Saturday Night Live is, by definition, a hit-or-miss show. But rarely does it give up the ghost of comedy as much as it did in this week’s Chris Pine-hosted episode, when the show’s writers and producers clearly spent more time arranging musical numbers than writing jokes.
The only decent political sketch came courtesy of a mercifully short 1990s PBS throwback, when the Acme team returned to investigate the mystery of “Where in the World is Kellyanne Conway?” Kate McKinnon embodied the cartoon villain as two actual child contestants were called on to solve the mystery but declined. “Seven weeks in a row and no one wants to the find that woman,” Mikey Day concluded, abruptly ending the sketch. For a one-note joke, it was effective and creative.
Almost everything else that happened in the episode was musical in some nature – I can only assume Pine is auditioning for some big-budget holiday musical. Even the monologue quickly devolved into a song about how much people get Pine mixed up with fellow leading men Chris Pratt, Chris Evans, and Chris Hemsworth, and it set the tone for an incredibly unmemorable and unnecessarily musical show.
The only thing the show got right was a rabid silliness, which pervaded the musical and non-musical sketches:
- A reality show parody, entitled the The House: Seattle: Season 6,000, didn’t break any ground in material about how reality shows are manufactured and awkward, but it had a few good jokes and managed to create its own dumb, weird universe that was ultimately really satisfying.
• Weekend Update came out surprisingly strong in this otherwise weak episode. Michael Che reckoned the men who celebrated the passing of the new healthcare bill “looked like they just invented sickle cell” while Donald Trump is finally “a president who speaks fluent maniac”. Colin Jost’s bit about the accomplishments of Trump’s first 100 days worked well, as did a cheap shot at the state of Penn Station. But Vanessa Bayer was the true star, as a contest-winning meteorologist who nails the cadence of a weather person while conveying nothing but nonsense.
• McKinnon and Alex Moffat kicked off the cold open as Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the co-hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe who recently announced their engagement. The joke of the sketch was that they are a couple, but despite that dud of a concept, there was some great awkward sexiness between McKinnon and Moffat.
• Day and Pine played neighbors to a criminal when their carefree, cotton-candy-filled partying won over the cops and bad guys alike. There wasn’t much more to the sketch, but it was still one of the best of the night.
Almost everything else in this episode was confusing or poor or both. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a total surprise: this week’s promos were much more about musical guest LCD Soundsystem than any comedy Pine would be performing. And maybe Jimmy Fallon’s recent music-heavy guest spot did well for the show and this was a vain attempt to match that. But it was a bad call all around. Here’s hoping the show steps up next week, when the hilarious Melissa McCarthy hosts.
