host for the first Saturday Night Live of 2026.

There are some hosts whose “the best week of my life” goodnights sound canned, but Wolfhard was such an eager and energetic presence that I bought that the 23-year-old Canadian was riding a genuine 8H buzz. Even when he stumbled in his last sketch, the guy just steamrolled ahead and redid the line on the fly, an endearing go-get-’em spirit no doubt engendered by a young lifetime in front of the unforgiving cameras.

Wolfhard (and no, I’m never going to stop smiling wryly while typing that name) brought along a pair of Stranger Things besties in Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin (sorry, Will), and they seemed jazzed about the whole experience, too. (They gladly took a shot at the incessant and age-inappropriate scrutiny “fans” kept them under while they went through globally streamed puberty.)

Honestly, this was a Netflix corporate dream show, as the streaming giant also got an extended pre-tape offering viewers of Stranger Things‘ recent series finale the comedy promise of a five-show spin-off showcase. It was more fan service than clever on its own (“fans” got a limp nod to their phantom ninth episode conspiracy theory), but I did appreciate the era-fidelity of positing that Mike, Dustin, and Lucas put the Upside Down behind them in favor of an Sex and the City-style NYC existence, cocaine nosebleeds and all.

To confess, I bailed on Stranger Things after the first season. (I’m old, and ate ’80s horror with my discontinued Mr. T cereal.) Therefore, a fair amount of the timely stuff bounced off my greying head, but Wolfhard was a gamer, so I’ll just note that SNL‘s efforts to court the youth demographic as it did tonight occasionally felt exhausting/exhausted. Still, the kid (sorry, man) was a solid presence.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: A tried and true test of a host’s willingness to get down, a sci-fi series sketch saw Wolfhard as its titular, preening “Space Emperor” expertly get stuffed with tasty “delights” by horn-haired attendant Mikey Day. The test comes in seeing how the host will play into a conceit designed to make them break, and Wolfhard did a fine job walking the line between crowd-baiting giggles and performing professionalism.

Day, for his part, was his old pro self, timing his sycophantic mouthfuls of sticky goo and outsized alien meat for maximum laughs. (“Take that delight out of the rotation!” he booms after his emperor rejects one offering.) More than a few cast members got the sillies (Chloe Fineman, looking at you), but you can’t really blame anyone here, as the whole premise was designed to bring everyone involved to the breaking point.

Wolfhard kept on delivering his despot’s imperious lines with a face dripping with unidentifiable glop (one enthusiastically proffered treat looked like half a dragonfruit stuffed with lime-green caviar), selling the sketch’s version of high-minded TV sci-fi technobabble even as everyone around him wobbled between laughter and queasiness. And while I’m tempted to ascribe some stealth satire to the portrait of an evil, glutinous supreme leader levying capricious tariffs on his neighboring kingdoms when not objectifying the enslaved “floor girl” chained to his throne, I’ll just say this bit of well-performed silliness made me laugh.

The Worst: So “Snack Homiez” is a big favorite now, huh? I’m of two minds about this shameless pitch to a YouTube demo that barely knows what SNL is. On the one hand, Chloe Fineman, Veronika Slowikoska, Jane Wickline, and the surprisingly returned Sabrina Carpenter play 12-/13-year-old podcast rats with unnerving verisimilitude.

With their piping voices, shrugging social awkwardness, and incessant stream of indecipherable slang (“raw,” “chopped,” valid,” “fire,” “gassed,” “low-key,” “unc,” please make it stop), all four undeniably inhabit their like-and-subscribe-grubbing youths to a suitably insufferable degree. Wolfhard’s 16-year-old guest describes his own Twitch brand as a “looksmaxxing giga-chad,” and while I salute the stab at replicating the fast-forward gibberish of the internet kids of today, everybody involved manages to find a fruitful minor key of observational performance.

There are decades of coming sociological studies about the evolutionary damage online culture is doing to young males, and the cross-currents here of jockeying, gay-bashing, and bashful hero worship are worth at least a footnote or two. Plus, no Trump this time around.

