Saturday Night Live Squanders Walton Goggins’ Weirdo Charisma

And Your Host…

In his monologue, Walton Goggins got saddled with the “you may know me from” opening gambit (keep phoning these in, SNL!), but he sold his current platform-spanning stardom short. Sure, his turn in the just-concluded The White Lotus got the most buzz recently, but he’s also been killing it on (the also-just wrapped) The Righteous Gemstones and Fallout (maybe Invincible if animation’s your thing), the actor’s live-wire charisma making very good shows that much better.

Apart from a sweet appearance from his momma (showing off the Georgia-born dance moves she taught her boy), the one real joke of the monologue was Goggins replying to the theme of entertainment writers commenting on his appearance. And, seriously, “greasy?” C’mon, fellow TV writers, be better. And yet… Walton Goggins is a striking looking dude, his improbable kisser an assemblage of attention-grabbing features like that of a really handsome leading man who’s just wobbled off of an unexpected 24-hour roller coaster ride. Goggins’ joke about references to his receding hairline (“I’ve had the same hairline sice I was seven. It’s not receding, it’s holding its ground”) merely scratches the surface of what makes the startling topography of his face so arresting. (Eyes and teeth are the real story here, let’s be serious.)

At any rate, Walton Goggins has always been a vital, unpredictable, and impossible not to watch presence in dramas and comedies alike. Just look at his bravura one episode of Community, where a menacing deadpan turn explodes in the stinger with such unexpected potency that the reveal is a veritable grenade of cathartic laughter. Goggins is all primed and jittery potential, which makes his first Saturday Night Live more of a disappointment than it might seem with a less propitious host.

It’s not Goggins fault—sure, he was a little cue card-shaky, but that’s a skill some hosts have and some don’t. But the show really only utilized Goggins well once (the Bill of Rights signing), his sparse appearances throughout the night inexplicably shifting him into what I’m going to continue to call “the Mikey Day” role more than once. You know, when an SNL sketch with a promising premise is deemed at risk for confusing the audience for a moment, only for one character to halt the proceedings in order to point out the comic conflict and say something to the effect of, “Whoa, wait a minute, [comic premise] is sure weird, huh?”

That’s where Goggins found himself in the theater sketch (“I hate to break character, but I do notice that dogs keep leaving…”) and the spooky theme park restaurant sketch (“You guys have said ‘It might be our last’ a lot now…”), both of which were the usual place of stalwart SNL trouper Day, the go-to guy for unnecessary exposition dumps. (Day, freed from his signature toil, actually got to break loose on Update for a change.) In his goodnights, an enthusiastic Goggins called this “one of the greatest weeks of [his] entire life,” and it does look like he had fun. But the show sure didn’t make the best use of the weapons Goggins brought to the party.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: The first was best tonight, at least as far as the show knowing what to do with Walton Goggins. After the monologue, we got that Bill of Rights signing, where James Austin Johnson’s James Madison happily moving on from the First Amendment, finds his open call for a second running up against Goggins’ Matt, a mysteriously cool customer in shaded spectacles who, slouching in a corner seat, drawls out “Guuuns.”

Walton’s gift for disreputable but undeniable charisma is unmatched (see: The Hateful Eight), so having his unassailably cool Matt be the impetus behind America’s tragic entwining of firearms and freedom makes just the right kind of discordant comic music. Matt’s terse badassery brooks no argument from the flustered JAJ, Johnson’s query as to whether one of the founding principles of this new nation simply be “guns” running up against Matt’s room-winning air of bad boy charisma. Even the way Goggins introduces himself sees the actor put just the right underplayed stank on “Matt” to silence all such quibbling.

It’s a smart, sly take on an issue that, let’s face it, is tough to take on with any degree of subtlety in American comedy. That Johnson and the rest of the be-wigged founders are swayed almost immediately by this laconic outsider (“Where are you from?” “America.” “Which one?” “A united one.”) channels an understanding of America’s gun culture better than any degree of strident speechifying, and the kicker (the crawl states that Matt was shot right after leaving the Pennsylvania state house) snaps home the joke with similar tidy aplomb.

