Tall, Handsome, and Slightly Lost: Alexander Skarsgård Hosts SNL

And Your Host…

It’s always an interesting proposition when a big lug of a dramatic actor hosts Saturday Night Live for the first time.

Sometimes we get a big stiff; other times we find out that Jon Hamm is improbably hilarious. Alexander Skarsgård—current Murderbot and Swedish hunk of unnervingly chiseled handsome—wasn’t a Hamm, nor a ham, sadly, But neither was he a total stiff. The towering Infinity Pool star tossed himself bodily into sketches even if he never slipped into the whole comedy thing with ease.

Skarsgård was best showcased in his monologue. Sporting a suitably Don Draper-esque suit, he put on an arrogant, glad-handing show biz phoniness to pretend to pay tribute to the ever-present but under-represented SNL band. There was a self-parodying swagger as Skarsgård promised, “Call me Willy Wonka, because tonight I’m gonna let the little people cook.” And while musical stalwarts James Genus (bass), Maddie Rice (guitar), and good ol’ Lenny Pickett took their turns being unimpressed by the host’s faux sincerity (“Look, a female! On guitar!”), Skarsgård was clearly having a ball faking a swinging sax solo (while drinking a glass of water) and suggesting a more assured live-TV presence than we eventually got.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: While it should go in the political subsection, I’m yanking “Mom Confession” into the top spot. Partly because there weren’t a lot of candidates tonight, but mainly for the combination of observational satire and Ashley Padilla. As a doting mom who has something important to tell her grown kids, Padilla once more exhibits an assuredness and comic presence that the show has been missing for a number of years.

There’s a patience to the set-up I appreciated, too, with Padilla’s suburban mother prefacing her big revelation with a series of escalating warnings all but guaranteed to put her family on edge. The sketch wants to say something, but its balance of message and execution is tip-top, with Padilla elevating every beat. Admonishing her kids not to react whatsoever while she delivers trial runs like “I eat bugs” and “my butt fell off” only helps the eventual reveal that she maybe, possibly, has changed her mind about Trump land that much harder.

Where the Cold Open was a tonal and conceptual disaster, this lived-in, decidedly human approach to harrowing current events stays rooted firmly in behavior and character. Padilla’s mother greets her kids’ exasperated “It’s about time” reactions with the petulant defensiveness of the reluctantly awakened privileged. As she haltingly enumerates all the horrible things that have broken through her placid white middle class bubble (gun rights seem to be different depending on the carrier; Trump may not always tell the truth; why was she worked up about the trans stuff?), she still retreats into her protective shell at each of her four offsprings’ told-you-sos, curling up in her chair while threatening, “I will go see the Melania movie tonight!” (The furiously red-faced Padilla screeching, “You want this to be real or not?! Then give me grace!” is her channeling character expertly into what the sketch is saying.)

The way we of the “fascism, no thanks” side of the aisle have had to navigate our own families has been a real eye-opener over the past decade or so, and this sketch lets character trump the Trump of it all, and is all the more effective. Toss in a funny little Beck Bennett-esque turn from a mustachioed Skarsgård as the clan’s detached dad for flavor, but this is the Padilla show. Yes, again.

The Worst: The Cold Open. The. Cold. Open. See below.

The Rest: Skarsgård actually played Tarzan in 2016, which I’d somehow forgotten. That fact doesn’t really aid the doodle of a Tarzan sketch, although his ape man monosyllabically easing into a breakup with Sarah Sherman’s Jane was theoretically amusing. Once again, Skarsgård doesn’t bring much to the party (he’s sort of a sheepish lord of the jungle), even if there were a few weird little touches around the edges. Tarzan calling Jane’s concerning lack of non-animal pals a “big red flag” gets a chuckle, but I was more here for Kenan Thompson arriving in in cat ears alongside a very good real kitty as Leopard and Son movers, there to move Tarzan out of the treehouse. There’s no reason for it except for Kenan, cat, and cat ears, which is the sort of reason I appreciate almost as much as Kenan pronouncing the word “stinkily.”

Alexander trod in younger brother Gustaf Skarsgård’s handmade boots in the “Viking Raid” pre-tape. (Here I’ll self-promote—I once reviewed all of History’s Vikings series from beginning to end, and Gustaf’s half-mad holy man Floki was a truly memorable creation. He may not have Alex’s abs, but he’s just as magnetic.) The piece is handsomely mounted as ever, the CGI and prop blood splashing this tale of a Viking clan’s assault on an unfortunate English monastery while Skarsgård’s strapping warrior sulks about not being popular. The conceit doesn’t have much more to it than the twist of rampaging Vikings being sensitive and a whole lot of blood, allowing everyone involved to strap into some kick-ass armor and ham it up. (James Austin Johnson, naturally, is the most committed Norseman.) Also, Vikings was pretty good until Travis Fimmel’s magnetic Ragnar Lothbrok exited the scene. Just saying.

