Teyana Taylor’s Energy Can’t Jolt Saturday Night Live Alive

And Your Host…

Newly minted Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor‘s first SNL hosting stint fell into the gap between her undeniable enthusiasm and confidence, and the material on offer.

Coming out in an “I ❤️ NY” tee and what looked like the pelt of a particularly lush Times Square Elmo, the proud Harlem native and One Battle After Another star was on, she was amped, and she proceeded to throw herself bodily into a raft of sketches with sprung rhythms. When an SNL audience goes numb, the dissonance between energy expended and energy received gets dire pretty fast.

It wasn’t on Taylor, a powerhouse of a performer all-in for sketch after limping sketch. Her big showpiece had her gamely decked out as an old man, the wedding DJ’s string of Earth, Wind & Fire grooves pulling him to the dance floor for some of the expected* but still-stunning Teyana Taylor moves. (*See stray observations.)

Maybe it was the below-zero New York weather, or the impending snowpocalypse heading toward much of the country (here’s hoping Central Maine Power can keep my lights on long enough to finish this review). But this was a dead crowd—and it wasn’t really on them, either. Some SNL episodes have it and some don’t, and it’s not always easy to pinpoint why. Here’s to Taylor for plugging away right to the end, but even she couldn’t juice this one up on its feet.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: Unprecedentedly, I’d throw the Trump Cold Open in this slot if it didn’t have its own subsection. I know—I’m as shocked as you are.

In a close second place, I’ll turn to Ashley Padilla for help. The self help night class gave the risen star another chance to inhabit a character with shades of subtle desperation, something Padilla excels at. Her teacher, a gung-ho motivational speaker with a spotty resumé and a class full of rightly skeptical students, allowed Padilla to hold increasingly sweaty court as her audience immediately and repeatedly found the red flags in her carefully assembled PowerPoint slide show.

The parade of students pointing out the red flags betrays a recent-years Saturday Night Live structural weakness. (Naturally, Mikey Day is in the mix of people underlining every comic beat so we don’t miss it.) But the escalation works as Padilla’s employment history—including a long stint as Dolly Parton impersonator and failed stab at Michelle Obama speechwriter (it’s mostly crowd work)—spills out, the teacher’s own confidence washed away at every turn. And that’s where Padilla shines, her performing authenticity raising the sketch a level or two.

Sitting defeated and speeding desultorily through her slides (one reads, “It’s okay to get catfished”), Padilla’s would-be inspirational leader stews so dispiritedly in her own defeat that a squirmy sort of dignity emerges. Sure, her refreshed enthusiasm once her students explain how her unimpressiveness has inspired them sees her bust out that terrible Dolly Parton, but Padilla is the sort of sketch performer who can make you invest in even the slimmest wisp of a character.

The Worst: I’ve fought the battle against the idea that reality show sketches are by their very nature hilarious. And I’ve lost. Backstab Island has one joke—Taylor’s contestant, unlike ever single reality competitor cliché, is actually there just to make friends. Here’s where Taylor’s all-in energy and the listlessness of the sketch fizzled out hardest. I kept thinking the sketch was going to add a twist, or get weird, but nope. The one joke is all you get. (Even Jane Wickline‘s contestant repeatedly getting anger-doused in guava juice landed with a splat.) The reality-TV sketch well dried up decades ago. Theoretically there’s a great sketch on the theme lurking in somebody’s head, but the simple reversal of one player having healthy boundaries and a good attitude is wheezy stuff.

The Rest: In her monologue, Taylor joked about her childhood dream being to find out about her Oscar nomination while being fitted for a bald cap next to Mikey Day. The wedding sketch is the payoff, with Taylor’s hip-replaced grandpa indeed sporting some admirable old man prosthetics, courtesy of SNL‘s award-winning hair and makeup people. Sadly, Taylor’s energetic dancing as the rejuvenated geezer sent that bald cap askew, the increasingly evident forehead crease drawing focus as much as the dropped eyeglasses prop Taylor (and then Kenan) struggled to retrieve.

Apart from Taylor (with help from an identically costumed breakdancer via a nifty Texas switch) tearing up the dance floor to the audience’s mild delight, there’s nothing else going on here. “Old guy unexpectedly dances like Teyana Taylor” needs something else to warrant all that effort, even if Taylor herself gave it all she had. (A stagehand could be seen bum-rushing the still exuberantly dancing Taylor off to the next sketch as this one cut to commercial.)