On the downside (and it’s a big one) is how this inconsequential (if well-acted) trifle has clearly been tabbed as a killer post-monologue crowd pleaser. On a purely strategic level, this makes little sense. If the goal is for this 51-year-old show to impress 12-year-olds, it won’t. If it’s to pander to old farts in the SNL audience (ahem) with how ridiculous those darned kids are, it’s both impenetrable and not nearly funny enough.

Toss in some shameless-even-for-SNL A$AP Rocky-cameoing product placement for very real hip-hop-themed snacks, and the entire enterprise deflates. The acting’s more than fine (Wickline’s put-upon, barely older “unc” might be her best character), but I question the franchise tag.

The Rest: The Harry Potter pre-tape (promoting HBO’s actual franchise-milking reboot) went for a double-shot of zeitgeist, with the Hogwarts spinoff casting Wolfhard as Harry and appropriately ginger Ben Marshall as Ron in a Heated Rivalry-inspired, same-sexy retooling.

The narration slips in the premise-establishing fact that the spinoff was hastily rewritten once HBO saw how surprisingly America was into gay hockey action, with Harry and Ron getting steamy on the quidditch field, under the invisibility cloak, and so forth. In defiance of one featured player’s widely publicized homophobic stand-up set this week (we’ll get there), the piece runs a line of appreciative (if smirky) gay-friendliness in deference to the hot show of the moment.

Jason Momoa pops up in the other surprise cameo of the episode as a happily bitchy Hagrid cooing over his two young pals’ secret relationship (the narrator stresses that this is an 18-plus wizarding world), and while the joke that J.K Rowling has disowned this retelling nods shakily toward the author’s renowned TERF bigotry, the lack of a trans Harry or Ron to truly piss her off seems a deliberate missed opportunity.

Man, I wanted to love the family sketch more than I did. The setup—Wolfhard’s would-be indie rocker wants to skip college and go on tour—is all about James Austin Johnson’s entrance as the “Wait ’til your father gets home” patriarch.

And bless JAJ in all his ever-confident, frosted-tips glory in the reveal, as Dad turns out to be an aging boy band star aghast that his son would eschew a life of synchronized choreography and tasty hooks for acoustic sets in dingy bars. It’s the old Python bit where Graham Chapman’s booming author dad rejects his effete coal miner son’s career choice, and I worked up my hopes waiting for whoever was going to come through the door. In practice, though, there just wasn’t enough oomph to the reveal or JAJ’s subsequent performance (backed up though he is by his equally coiffed and posing backup band, Marcello Hernandez, Andrew Dismukes, and Jeremy Culhane).

It takes a real misfire for me not to grade a JAJ/Ashley Padilla-led sketch on a curve, but this one didn’t ever take off for me, and JAJ’s final turn to acceptance comes out of nowhere. (Padilla lustily hauling off to backhand Wolfhard for correcting her that it’s “Pixies” and not “The Pixies” notwithstanding.)

Weekend Update Update

I’ll rant about SNL‘s stubborn refusal to engage with the national crisis (sorry, “crises”) below, so I’ll give it up to Michael Che and Colin Jost in the usual manner. They’re funny guys who at least use genuinely alarming/terrible news to one-up each other in a “Who’s cleverest?” contest, while sneaking in one or two actually substantive jokes per episode.

As both Che and Jost have hinted around about not needing this gig any more in recent years, you can see the attraction in staying behind the “Update” desk—nowhere else is going to give them a higher profile showcase for their signature brand of odd couple sparring and the occasional on-target gasp-punchline.

Tonight was actually one of their more pointed outings. So what if a set-up referencing Donald Trump promising “a day of reckoning and retribution” while he orders a heavily armed army of pardoned January 6 insurrectionists to provoke violence he can use to cancel democratic elections is just an excuse for Jost to cut to a picture of Death (presumably haunting Trump in the mirror). I’m tough on these guys. I get it, as much as I understand that “Update” remains many viewers’ favorite part of the show. But there are people doing this sort of thing a whole lot better at a time when it’s most relevant.

Jane Wickline seems to be edging into a more secure place on the show, as evidenced by a pair of solid turns tonight. On “Update,” she was funny impersonating a woman who apparently went viral for a New Year’s resolution about collecting buttons. (I’m a busy guy and I’ll take SNL‘s word on the virality.)

