Saturday Night Live returns from a short hiatus with A Holiday Message from Dr Anthony Fauci (Kate McKinnon), who relays the latest informing about Covid-19 to the public. He attempts to calm worries about the new Omicron variant – “if you had a vaccine and a booster … unclench” – before, like last year, turning the stage over to “nerds trying their best” from the CDC, who act out common scenarios relating to the pandemic. These include a guy being banished from society for attempting to eat at a restaurant without his vaccination card, a horny, but worried airplane passenger hitting on game flight attendant, and a mall Santa who no longer allows children to sit on his lap because “thanks to the vaccine, my testicles have ballooned in size”.
This is followed by appearances from a series of public disgraces, including “unemployed brothers” Andrew (Pete Davidson) and Chris Cuomo (Andrew Dismukes), Congressional gun nutjobs Lauren Boebert (Chloe Fineman) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Cecily Strong), and “weirdo with the beardo” Ted Cruz, who gets the last laugh on the recently deceased Bob Dole for having once said “no one likes me”.
The season thus far has seen an overall uptick in the quality of the cold opens, most of which is owed to the new cast members being given the spotlight. Unfortunately, this dire offering sees the show returning to several wells that have long run dry. The smug, unfunny Fauci caricature does nothing but serve to remind viewers that McKinnon is still pulling a paycheck from the show, while the recycling of the utterly forgettable CDC playlets sketch from last December points to how lazy the writers can be.
Billie Eilish pulls double duty as host and musical guest. Dressed in a massively poofy Christmas dress that makes her look like “Mrs. Claus going to the club,” the 19-year-old singer-songwriter talks about her signature fashion style (“The real reason I wore big, oversized clothes … is because I was actually two kids stacked on top of each other trying to sneak into an R-rated movie”), her childhood dreams of acting, which were dashed by her mother (who she brings out for a pointless cameo), and the difficulties that come with with being famous at a young age (she uses this to get a solid dig in at Colin Jost, showing off his uber-nerdy high school picture).
In the first sketch, a married couple (Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat) look over all the Christmas cards they’ve received from family and friends, such as their “super white, super Christian neighbor”, “cousin who’s made pregnancy their entire personality,” “well-off, middle-aged gay couple your wife is friends with…and gross, little old dog you can’t believe is still alive.” Miley Cyrus shows up briefly, playing herself, and her ease at live comedy makes a sharp contrast with Eilish (playing a bitchy high school frenemy), who comes off noticeably stilted.
In what is arguably the low point of the season, we follow a smartphone scroll through some of TikTok’s most popular videos of late, which feature would-be self-defense gurus, doofy fit checks and sad thirst traps, various conspiracy theories and idiotic punditry, twerking nurses and more. The actual visual construction on display is impressive, but this nothing more an overlong regurgitation of viral content everyone’s already sick of. That Saturday Night Live thinks merely referencing these TikToks counts as comedy speaks not only to how utterly uninspired the show has become, but how far behind the cultural curve it is. Frankly, it’s pathetic.
That said, uninspired is still preferable to irritating, something which is made very clear by the following sketch. Two hopelessly square, white children’s pageant directors (Eilish and Heidi Gardner) attempt to put a hip-hop spin on their nativity pageant, loudly directing their cast to strut, twerk and work a candy cane stripper pole. Eilish throws herself into her performance, but her southern dialect is all over the map. Gardner, meanwhile, is the most annoying she’s ever been. By the 50th time they’re screaming the word “Pimp Walk!” you’ll be begging for the commercial break.
Then Eilish is about to sit down with her family for Christmas dinner, when she spies her elderly neighbor across the street spending the holiday (seemingly) alone. The two women start a correspondence through their windows using notepads, which leads to Eilish inviting the woman over. Things take an unsettling turn when the neighbor reveals herself to be a psychotic racist who is currently committing Munchausen by proxy on her grown son (Mikey Day) and is almost certainly responsible for the murder of her late husband. It’s a darkly clever spin on holiday treacle, but, like every sketch preceding it, it drags on well past the point of amusement.
On Weekend Update, Michael Che invites Punkie Johnson to the desk. She starts off talking about her family’s holiday rules (the most important being: “the oldest person must always make the potato salad because they have LIVED … they know the secret ingredient isn’t eggs and paprika, it’s pain!”) before pivoting to her own desire to be a mother one day – but only to a gay daughter (“My family motto gonna be: if I’m smashing hoes, then everybody smashing hoes in this house!”).
She’s followed by fellow sophomore cast member Dismukes, who shows up wearing tiger stripe face paint for his new animal segment. Things go off the rails immediately when, instead of predicting the outcome of an upcoming football game, his psychic pet octopus Bongo tells him “You will die in seven days”. Dismukes’s devastated, but dignified acceptance of his impending doom is the highlight of the episode.
Next, Eilish plays chanteuse Leslie D. She performs a jazzy number called The Night I Met Santa, in which she bungles an attempted flirtation with Kris Kringle by telling him he has nice teeth, doing finger guns, and calling him a virgin. Eilish is at her most natural in song mode, although surprisingly, it’s Kenan Thompson, playing Santa, who gets the biggest applause after hitting an impressive high note.
This is followed by a thematically similar pre-filmed segment in which a lonely Kyle Mooney awkwardly attempts to celebrate the holidays with his fellow cast members, only to continually weird them out. He finds some solace in a brief meeting with Eilish, before terrifying her by indulging his violently unhinged fantasies about kidnapping Day.
Eilish then appears alongside McKinnon as dead-eyed front desk girls in a commercial for Business Garden Inn & Suites & Hotel Room Inn. It’s a lazy (if accurate) rundown of the common amenities found in faceless, mid-budget hotels, such as “tiny soap in plastic”, “band-aid colored blanket”, “short glass wearing oval hat” and “wet egg”. Eilish and McKinnon make the already interminable sketch drag on even longer by constantly breaking. At least Eilish’s brother Finneas – making his second appearance of the night – acquits himself better during his short walk-on as Trevor, a sleazy “bellhop/valet/night manager/in-house doctor”.
The first part of this episode was as bad as the show has been all year, although things slightly improved during the back half. When it comes to live comedy, Eilish is no Miley Cyrus, but at least she balanced things out with two strong musical performances. The writing, on the other hand, was a total bust, with almost every sketch revolving around instantly tired one-note jokes. Worst of all was McKinnon return to the spotlight, her utterly grating performance throughout only serving as a reminder at how much of an albatross she’s become to the show (when she shows up, that is).
Hopefully, next week’s episode – the last of 2021 – will see a massive improvement in quality. After viewing tonight’s offering, that would be a Christmas miracle.
