Segments are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Liam Neeson [real] targets Vladimir Putin with Barack Obama (JAP) video
— Good involvement from Liam Neeson, which thankfully prevents this from being another full-fledged “politician sits behind a desk and talks straight to the camera” cold opening, a format that’s rarely exciting to watch.
— An entertaining Putin-like action pre-tape of Jay’s Obama.
STARS: ***
MONOLOGUE
host endures sexual oversharing from VAB, AIB, BOM, her grandmother (KAM)
— Very funny lines from Vanessa.
— The predictable route this monologue takes is basically a Girls-themed variation of Kerry Washington’s Scandal-themed monologue from earlier this season, right down to the format of three cast members coming up to the host one-by-one asking for advice. However, this is being executed decently.
— Interestingly, the voice Kate’s using as Lena Dunham’s grandmother is the same voice she would later regularly use as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
STARS: ***
OOH CHILD
GPS navigation voice interrupts carpooler’s (host) singalong
— A pretty funny conceit with Lena’s growing frustration as each attempt she makes at a singalong of “Ooh Child” always gets cut off by the GPS voice.
— A solid dark twist at the end.
STARS: ***½
SCANDAL
newly-hired (host) is in over her head on Olivia’s (SAZ) team
— Funny how I mentioned Scandal in my review of the monologue.
— Funny how I also mentioned derivative premises in my review of the monologue, as the concept of this sketch reminds me a bit of the 1940s newspaper office sketch from the season 37 Zooey Deschanel episode.
— Is it Lena’s known trademark to often ask “I have 1,000 follow-up questions”? She said it in both the monologue AND this sketch.
— Funny interaction between Sasheer and Taran.
— Lots of good comments from Lena throughout this.
— Hilarious comment from Jay revealing he’s already taken the trip to Mexico that he was asked to go on just a minute ago.
STARS: ***½
WHAT’S POPPIN’
lily-white self-styled rap group performs on hip-hop show
— A laugh from the names of Kenan and Jay’s characters: LeGod Williams and Lil’ Taint Anthony.
— A decently funny odd concept to this “rap” group.
— (*groan*) Cue the obligatory cutaway to the straight man characters having frozen shocked looks on their faces while witnessing something weird, which is such an overused SNL trope in recent eras.
— Lena: “Break it down now, girls!” Mike: “…and Tim.”
— A good laugh from Aidy’s “Hey! My flute amp!” line.
— Some good lines during Kenan and Jay’s angry confrontation of the “rap” group. I also love Mike’s reveal that Tim is just his rapper name.
— The running bit about Sprite is too much of a weak non-sequitur that’s not necessary to this sketch.
STARS: ***
GIRL
Adam Driver (TAK) & host portray Adam & Eve in Garden Of Eden reimagining
— An okay idea for a Girls spoof.
— One of the newspaper reviews stating “If this is feminism, then I’m confused” is pretty funny.
STARS: ***
WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING? YOU’RE BEING CRAZY
teens (NAP) & (host) are flirty; Jon Hamm cameo
— The set-up of this kinda reminds me of the My Brother Knows Everything one-off sketch that Nasim did in season 36.
— Meh, so far, this feels too generic for an “adolescents host a talk show” sketch. Nothing much to get excited about here.
— At least Bobby is funny in his side role as the brother.
— Random Jon Hamm. Always nice to see him on SNL.
— I love Jon worriedly asking, “Is this like a Dateline/Chris Hansen thing?”
— Bobby: “Is that freakin’ Josh Hamm?!?”
— Jon’s uncomfortable demeanor continues to be funny. I probably would like this overall sketch better if there wasn’t so much mediocre lead-up to the Jon Hamm part. I personally didn’t need the Kyle interview that preceded the Jon interview.
STARS: **½
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “Graceless”
WEEKEND UPDATE
Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey (TAK) offers more enigmatic wisdom
Vladimir Putin’s Two Best Friends From Growing Up (FRA) & (VAB) badmouth him via sotto voce
— Third consecutive episode with Taran doing an Update commentary, all of which he has knocked out of the park. His Matthew McConaughey impression here is spot-on and very funny, and his nonsensical “deep” ramblings are priceless.
— I don’t like how it’s becoming more and more of a regular thing lately for Cecily to do a “character voice” as the punchline to an Update joke. She’s relying on that particularly heavily tonight. That’s taking too much of a goofy approach to Update that doesn’t work for me in this format.
— Nothing to really say about Colin in his second Update. I see a slight improvement over his first showing in the preceding episode’s Update, but he’s still suffering from the same problems and is still practically doing leftover Seth Meyers material.
— Aaaaaaaaand in an apparent attempt to drive me insane, not only do we get yet another season 39 Fred Armisen cameo, but it’s the return of those fucking dreadful Two Best Friends From Growing Up characters. SNL really went out of their way to bring THIS tripe back???