Apart from the buzzworthy premise, Wickline seizes on a character within the fleeting internet figure, stammering defiantly her resolve in defiance of a skeptical Che. (“Don’t be playful.”) So long sidelined as much by her own seeming diffidence as by her oddball persona, Wickline exhibits a refreshing confidence, with button lady’s pronouncement, “It only has to make sense to me for me to do it” serving as a clarion call for resolute weirdos everywhere. Go on and collect those buttons.

Kam Patterson got an “Update” slot playing former NFL superstar and Miami Hurricanes superfan Michael irvin. Not really an impression, Patterson’s Irvin played out his over-the-top ‘Canes fandom in the sort of bombastic sports figure caricature “Update” is traditionally home to. (It’s not Big Papi or LaVar Ball, but then Patterson’s no Kenan Thompson.)

Patterson was confident enough, and the concluding joke about the fanatical and troubled Irvin (“my mother was a hummingbird and my father was a brick of cocaine”) running to Monday’s CFB championship with “an assful of police tranquilizer darts” at least paints a picture.

Recurring Sketch Report

“Snack Homiez” is not a thing. I refuse to accept it as such.

Political Comedy Report

Saturday Night Live‘s presidential impressions live on performance, not substance. That’s not even a bad thing—SNL‘s in the ha-ha business more than the cultural critic business, no matter its troubled post-Watergate birth. But expert buffoonery went down more easily when politics as usual didn’t involve a queasy, every-morning grab at your phone to see if the president shredded the Constitution or annexed Luxembourg while you slept.

James Austin Johnson is a master impressionist as well as a thoughtful guy about the particular president he’s tasked with bringing to show-opening life each week. Over his tenure as Trump, JAJ has hinted that his take on the twice-impeached insurrectionist currently using hand-picked minions to derail an investigation into his position at the center of the biggest child sex trafficking scandal in American history is a lot more angry and alarmed than he’s allowed to be under the jowly makeup and wig.

But that’s SNL‘s influence, an inexorable steer into the cartoonish and the lazily topical. JAJ’s Trump remains a brilliantly observed impression cloaking timid nods to bigger, more terribly pressing things.

The Cold Open tonight was another Trump-at-a-podium number, with allusions to, say, Trump kidnapping a sitting head of state to install a self-enriching oil puppet state, or his ongoing threat to invade another sovereign country and destroy NATO on behalf of his Russian oligarch hero, passing as just part of the schtick.

This Trump’s parting aside that he’s going to just straight-up cancel the November midterm elections felt like JAJ peeking out from behind the makeup to prod yet another limping show opener toward the attention of an audience primed to chuckle at that silly ol’ Trump once again. (Donald Trump is going to attempt to cancel the upcoming election. It’s simply a question of whether he’s stopped.)

The same goes for the standard parade of Trumpworld figures, a gaggle of white supremacist thugs and enablers JAJ’s Trump aptly describes as “my little cabinet of curiosities… from the twisted mind of Guillermo del Trump.” Ashley Padilla purses her lips as ICE ringleader Kristi Noem, Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio gets chastised for speaking Spanish, and Jeremy Culhane gets drafted into J.D. Vance duty, each following the SNL model of winking at an actual outrage or two, then speeding off. Colin Jost continues to relish mocking the alpha-douche antics of drunken, fascist, manly man Pete Hegseth, which at least jolts things awake for a moment.

I did appreciate the carryover gag that there’s one Trump minion so repellent as to not merit an in-flesh appearance—first time around Steve Bannon was a cloaked and masked Death, while Trump here bemoans the fact that someone allowed a bible into the Oval, sending adviser Stephen Miller clinging unseen to the ceiling like a Nazi-loving, albino demon-lizard. Or something.

Lazy aim doesn’t help things. Noem’s lines about the sort of half-evolved, wall-punching, gay-panicked male monsters she wants for ICE is right on the money. But her joke, “Do I have this situation under control? Noem, I do not,” fundamentally misses the point that Trump’s masked, protester-murdering secret police force is operating exactly as designed.

