As expected, we open on the freshly fired Jeff Sessions (Kate McKinnon). He’s clearing out his office, packing his belongings – a Bible, the NAACP’s first ironic lifetime achievement award, acorns, a letter from Coretta Scott King calling him a son of a bitch – into the cardboard box he was born in.
He mournfully reflects upon his time in office and is visited by Trump sidekicks – Sarah Sanders, Mike Pence, Eric and Donald Trump Jr – and Robert Mueller, who is Robert DeNiro, marking his third appearance as the special counsel. Mueller thanks Sessions for being so incompetent and joins him in the closing bars of Adele’s Someone Like You. Like this season’s previous cold opens, this one doesn’t attempt to satirize the week’s biggest national news story so much as simply remind people of it.
Ray Donovan star Liev Schreiber hosts, for the first time. He deadpans his way through a self-deprecating monologue about how he’s not naturally inclined towards comedy, proving his point by ending with a serious reflection on the midterm election. In the first of several milquetoast homilies delivered with capital-S seriousness throughout the night, he thanks the audience and viewers for (presumably) adding to the highest turnout in midterm history.
Thankfully, the solemnity goes out the window in the next sketch, Invest Twins, in which a local news interview with two investment expert brothers takes a cringeworthy turn after the anchor mistakenly refers to them as the “incest twins”. The premise is milked for all possible double entendres, earning the reliable laughs such sketches usually provide.
Next is Unity Song, a fun music video in which Beck Bennett, Ego Nwodim and Cecily Strong sing about the small annoyances that unite everyone – soft apples, people who say the book is better than the movie, warm public toilet seats, the words “crotch” and “moist”.
A new entry in the popular Encounter series, Paranormal Occurrence sees Schreiber replace Ryan Gosling as the male member of a small-town trio who continually find themselves testifying to a government panel about their run-ins with supernatural forces. This time they’ve each received visits from ghosts. McKinnon returns to the role of Coleen Rafferty (revealed here to be only 27), the haggard, hapless, chain-smoking weirdo whose personal experience is, as ever, far less transcendent than her friends’. Instead of helping a lost soul pass on to the other side, she ends up “upper-decking” a stranger’s toilet on behalf of a vengeful spirit.
One of the things for which previous entries were notable was Gosling’s constant breaking. Schreiber is better at keeping himself in check at first, though once McKinnon straddles him while acting out her story, he – and the audience –completely lose it. There’s a strong case to be made for this being the most reliable recurring sketch the show has in its arsenal.
We get another music video, this time for Permission, a song from the Booty Kings (Chris Redd, Kenan Thompson), featuring Uncle Butt (Pete Davidson), as well as real rappers Future and Lil’ Wayne. What starts out as an explicit and misogynistic song about ladies’ posteriors takes a self-reflectively progressive turn (“I’m learning / And I’m growing / But unless we both agree / My penis won’t be showing”), becoming a song about consent and respect for women.
Lil’ Wayne follows up with his first performance of the night, Can’t Be Broken. He’s joined by singer/actor Halsey.
Weekend Update hits all the expected targets: the midterms, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s injury, the expulsion of Jim Acosta from the White House press pool. But the centerpiece is the copout apology from Pete Davidson (practically Weekend Update’s third host this season) for jokes he made last week about former Navy Seal/Republican congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw. For the record, he compared the politician, who lost an eye in combat, to a “hitman in a porno movie”.
Given the firestorm of selective outrage that followed, it seemed a given that Davidson would say sorry. Nor was it a surprise when Crenshaw showed up to accept it, while also getting in a few easy shots. (The biggest laugh came from his cellphone ringtone being an Ariana Grande song, lest you thought the show might have moved on from this tired story.) Crenshaw then made a serious appeal for national unity, in the spirit of Veteran’s Day.
The reaction across social media proved overwhelmingly positive. But I found the whole thing embarrassing, not only because it’s the latest in a long history of SNL capitulation to conservative indignation – see the lame attempts at good sportsmanship that had them bring on Sarah Palin and Donald Trump – but also because it was indicative of the show’s schmaltzy centrism. SNL often claims to be an important satirical counterbalance to the establishment narrative of the day, but it consistently neuters itself out of deference to the same establishment. It’s far removed from the days when George Carlin introduced it to the world.
The stink of Davidson and Crenshaw’s segment carries over to the next sketch, which is too bad since it’s a clever one. The Poddys nails the current glut of political and true crime podcasts, although the low-energy tone of the awards show sketch, while essential given its subject matter, does makes it feel a tad overlong.
The sleeper hit of the night, House Hunters, finds a couple (Schreiber and Leslie Jones) on the HGTV reality show comparing notes about the homes they’ve looked at, all of which are absurdist samplings from a Dalí painting or Buñuel film. The premise is a perfect delivery machine for the kind of clever surrealism that, when the show commits to it, often proves the its strong suit. The sketch also contains a killer payoff to a recurring joke about Schreiber’s character’s desire for a “mancave”.
Lil’ Wayne again takes the stage, joined by Swizz Beatz, and performs Uproar. Brothers stars Bennett and Kyle Mooney as a pair of rambunctious siblings whose fighting results in their father (Schreiber) hosing them down in the living room, in front of his horrified guests. It’s an unfocused sketch, but high-wire physical comedy from Bennett and Mooney makes it work.
The final sketch, Outside the Women’s Bathroom, is a pilot for a talkshow wherein host Dave (Schreiber, doing a solid caricature of an east coast scumbag) interviews unsuspecting women on their way out of a restaurant lavatory. It starts out rough, with Schreiber fumbling his lines, but he quickly recovers. While never rising above its half-clever premise, it’s stronger than most of the other closing sketches throughout the season.
Despite setting expectations low, Schreiber proves himself adept at deadpan humor. The show as a whole, meanwhile, remains reliably entertaining when it gives the cast a chance to show off their physical comedy chops, as well as when it lets the writers indulge in zany weirdness. But it continues to miss the mark with its toothless political content.