Kenan Thompson and Taylor made a good team right from the jump, the first post-monologue sketch pairing them as eccentrically musical airline employees. Stuck telling a gaggle of tetchy passengers that their flight has been delayed, the duo, under their stage name Shrimp and Grits, croon a series of soulful ditties completely unequal to the task of making irritated travelers less irritable. It’s the sort of performance-heavy showpiece tailored to a host with skills (and the stalwart Kenan), but like the unfortunate commuters’ plane (which has misplaced its wings), this just didn’t truly take off.

The sketch did reference the ongoing travel chaos under Trump’ s hand-picked MTV Road Rules clown and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. (“This is Trumps’ America—Mayor Pete Buttagreg cannot save you.”) And James Austin Johnson continues to play amusingly smooth-voiced pilots, that silky, impersonal cadence just the perfect tone for his deadpan gifts. But this was clearly meant to plant the host’s singing/dancing/comedy flags with authority, and it didn’t.

Taylor’s Oscar-nominated turn as the gloriously named Perfidia Beverly Hills in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another headlines the fake ad for photo-realistic movie action figures. You don’t have to have seen Anderson’s timely-as-hell, typically stellar movie to get the incongruity of a politically heavy action thriller’s line of children’s toys, this being another lovingly shot pre-tape in service of the premise. Seeing the piece reference Benicio del Toro’s character having a secret tunnel to help “your Latino friends escape” from Sean Penn’s maniacally racist government agent, and little white kids getting swept up enough to yell,”Take that, pig!” while Taylor’s Perfidia machine-guns pursuers, at least grapples with the moment with a bit of righteous satire. (Note: I would like all of the Paul Thomas Master Set action figures, please. Or at least somebody buy me the Philip Seymour Hoffman in Hard Eight figure for my upcoming birthday.)

‘Weekend Update’ Update

Colin Jost and Michael Che seemed affected by the same “Screw it!” anger we saw in the Cold Open tonight. At least for a while. Che really got into his jokes once he realized this crowd was ripe for provoking, his lines about Trump pal/upcoming sex trafficking witness Ghislane Maxwell being prepped for another suspicious jailhouse “suicide,” and ICE being “alleged” people, sparking some hard-won unease. Sure, Che seems just as happy getting gasps when joking about Stevie Wonder’s sightlessness or little Asian kids making his sneakers, but that’s when he’s most in his element.

Jost took another seemingly unscripted jab—Che’s joke about his co-anchor being “the most molested” kid elicited a promise that the line wasn’t in dress rehearsal. (Bashing Jost is always this Update’s go-to because, well, he’s Colin Jost.) Jost’s openers about Trump worshipping Satan and forming a “Board of Peace” consisting of the most corrupt and tyrannical countries (including America) on Earth were wordy but solid, as was his comparison of Trump’s unhinged threats to annex Greenland to creepy psycho men on dating apps. If “I’ll kill you, you ugly bitch” as a response to polite rejection sounds familiar, it’s because we all know abusive, half-formed male psychopaths in our lives.

Did I mention Jost-bashing? Well, it’s Marcello Hernandez‘s turn, as his “Gen Z translator” proclaimed that the sure death knell for any hip slang is Colin Jost using it. (RIP, “cap,” “fahhh,” and other terms old-ass reviewers get from context.) Points to Marcello for pointing out the way that white Gen Z-ers appropriate Black culture, although like a lot of Hernandez’s “Update” pieces, this is more energetic than hilarious.

I’m rooting for Jeremy Culhane. He’s shown flashes this season apart from the usual featured player table scraps, and while I’m not (repeat not) clamoring for Mr. On Blast to make a return any time soon, Culhane wrung just enough out of the bit to win me over. The joke that his observational “blasts” are lame (“What does the ‘b’ in billionaire even stand for—bidiot?”) wouldn’t be much without the dressing of a series of increasingly elaborate hand gesture and music sting cappers, but Culhane’s sheer stubbornness got funnier as it went on. The first stinger synched up amusingly enough, but Culhane’s willingness to hold the ensuing, less successful moves with a dumb smile on his face put a dumb smile on my face. Again, however, let’s hang this up at one, shall we, m’man?

Recurring Sketch Report

The NFL announcing team of James Austin Johnson’s Joe Buck and Andrew Dismukes‘ Troy Aikman made their return, doing the same exact joke as last time. Luckily for us, JAJ can make a straight-laced figure forced to read out ridiculous on-air plugs reliably amusing, as his Buck repeatedly interrupts patter on the upcoming AFC championship game to mandatorily hype the network’s new lesbian-themed (and unfortunately titled) erotic restaurant drama Quefs.