The Worst: I’m tempted to put dog theater here (squandering the potential of a drawling, Tennessee Williams-esque doubles act from Goggins and Heidi Gardner genuinely pissed me off), but that one at least had some very good dogs in abundance, so it gets a pass. But the spooky restaurant sketch was the exemplar of how to waste what you’ve got, with Goggins stuck playing straight man, of all things. Premise-wise, you could almost hear someone in the writing process (cue Lorne Michael impression) asking, “Riiight, but will the audience get there quickly enough?” Yes, unnamed executive producer with his own Mark Twain Prize, we can get there if you’ll just trust your audience for more than ten freaking seconds.

Ahem. Anyway, the joke is that the staff at the newly opened theme restaurant (Ego Nwodim and Bowen Yang) haven’t had time to come up with the theme restaurant’s backstory and patter yet. That they keep falling back on an effortful “because it may be your last” catchphrase with each successive course isn’t a bad place to start, and Bowen and Ego’s subsequent sweaty efforts to stretch show some flashes. (The detail of a woman in peril keeps getting embroidered with amusingly alarming inappropriateness.)

But man oh man, do Goggins and the equally unfortunate Ashley Padilla get stuck with needless exposition dumps the whole time. The one-two punch of deadening over-explaining that is, “Honey, does the staff seem sort of bad at this?,” followed by, “Sorta—yeah, it feels like there should be more of a story,” saw me scrawling an all caps, “LET. US. GET. THERE” in my in-show notes.

The Rest: That runner-up for Dennis’ molar-grinding, the dog theater sketch wasted the spectacle of a posturing, Southern-fried melodrama fronted by Goggins and Gardner. Bowen Yang ‘s emcee introduces the bit, explaining that the audience of 20 golden retrievers represents the final exam of service dogs expected to sit through a play, which is as good a way as any to set up such an improbable concept, I suppose. (Michael Longfellow and Jane Wickline won the backstage casting sweepstakes here, unless they didn’t want to hang out with 20 very good puppies.)

But then it’s all interruptions and baffled responses from the actors as the dogs, immediately fed up with the play’s overheated hokum (Goggins’ monologuing drifter and Gardner’s alcoholic sexpot turn out to be incestuous siblings), start filing out. (Or, thanks to some trainers’ deft prop work, donning “I’m awake” eyeball spectacles or leafing through the Playbill to find out which producers are to blame.) SNL loves its live dog sketches, and I’m not complaining about the years-long recurring theme as such. (What am I, made of stone?) But once again, let us get there. That the sketch is derailed within seconds for Goggins’ actor to tell us essentially, “Hey, isn’t this weird?” sucks the life out of the room.

Goggins disappeared for long, long swathes of the live show tonight. He was only in four live sketches apart from the monologue, with much of his first hosting gig taken up with a pair of good but not great filmed pieces. The better of the two, if only for one killer guest appearance, was the first, a musical reverie in which zoo-goer Jane Wickline’s discovery of a lone baby sneaker sends her in search of the infant of her newly kindled dreams. Only she finds a bow-tied Goggins perched on a wall, his tiny baby feet dangling and one shoe missing.

I like a good swerve, especially coming as this does after the sketch had already prepped us for an elaborate musical number about a young woman’s suddenly ticking biological clock. The abrupt halt after Goggins’ baby-footed suitor’s crooning assurance that this magical meeting means he and Wickline are a couple is a funny direction to veer in, with Goggins petulantly accusing the not into-it Wickine of “gaslitting” him, and dismissively crossing his tiny feet after she understandably rejects his lyrical pitch to make love on the carousel. And then Goggins’ White Lotus scene partner Sam Rockwell (happily revealing himself as Sam Rockwell) pops in as the nearby balloon vendor, who also has baby feet and who, after a typically intense confrontation with the unimpressed Wickline, shows off some signature (if tiny-footed) dance moves for the reprise. (Requite greatest DVD extra of all time here.) Loopy in all the right ways.