NBC got some Winter Olympics synergy going with a fake games walk-up where Jane Wickline‘s luger reveals that she really, really doesn’t want to go down a suicidally steep and icy track with only a tiny butt sled for protection. That’s the one gag, but Wickline’s intermittent appearances interrupting her more gung-ho snow boarding and ice dancing colleagues stays funny. Her deadpan testimonial, “This is a nightmare—I hate the thing I’m good at” captures the hideous trap her lifelong unwilling luge champ is caught in. Remember kids, so many winter sports involve doing whatever necessary to “confuse and ultimately silence” your survival instinct.

When in doubt about what to do with your imposing host, toss him in a babydoll dress, pigtails, and braces, and have him bellow and hurl an obvious dummy out the window. At least that’s what “Play Date” felt like, even as Skarsgård seemed more into these proceedings than at other times tonight. The premise reveals that Skarsgård’s Agnes, new girl in town, gets irrationally mad any time one of her new friends mocks her for not knowing who Harry Styles or Bluey are. Sarah Sherman does the quick off-camera swap to the dummy, as her taunting playmate is repeated chucked through the window while Skarsgård’s 6-foot-4 little girl booms out a threatening, “Oh, you just opened the gates of hell!”

Letting Skarsgård cut loose and get loud and physical was a good instinct, although the host never quite achieved Will Ferrell levels of quicksilver fury. As the wariest of the girls, I dug Wickline’s offhand, “Stop asking her if she knows stuff!” more.

‘Weekend Update’ Update

The measure of a Colin Jost and Michael Che “Update” is in how deep a cut they manage to make with their drive-by cleverness. For sustained late-night fake news satire, you go to John Oliver or Josh Johnson. For occasionally smartly delivered zingers glancing off of the most pressing news of the week, these are your guys.

And they’re good at it. Che loves to milk audience ambivalence, tonight accurately calling “a thinker” his genuinely layered joke about accused health insurance CEO assassin Luigi Mangione avoiding the death penalty. (“Unless he has a pre-existing condition.”) And Jost got his pelt in the form of the gasps that greeted his one-liner about Minnesota governor Tim Walz comparing ICE’s racial profile raids to the Nazis hunting Anne Frank. (Over a photo of Jeffrey Epstein: “But remember, this administration has always ignored the stories told by young girls.”)

Could they bear down and craft a more comically coherent narrative? Sure. Scattershot jokes about Kash Patel looking like Mr. Bean and another Kristi Noem puppy-killing punchline vie with another solidly delivered Jost joke about Trump supposedly changing tactics in Minnesota “to calm the recent violence around his poll numbers.” Che, on the other hand, did an especially hacky Rush Hour bit about the Brett Ratner-directed Melania documentary when the idea that Trump hand-picked another outed sex creep to direct his wife’s propaganda flick was sitting right there.

It’s a tough time to be happy, but a fertile and vital time to be funny. Still, with these guys, you get what you get.

Speaking of the same old reliable “Weekend Update,” Sarah Sherman got to make fun of Jost for a while. There was a greater degree of difficulty, as she reported on the frigid New York weather while stripping to reveal a skimpy, spangled top (supposedly at a lecherous Jost’s direction), but Sherman is never happier than when engaging in the long-standing SNL tradition of Jost joke piñata. In her cut for time sketch last week, we saw Sherman attempting to edge her Sarah Squirm sensibilities back onto a show so often sidelining her in ordinary roles. Here, she smashes a supposedly frozen pigeon to bits on camera, telling PETA not to worry, since the pigeon was racist. Get weirder, Sarah.

Recurring Sketch Report

“Scandinavian Movie 2” at least threw a curve ball, as the expected confrontation between host Skarsgård and Johnson’s stellar dad Stellan was swapped out for the first of two cameos by the actual Skarsgård patriarch. Honestly, I was a little disappointed not to see JAJ’s Stellan make another appearance, as his take on the gloweringly dour actor was a hoot last time. Still, we got the treat of seeing old pro Stellan actually soaking fully clothed in a bathtub, so I’m not going to make too much fuss.