Now, that’s a cheap joke (one that sideline reporter Teyana Taylor/Lisa Salters can’t help but explain for the dullards in the back.) Complete with the ubiquitously annoying picture-in-picture bumpers at the bottom of the screen, the joke remains that Buck dutifully attempts to feign interest in his corporate parents’ latest buzz-worthy programming, while Dismukes’ former jock smilingly fakes his way through the pop culture fog. As a riff on corporate synergy and its strange bedfellows, the sketch at least has a couple of funny guys playing it straight, the only strategy that could work. Johnson has a way with an aside (“Let’s not guess, Troy”) that plugs into the vein of beleaguered professionalism of many of his characters with energizing assurance.

And like Padilla, JAJ is an actor in a sketch show, not a sketch actor, a fascinating evolution for SNL over the past few seasons. It results in the show leaning more into subtler, odder premises, something that tickles me to no end, but which runs counter to the prevailing SNL belly-laughs ethos. Sometimes talent leads the way.

Political Comedy Report

Well that wasn’t such a chore now, was it?

But I kid SNL‘s decade of limp, say-nothing Trump Cold Opens as the country hurtles into the void. James Austin Johnson, unlike the clearly not-into-it Alec Baldwin, is a world-class impression weapon so often sent out there with damp script pages of watery nothing to go along with his minutely observed and genuinely prickly Trump. Johnson has publicly hinted at his frustration over SNL‘s conception of Donald Trump not grappling with the true danger posed by this evil, sundowning maniac, and tonight felt like the first time in forever that SNL took the gloves off and threw a few meaningful punches. In the midst of the Trump regime’s amped-up attacks on late-night comedy programs, the momentarily discarded timidity was truly bracing.

The framing of an Oscars-style Trump Awards given to every sycophant and lickspittle who’s bestowed a preening grifter and bully with fawning praise and/or their own accolades is at least novel. It gives Johnson room to stretch his Trump’s narcissism with blobby new energy, throwing the lavish Hollywood party he’s never been invited to—even if, as JAJ’s twice-impeached traitor notes in passing, his crowd is filled with “so many awful and terrible people.”

The awards themselves see Trump gobbling up the enforced adulation he’s demanded from countries and corporations alike. JAJ’s portrayal of the bottomless avarice of his subject clocks how Trump has already forgotten the name of the coup-friendly Venezuelan opposition leader (María Corina Machado) who handed over her ill-won Nobel Peace Prize to the guy who just illegally kidnapped that country’s sitting head of state. Jeremy Culhane’s J.D. Vance endures a gay joke from his boss while losing the “Best Kiss” (of Trump’s ass) award to Padilla’s Kristi Noem. (Trump immediately swipes it back, even though his own nomination for kissing Putin’s ass came up short.)

There were unaccustomed haymakers here. Saturday morning’s on-camera murder of yet another protester, Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti, by Stephen Miller’s white supremacist gestapo, was alluded to as Trump referred to his awards being a distraction from what his “freaks and psychos at ICE” are up to. The Best Trump Photo category brought up ongoing atrocities, from Trump’s cringey flag-humping to his ubiquity in the illegally unreleased Epstein files, and that time he stood annoyed while a supplicant had a seizure right in the Oval Office. Andrew Dismukes got his own bald cap as Miller, although the literal Nazi and Trump shadow president deserves more mockery than he got here.

With JAJ riding herd over an uncharacteristically blunt and angry Trump sketch, the real kicker came at the end, where for-hire MAGA singers Carrie Underwood and the Village People member who claims “YMCA” isn’t gay crooned an in-memoriam montage of all the things Trump killed in his second term. As photos speed by of everything from NATO to civil rights to the demolished White House to diversity programs to the opportunistically anti-Trump Marjorie Taylor Green, and the song repeats, “America, this is you,” the dead-eyed singers’ new anthem chillingly echoing truths Saturday Night Live so, so rarely confronts so directly.

The night’s other head-on political sketch leaned more into the One Battle After Another spirit, as Taylor and Kenan’s Black PBS host and guest can’t help but hum in skeptical harmony as their white colleagues repeatedly assure viewers that “this is not who America is.” Like the first term post-election sketch where Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock endure their white friends’ shocked horror that white America would ever elect an open bigot and outed sex criminal, there’s a welcome perspective at play here. Many have noted this cast’s own dwindling diversity (Kenan and the guest host being the only available Black performers for the premise), but at least there are enough voices in the writers’ room eager to go beyond the easy white liberal platitudes and performative allyship and get down into the uncomfortable, less obvious roots of our current crisis.