Dan Bulla got his title card for another Midnight Matinee short film, but that took the final spot, so scroll down to the 10-To-Oneland Report for that one.

Goggins’ only other real live showcase was the Mother’s Day brunch sketch, where his flirty waiter’s come-ons to increasingly flushed older moms Heidi Gardner and Sarah Sherman fluster their adult sons. (Played by Andrew Dismukes and Mikey Day, so you can guess my big complaint here.) Goggins’ open-shirted Albee plies his targeted menopausal guests with bottomless mimosas (“And maybe after you’ve had a couple, you’ll be too”) and barely double entendre (see previous), giving Goggins a chance to show off his own late in life sex symbol cred (as he happily noted in his monologue). The move where Albee takes one of the receptive Sherman’s ice cubes, rubs it all over his chest and then sniffs it before plunking it back into her water glass is so, so Albee.

Goggins unleashed on a single-minded weirdo has proven comically explosive in role after role during his illustrious career (see Vice Principals, Gemstones), the actor’s fearlessness and intensity bringing a tingle of dangerous unpredictability to every scene. And Albee’s fetish for his older patrons coasts on Goggins embracing such groan-worthy pick-up scenarios as him greeting Sherman’s warning about her lactose intolerance by promising, “I’ve never complained about a breeze blowin’ through my hair.” Dismukes and Day have to intermittently make sure we know how offputting this all is, although as least Goggins pulled Day up short with an imperious exchange: “Are you the Lord Jesus?” “No.” “The don’t be cross.”

Weekend Update Update

If it’s to be Jost and Che’s swan song next week, the duo got in another confident outing here. Last week’s was better targeted, but this served as a reminder that the long-running Update team will be tough to follow. Still, I’m looking forward to watching the next team give it a try.

Jost did what amounted to a Norm Macdonald joke about the least happy city in America being “Dick Splinter, North Dakota.” Che’s best went cut through all the Pope hoopla by rebutting claims that Catholics loved Trump’s A.I. Trump-as-Pope nonsense by musing, “I just find it hard to believe that anyone in the Catholic Church would be into something so juvenile.” (Cut to Catholic Jost’s “you got us” shocked face.) When they’re good, Jost and Che’s cleverness can get smart, mean laughs and/or go for admirable silliness. At their worst, that all curdles into smug self-regard and, in Che’s case, his own juvenile streak of misogynistic button pushing. With Scarlett Johansson hosting next week’s season finale, look for these guys to go out in a blaze of self-referential, joke-swapping glory. (If they are in fact leaving.)

I’m hard on Mikey Day, I get that. But this was the sort of thing I get the sense he’d much rather be doing than being the party-pooping straight man in sketch after sketch. His Man Who Just Walked Into a Spider Web is all knockabout physical comedy greatness, his would-be economic commentator’s paranoia about the possible spider lurking in his clothes resulting in Day pinwheeling out of his chair while ripping his shirt to shreds. Gathering his breathless self after a panicky shoe-smashing of his possibly imagined tormentor, Day’s abashed, “Should I still talk about tariffs?” with his buttoned cuff still clinging to one wrist was just the right underplayed note to go out on. I don’t know how exactly Day’s roles on the show got so pigeonholed over the years—maybe his position as sort of writers room elder statesman saw him ceding the funny parts to others. But man can he still bring it.