The sketch itself was—and I know this will shock you—funnier the first time. Recurring sketches rehashing the exact same jokes isn’t new, and having an actual Swede woodenly reacting to the panoply of fake accents was amusing (if not an anti-Scandinavian hate crime of some sort). And as a fan of somber Scandy cinema, it’s fun to imagine Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman breaking character and yelling, “That’s one for the blooper reel!” while Ingmar Bergman reluctantly chuckles from behind the camera. Still, Mikey Day fulfills his destiny as the guy who explains the joke, and Alexander Skarsgård doesn’t truly sell either the exaggerated depression or the off-camera silliness. (Wickline’s Swedish accent keeps making me laugh in spite of myself.)

Sticking with Stellan, the esteemed actor showed off his belly in the returning “Immigrant Dad Talk Show,” once more stealing a scene from his eldest son (and another potential role for JAJ). The sketch itself is another indication of the shallow bench of hit sketches this cast and writers room has managed to create. Marcello Hernandez goes big and broad, his Latino dad berating his guests (white Mikey Day, and Skarsgård’s very white Finnish dad) for not being his brand of over-the-top stereotype.

I, as a very white dude and not a father, bow to Marcello’s obvious enjoyment of parodying garrulous community characters he no doubt grew up around. And while I maintain that Hernandez needs to find some nuance in his performances generally, he’s at least into it here. Host Skarsgård, as happened much of the night, just didn’t feel in tune with the show’s vibe, even if his character’s shameful reveal (he and his father accidentally touched knees in a sauna) brings out his actual dad in all his fish-bellied glory to imperiously sneer at him. Day’s wishy-washy dad is as much of a stereotype as Hernandez’s (he kisses his grown son on the mouth and sports a performative anti-ICE shirt), with the added handicap of not being funny.

Padilla and Andrew Dismukes brought back their adorably tousled “Two People Who Just Hooked Up,” this time discussing the Super Bowl, sort of. I haven’t been shy about my admiration for Padilla as an actress, and here she’s matched by Dismukes, the bashful duo’s inability to stay focused on football emerging in a series of endearingly funny asides and sidelong glances. The jokes are the same, although their post-coital banter incorporates sports lingo (“tush push” was a no-brainer), and there’s a gentle almost sweetness to the whole thing that the inevitable late disillusionment can’t erase.

Political Comedy Report

To pick the least objectionable aspect of this appalling Cold Open off the top of the pile: Pete Davidson?

I enjoy Davidson (when he’s not sucking up to terrorist slave-states for big sacks of cash) but political impressions are, to be gentle, not his thing, and there’s no earthy reason suggested here that an actual cast member shouldn’t have landed the latest Trump administration role of Tom Homan. Davidson in a bald cap is Davidson in a bald cap, a missed opportunity with such a deeply parody-ready figure as the Shrek/Gamorrean guard-looking “border czar” sent this week to do ICE damage control in Minnesota.

There’s a bigger issue though, and it has to do with Saturday Night Live‘s perpetual choice to approach deeply abnormal events from a place of reassuring normalcy. Call me sentimental, but a masked merc army dispatched by a worthless old bigot/adjudicated sexual abuser/convicted fraudster/twice-impeached insurrectionist/suspected underage sex criminal terrorizing every non-white person they see and murdering those brave enough to stand up to them isn’t normal.

The sketch nibbles around the edges of the ongoing horror show in Minnesota (and, as of last week, my home state of Maine) by unidentified, hair-trigger ethnic cleansers, sure. And nods to the ICE gang being a gaggle of dead-eyed police academy rejects culled specifically from January 6th insurrectionists and the ongoing double standard about just which protesters are allowed to exercise their Second Amendment rights get checked off in turn.

But the whole tone of the sketch buys right into the laughable PR spin this White House is peddling—that the ICE-employed murderers of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and others we don’t yet know about were just “bad apples” whose rampage of racial profiling and indiscriminate bullying violence was somehow the fault of the wee Nazi cosplay enthusiast Homan is replacing and not, as JAJ’s dim-bulb agent lays out, the intended result of Trump and his white supremacist cronies all along.

Davidson’s colorless Homan is the rational one, while his assembled ICE goons are a multiracial force of clueless dummies and not the intentionally deployed shock troops for the MAGA fascist agenda. This Homan patiently fields silly questions as the voice of reason, hurried to Minneapolis to responsibly settle down a misguided batch of ding-dongs, and not, say, the architect of the cruelest anti-immigrant purges in recent history, whose blame-the-victims excuse for ICE’s murder spree is the “heated rhetoric” of those calling fascism and racism what they are, all while spewing incendiary propaganda against anyone not on his boss’ team.

