Saturday Night Live started its 43rd season with on a bit of a high, fresh off a string of Emmy wins and with a few new featured players to replace the departed Vanessa Bayer, Bobby Moynihan and Sasheer Zamata.
But despite the gameness of second-time host Ryan Gosling, the show never elevated much beyond average.
As has become basically the standard for modern SNL, Kate McKinnon carried the show at nearly every turn. In the opening monologue – which saw Alec Baldwin continuing his mediocre Donald Trump mimicry – McKinnon returned as Jeff Sessions to explain that he’s always around because he lives “in the grandfather clock just in the hallway”.
“I made friends with some mice,” McKinnon-Sessions said. “They tell me secrets.”
Credit must also go to Aidy Bryant, who played White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders with Southern sass and a sly self-awareness. “I’m no nonsense but I’m all nonsense,” she boasted, confidently.
Gosling’s monologue revolved around his turn in the Oscar-not-quite-winning La La Land, wherein his white guy piano-player held strong to the basic tenets of jazz. “New Orleans – or as it’s supposed to be pronounced, ‘Nerlens’,” he said, from behind a piano.
The show has overly-relied on musical monologues in the past few years, and this week’s effort did not elevate the standard much – even a one-liner cameo from Emma Stone didn’t seem worth it.
Other things to look into:
- The Levi’s Woke sketch. SNL takes on the intersection of modern-day activism and consumerism with some “woke” jeans, which blend parachute pants with classic denim and offer no gender specifications or size labels. “Levi Wokes have no style”, the fake ad brags.
- McKinnon as Angela Merkel. Most of Weekend Update remains pretty standard, but McKinnon’s take on German chancellor Merkel made it worth the time this week. Her portrayal – sympathetic but honest, with an unbreakable crush on Barack Obama – worked to both humanize a larger-than-life figure while also poking fun.
- The goofy “10-to-1” sketch – wherein Gosling seethed over the use of the Papyrus font for the Avatar logo back in 2009. Comedy-nerd twitter exploded over a tweet from SNL writer Julio Torres from back in January about this very same issue.