Heidi Gardner was born on Update, her early-career Every Boxer’s Girlfriend From Every Movie About Boxing Ever cementing her status as one of the show’s best pure character actors. Update allows for a caricature to come to life in an actor’s specificity and commitment, and nobody’s been better at this sort of thing that Heidi for a long time. The premise (here The Mom Who’s Only Read About New York on Facebook) spelled out in the intro, Gardner was free to fill out the sketchy outline with gloriously on-point details. That the fearful tourist feels the need to whisper the race (“white,” invariably) of every online author whose outlandish stories of Arab sex trafficking, brain-rewiring bootleg porn glasses, and being unwillingly jumped into the Crips is one such observational inspiration, with this white (sorry, “white“) suburbanite choosing to spend her time in the big city huddling in her hotel room and stuffing all her valuables up her keister for safety. Gardner can mine this sort of short-form character study for big. sneaky laughs, here laying in levels even as her leery accidental tourist betrays the red state preconceptions underlying her paranoia.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

With now just one more episode to go in Season 50, the death watch is in full swing. Tonight, the “literally no airtime” pendulum swung for the likes of Chloe Fineman, Devon Walker, and Emil Wakim (who, to be fair, was seen waaay in the back of the dog theater for one wordless second). The vicissitudes of Saturday Night Live‘s dog-eat-dog casting might be designed to keep everybody on their toes and hungry, but when the end-of-season tallies are being scored, a late shut-out is an ominous look.

Jane Wickline had perhaps her strongest night yet, anchoring the baby foot musical and hanging out with some dogs. Not sure if it’s her last glimpses, but not a bad showing.

This was a Heidi Gardner showcase though. Matching with Goggins for a couple of showy, funny turns and getting another standout Update characterization made the case for her to either go out strong or vault into the center of things going into Season 51. Here’s hoping she stays—Cecily Strong’s cameo tonight reasserted how SNL truly needs a versatile character actress in the mix.

Political Comedy Report

An exercise is toying with how much we’ve come to dread these things, at least tonight’s cold open knew itself. And the inevitable but most welcome drop-by from an old friend didn’t hurt, either.

Sunday being Mother’s Day set us up big time, with Kenan, Marcello, and Bowen (alongside three women I think were their real moms?) crooning the sort of silly-sentimental ditty the annual Mom’s Day tradition has prepared us to indulge. When James Austin Johnson’s Trump barged in to unceremoniously usher the mother/son sweetness off the stage, his smirking promise to “invade all aspects of your life” produced the traditional cold open disappointment—but, you know, on purpose this time, which was canny.

Trump essentially then did a tight two, literally asking an absent, ‘What else? What else…,” in the midst of his middling stand-up set about the new Pope’s Chicago origins (his apologetic “First thought” summing up the initial flood of Daaa Pope jokes), and threatening to send J.D. Vance to “do his thing” should the new pontiff continue to criticize him. Fortunately, all this intentional floundering was preamble to Cecily Strong’s return as the newly appointed interim U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C., Fox News’ Jenanine Pirro. (Wait, that can’t be right… [checks news, drinks entire box of wine]… Oh, right, this is America now.)

Regardless, Strong’s royalty and her take on the infamous TV blowhard and walking racist wineskin Pirro remains one of her most indelible impressions, all clenched, staccato bluster and bombastic slurred slurs. Oh, and spit takes, as her woozy banter with Trump addressing Defense Secretary (and fellow blackout drunk Trump hatchet-person) Pete Hegseth’s many, many missteps brought forth Colin Jost to receive his customary faceful of aspirated wine. Strong’s Pirro bellows her glee at being chosen to join Trump’s cabinet of “boozehounds, Russian assets, and people famous for the little baby animals they’ve killed” before Jost’s Hegseth fulfills his pinkie swear not to drink while helming the single largest military bureaucracy in the history of the world by offering Pirro a flask and then waiting, mouth eagerly agape, as he tells Pirro about losing a second F-18 jet to the sea on his watch.

The flabby Trump rambling here was even less integrated into the open than usual, making the cameo the only real attraction. (Johnson, bless him, does get a few chuckles by absently wondering why holy water burns his skin and musing, “Can a country go bankrupt? We’ll see.”) But what a cameo it was—I’ve got no idea how long Cecily’s going to stick around. Probably about less time than it takes for the sloppily unqualified Pirro to stumble herself back into her Fox chair. But if this administration is going to continue to stuff more and more farcically incompetent lickspittle clowns into the car, at least SNL has the right lady for this particular job on speed dial.