Sketches like this that actually seem to have been written from other than a white/male/cis/straight point of view as the accepted baseline for comedy are bracing when they’re allowed on SNL. That the audience wasn’t all that responsive as Mikey Day and Chloe Fineman‘s pundits solemnly shook their heads that the American power structure would ever think of targeting people based on their color, forcefully colonize other lands, or deliberately try to provoke violence as excuse to impose exponentially greater violence, might be telling about SNL‘s demographics. Or it might have just been that kind of night—like a lot of sketches, this one felt inexplicably sluggish in execution.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

• As noted, I’m calling this the JAJ and Padilla show. Their lower-wattage stardom is a welcome difference, and a compelling one. They both seem to have strong enough voices and personas to shape the show to themselves at times, and I’m here for it.

• Tommy Brennan is not happening. Jane Wickline is on year two of not happening. I’m not happy about that. Brennan’s bland serviceability could be who he is or just the margin he got shunted onto, while Jane’s eccentricity has proven too singular and slight to break through.

• It still baffles me that Fineman’s gift for impressions isn’t used more, especially since she’s one of the senior cast at this point. Of course, that’s the same complaint I had about Melissa Villaseñor, a squandering of talent of the kind that SNL has always leapt on with both feet in the past.

• My main complaint isn’t really a complaint, as the stardom vacuum has allowed JAJ and Ashley to thrive. But formerly rising figures like Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernandez have cooled off a lot this season, while the minor-key brilliance of JAJ and Padilla still leaves a lot of room for an ambitious type to seize the show like the more bombastic and belly laugh-generating stars the show traditionally needs.

• Also, the exits of Ego Nwodim and Bowen Yang have left this cast looking awfully samey. Lorne, time for some targeted casting.

10-to-Oneland Report

The bust-up of formerly rising SNL sketch machine Please Don’t Destroy remains a puzzler. John Higgins left, Ben Marshall joined the cast and largely disappeared, and Martin Herlihy keeps getting more airtime with his own little boutique pre-tapes, despite being a regular writer now. PDD may have started running out of gas in its final season, but this new configuration makes little sense.

As for Herlihy, the boyish SNL legacy has been living in the ten-to-one slot, his signature brand of straight-faced absurdity appreciated (by me, anyway), even if his voice and presence isn’t particularly strong. I dug his Frankenstein-themed social experiment, and here again, Herlihy plays a smugly clueless version of himself, lecturing his viewers while betraying a bottomless self-regard unsupported by the facts as presented.

The joke starts with a swerve away from an exhausted SNL set-up (“Before you meet my family, I should tell you…”) to some prime Herlihy, as his nervous suitor immediately mocks his girlfriend’s Southern dad with a beyond-Foghorn Leghorn hillbilly accent. Once the twist is established (Herlihy teaches cowardly men to force their partner to break up with them first), it’d be a parade of cringe comedy except that Herlihy’s idiocy is so egregious that there’s no real tension. The gag’s on him as a self-important jerk, a vibe that needs another layer or two of weirdness to sustain itself. (The Frankenstein bit did it better.)

I’m all for SNL turning over the final sketch to an in-house oddball to set up shop. (Kyle Mooney, I miss you even if few others seem to.) And Herlihy’s got the right idea—even if it still feels like he needs a couple of pals to bounce sketches off of.

Stray Observations

• A 15-year-old Teyana Taylor choreographed a music video for…who was it? Oh yeah, Beyoncé. Confidence is not an issue.

• Taylor is the first teen featured on MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen to receive an Oscar nomination. Apart from Helen Mirren.

• As great as One Battle After Another Is (and it is), this Oscars is all about Sinners or I riot.

• As a geographically mandated Patriots fan, the “Why even play the game?” tone of that NFL sketch means their season officially ends tomorrow. It’s been a nice run.

• Mike Meyers came back as his Elon Musk, which is basically just an evil, grown-up version of Phillip.

• I was prepared to make a crack about these being some mopey Geese, but their second song head-faked that way before going the sort of bananas that makes SNL audiences uncomfortable. I dig it, Geese.

• “And you know we’ve gone too far when the British are like, ‘Easy on the colonizing, old chum.'”—Che, on English protesters against the Greenland thing.

• “Channing Tatum announced that a stage version of Magic Mike will be opening soon in New York City. Also opening soon—your aunt.”—Che.

Episode Grade: A grudging C-Plus.

Next week: Alexander—arguably the least frightening of the acting Skarsgård sons—hosts SNL‘s 1,000th episode alongside musical guest Cardi B. Look for James Austin Johnson to play dad.