Even as Davidson’s Homan gets tagged for taking that bribe (on camera!) and engineering the family separation policy, the sketch paints the in-progress bloodbath as just the result of some dopey yokels, no matter the tagged-on wider implication. When Thompson’s stolid ICE-head winks knowingly at the admonition not to destroy evidence, Davidson’s Homan reacts in horror that anyone would ever suggest such a thing. Whether as a result of actual, blinkered ignorance in the writers room (unlikely) or a soft-pedaled appeal to just chuckle at both sides when one side are literally murdering people (ding!), this is genuinely pathetic.

SNL spent Trump’s first term portraying the women in Trump’s life/cabinet as conflicted victims of a rampaging maniac. You know, despite actual figures like Melania and Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway offering no indications of anything but rabid fealty. This is just that wrongheaded, off-target “satire” repasted onto new atrocities.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Padilla is the best pure actor on the show right now, or at least she’s neck-and-neck with Johnson. And since JAJ was robbed of his expected Stellan Skarsgård father-son confrontation tonight, she gets the crown.

Chloe Fineman‘s a good comic actress, too, although the way the show has allowed her impression skills (which are prodigious) to wither remains a puzzle.

Hernandez and Sherman got splashy roles that did less for me than intended. Both performers seemed poised to bigger things but neither has grown enough as a performer to ascend to the A-list. Both need to learn some subtlety, is what I’m hinting.

Thompson’s like a lean-in scene-stealer by this point in his illustrious career. He’ll anchor a sketch if he’s allowed, but seems more than happy to amuse himself in strategic deployments.

Kam Petterson was nowhere in evidence. Maybe it was something he said?

I get that she’s an acquired taste, but i’m digging Wickline more than ever this season. It’s all about finding your slot.

As we round into the back half of Season 51, it’s past time for the other featured players to make their moves. Veronika Slowikoska is likely safe. Tommy Brennan, not so much.

10-to-Oneland Report

I’ve never played the “edgy” Cards Against Humanity, so I’ll just take at face value that the supplied “twisted” phrases on the titular cards are super-hilarious to the undiscriminating. Anyway, someone at SNL has spent many a night giggling at what looks like an effortfully naughty Mad Libs, so Skarsgård’s new boyfriend character wowing a friend group with zingers like “doing crack with Susan Boyle” and “dropping acid with a mariachi band at Josh Gad’s quinceañera” no doubt emerge from within the popular game decks themselves.

The joke is that Skarsgård’s overstuffed ski parka is bursting with hundreds of cheat-sheet cards allows him to do some nifty physical stuff—after the initial explosion of cards, the occasional spills from various parts of his coat required some deft prop work. Sadly, the game Skarsgård just isn’t particularly comedy-forward, and his anguish as being discovered falls a little flat. I can only assume that Dismukes’ archly delivered accusation, “You said this to me but moments ago” is his work, which is the one 10-to-one touch I enjoyed.

Stray Observations

• Tonight was the 1,000th episode of Saturday Night Live. And in answer to questions about how (or if) the show would make a big deal out of the milestone, Skarsgård fumbled in his pockets for a lone New Year’s popper and set it off in passing during the monologue.

• I suppose it’s a necessary skill, but rappers live-performing the radio edits of their songs bums me out.

• The incredibly depressing RIP tribute card hits hard this week. Catherine O’Hara has already been an SCTV star by the time she agreed to join the first of Dick Ebersol’s post Jean Doumanian casts in 1981. O’Hara never actually did join however, as she fled in horror after Ebersol’s newly hired head writer and legendary sh*t-stirrer, Michael O’Donoghue, roundly berated everyone and spray painted the walls in the infamous Mr. Mike’s attempt to inject some “DANGER” into the show. While it’s easy to imagine the peerless O’Hara elevating those Lorne-less years, she definitely made the right call.
• Stellan Skarsgård has it made. Four successful acting kids (two of whom routinely open huge movies), unimpeachable international leading man cred, plus Marvel money? Well done, sir. Show that belly.

• Stellan blows his Swedish thespian’s suitably dour take by revealing he’s wearing a Hulk hand under the water. Marvel money, baby!

• In the other cameo tonight, Jack McBrayer showed up in Sherman’s weather remote, presumably on a break from running the network.

Episode Grade: A thousand B-Minuses.

Up next: We’re off until the very end of February, when Heated Rivalry‘s Connor Storrie is backed by musical guests Mumford & Sons.