Recurring Sketch Report

Marcello Hernandez specializes in characters whose undeniable energy and charm masks a lack of actual jokes. Nothing against breakout star Hernandez, but characterizations like his returning Movie Guy are more about presentation than complexity. Marcello can do more than that, but leaning into schtick has sunk many an SNL performer. Here the gag is that Marcello’s otherwise unnamed usher hasn’t seen any of the movies he’s been brought on to hype up/review, allowing him to mug to his hearts content as he does his riff on an old Bill Murray Update bit.

But I kid Marcello. Movie Guy’s happy ignorance is amusing enough. I laughed at him bluffing his way through a discussion of The Fantastic Four (“I imagine this movie gonna about three, maybe four people…”), and him getting in on a few last pokes at Jost by calling out the star of yet another Jurassic Park sequel as “Carly Sohandsome,” following up by noting how Ms. Sohandsome would never be married to someone like Colin Jost. (What oh what will Update do without Jost to kick around?)

10-To-Oneland Report

A filmed piece has to get pretty damned weird to overcome my prejudice that the last sketch of the night should be live. “Boss’ Bathroom” was weird enough, I’ll give it that. Andrew Dismukes is the junior executive invited to his boss’ lavish home for a fireside chat alongside Goggins’ wife, played by Sarah Sherman. With the eternally boyish Dismukes being lured to the den of Goggins and Sherman, I was prepared (I thought) for the piece to go in any umber of directions. Uncomfortable threesome proposition? Human sacrifice? I was so smug.

The joke that Dismukes’ spying of his hosts’ rest room squatty potty would send his brain spinning into a series of visualizations of his hosts straining mightily on the crapper caught me unawares, I’ll admit. (Getting cued up by set-up lines like “You just have to push” and “looking for a solid number two” plopped right into the premise.) But toilet humor in the last spot on the show isn’t all that out there. Throw in the escalation of Goggins and Sherman’s effortful evacuations taking place amidst imaginary steamy bathroom jungle trappings however, and then finally a caveman-times spectacle of them graphically wiping their butts with talking prehistoric sea slugs, and then I fully surrender. Did not see that coming.

This might be my least favorite of the uniformly welcome Dan Bulla cinematic universe so far, but not for lack of trying. It still slots in nicely with the writer’s inventively bizarre premises, and if it ain’t subtle (prehistoric Sherman screaming “Water strong!” while a bidet geyser blasts her undercarriage is Sarah Sherman in a nutshell), it at least earns its spot capping off a disappointing show with admirably gross absurdity.

Stray Observations

I laughed hugely at The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt when the unsinkable Carol Kane’s Lillian Kaushtupper, trying to ferret out the gentrifying hipsters infiltrating her neighborhood, snapped the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of Arcade Fire!” Okay, that’s a good burn for the Canadian art rockers, what with their thrift store aesthetic and petal-strewn indie vibe (complete with black light tonight), but I’ve always enjoyed them nonetheless. They did their thing, and I dug it. I confess.

Is it poor form to mock two obvious problem alcoholics like Pirro and Hegseth for cheap laughs? Well, not when they’re being put into vital jobs they are in no way qualified for by a would-be fascist who only chose them because he’s spent years watching them sing his praises on the tee-vee. Also, the Trump administration is currently slashing finding for programs that help people struggling with various addictions, so I’m going to go away and tell Cecily to spit take away. No mercy for cruel hypocrisy.

What was that hole in the backdrop behind JAJ’s Trump in the cold open? I kept seeing someone moving around back there and it was very distracting.

Episode Grade: A not mad, just disappointed B-Minus.

Next Week: Season 50 comes to a close with ScarJo and musical guest Bad Bunny. See you there, and then we’ll all get some sleep on Saturdays for a change.