Saturday Night Live doesn’t have to do politics. It chooses to, both because even feeble slaps at Trump attract eyeballs and feed Lorne Michaels’ legacy as American satirist royalty. But trotting out these performance-driven trifles as if the end of the American experiment isn’t lumbering closer every week is to court more than irrelevance. What would a Saturday Night Live under true fascism look like? I imagine not much different.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Kam Patterson ran back to his Kill Tony cocoon in SNL‘s off weeks, assuring his appreciative yahoo crowd that Saturday Night Live is “gay“; Lorne Michaels rewarded his most recent right-wing hire with an “Update” appearance. Whether the young stand-up is a bigot, a dingbat, a careerist, or all of the above, Lorne’s ongoing efforts to broaden his aging show’s audience to the braying alt-right demographic is never going to work the way he wants it to. Patterson, like Shane Gillis before him, took the check and the publicity, and both have laughed their asses off at the old man attempting to co-opt their bottom-dwelling popularity.

After a three-week hiatus to process Bowen Yang’s departure and the potential opportunities for advancement in a mid-tier cast, some people were notably scant. Sarah Sherman and Andrew Dismukes had one fleeting appearance each, while Kenan continued his elder statesman role with a couple of brief, stolen scenes. As much as I miss Bowen, shrinking the size of the cast was long overdue, but it’s been maddeningly clear that nobody in the house has enough of “it” to truly break out. (As yet.)

Of the featured players, I’m sadly confident that Tommy Brennan has missed his shot, while Jeremy Culhane feels poised to take a step up. Veronika Slowikoska had the biggest leap this week out of the new kids, with Ben Marshall and Jane Wickline right on her heels.

Apart from channeling a pre-teen pipsqueak with aplomb, Slowikoska got a chance to go big in the “Guy’s Girl” sketch as Wolfhard’s Bears jersey-sporting, tag-along girlfriend, doing enough gravel-voiced scatological schtick to gross out a roomful of dudes. “She’s a lot,” is how one of the guys describes her try-hard antics, and he’s not wrong. It’s the sort of dynamic, cheap-seats role Amy Poehler might have done (she, too, would have nailed the on-camera beer-shotgunning), and if the sketch itself wasn’t a riot, Slowikoska made a solid case that she’s ready and able to carry a piece.

Ashley Padilla’s a star—look for the rare mid-season promotion soon enough.

10-to-Oneland Report

Well, at least Netflix got its money’s worth. Another branded sketch hinged on that Free Solo guy’s plan to scale a terrifyingly tall Taiwanese skyscraper for the streaming service’s ravenous viewership. Oh, and because it’s there or some such.

The gag that there’s also this guy named Reggie (Kenan Thompson) also planning to scale the 1,600-foot Taipei 101 despite being a narcoleptic junk food addict in a walking cast is mildly amusing (it’s Kenan, after all), but the only bite came from the sign-off: “Netflix: We saw your hockey porn and we raise you a live death.”

Stray Observations

• Ask not for whom the SNL in memoriam card tolls. This week, it tolled for Grateful Dead co-founder and two-time musical guest Bob Weir, who died on January 10 at age 78.

• A$AP Rocky’s first number got entertainingly weird and theatrical, as his “punk rock” song saw his background dancers pretend-trashing the set, a beefy ‘rassler-looking dude beat everyone up, and then Rocky himself was shockingly stunt-hurled right though the backdrop. A lot of musical guests are bringing the set pieces this season, and I’m here for it.

• If you enjoy these reviews and have some ready cash and time on your hands, I’m a 2X tall.

• “Officials in Minnesota have sued the Trump administration, claiming that their large-scale ICE actions are an unconstitutional federal invasion. While the Trump administration claims that, yep.”—Che

• “A federal judge on Friday ordered ICE agents in Minnesota not to retaliate against peaceful protesters. But if ICE agents listened to judges, then their ex-wives would be getting those checks for child support.”—Jost

• “RFK Jr. criticized President Trump’s diet, saying, ‘I don’t know how he’s alive.’ Well, I do. [Picture of a bloody Trump after supposedly being shot.] A slight breeze.”—Che

Episode Grade: B-minus, but a breezy B-minus.

Next week: One Battle After Another‘s Teyana Taylor hosts alongside Geese. (The band.)