— Also, at this point of the season, it’s starting to feel like Fred never even left the damn cast. In fact, I’m pretty sure his total amount of airtime this entire season outnumbers that of actual cast member John Milhiser (who will be nowhere to be seen in tonight’s entire episode, by the way, which only further proves my point).
— Ugh, and that overlong and insufferable Two Best Friends commentary is how they chose to end this Update? Talk about going out with a whimper (though it’s not like this Update had anything else going for it besides Taran’s McConaughey commentary).
STARS: **
JEWELRY PARTY
at a jewelry party, Venezuelan (CES) grasps her boyfriend’s (MOB) sexism
— A rare instance of Mike getting quite a lot of live airtime in an episode. Also interesting how both of his lead roles tonight have him paired up with a group of women.
— Fairly funny reveal of Mike being a men’s rights activist.
— The execution of this is letting me down. There’s an interesting premise there, but the approach is too flat, uncomfortable, and boring.
— I have very mixed feelings towards Cecily’s performance here, but I like some of what she’s doing.
STARS: **
PIMPIN’ PIMPIN’ PIMPIN’ WITH KATT WILLIAMS: OSCAR EDITION
Katt Williams (JAP) interviews crazy white celebrities
— During the TV One station I.D. bit at the beginning, we get a funny mention of a year-long “Martin” marathon.
— Not only is this another talk show sketch tonight, but SNL makes a typically lazy decision to place Jay’s solid Katt Williams impression in the ol’ “celebrity-hosted talk show” setting. If Jay had to continue doing this impression, I’d rather see it in other venues.
— It turns out that Jay’s Williams at least has good lines towards his guests.
— Yet another hilarious celebrity impression from Taran tonight, this time doing an absolutely PRICELESS Harrison Ford.
— I love Jay’s “Oh, shut it up” ad-lib towards an SNL audience member who is heard responding “Ohhh!” to Jay-as-Williams’ Rob Ford slam.
— Hearing Lena Dunham speak throughout an entire SNL episode makes me appreciate Noel’s impression of her even more than I did when it appeared earlier this season. Too bad that 1) Noel’s impression is only a brief part thrown in at the very end of this sketch, and 2) it’s Noel’s ONLY appearance all night.
— Further making me think that “I have 1,000 follow-up questions” must be something Lena Dunham is known to often say, Noel says a variation of it here as part of her Dunham impression.
— Overall, this was actually not bad for a celebrity-hosted talk show sketch. I also notice that it felt like this was set up to eventually become a recurring sketch, especially with how this sketch opened with Jay’s Williams saying each episode of this new talk show of his will feature him interviewing crazy white celebrities. We end up never seeing this sketch become recurring.
STARS: ***
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “I Need My Girl”
PLANNING
co-workers (KYM) & (BEB) embroil (BRW) in cockamamie outing planning
— A great increasing absurdity in regards to the email planning, absurdity that’s made even funnier by how straight Beck and Kyle are perfectly playing this.
— Good touch with how each transition title screen stating the day of the week is playing a snippet of the Fresh Prince theme song.
— Brooks is a solid straight man here. Back at this time, stuff like the 12 Years A Slave and Cowboys segments from the preceding episode and now tonight’s Jared Leto bit in the Katt Williams sketch and the straight man performance in this short made me think Brooks was finally “making it on the show” (to quote Bill Murray), and that he now had a decent chance of coming back the following season. Unfortunately, all of that ended up being dead wrong, and the progress that Brooks showed in these past two episodes ended up being short-lived, as he sadly goes right back to being used extremely little for most of the remainder of the season.
— The “Will Smith doesn’t do concerts anymore!” realization is very funny.
STARS: ****
GOODNIGHTS
IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS
— The absolute epitome of an average episode. Most of this episode was just fine, with barely anything standing out as strong, and very little standing out as weak.
MY PERSONAL CHOICE OF “BEST OF” MOMENTS FOR THIS EPISODE, REPRESENTED WITH SCREENCAPS
RATED SEGMENTS RANKED FROM BEST TO WORST
Planning
Ooh Child
Scandal
Pimpin’ Pimpin’ Pimpin’ with Katt Williams: Oscar Edition
Presidential Address
Monologue
Girl
What’s Poppin’
What Are You Even Doing? You’re Being Crazy
Weekend Update
Jewelry Party
HOW THIS EPISODE STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING ONE (Jim Parsons)
a slight step down
My full set of screencaps for this episode is here
TOMORROW
Louis C.K.
Is this Hamm’s final live SNL appearance? I know he played “Hamm Solo” in the Star Wars auditions sketch coming up in a season or two, but I can’t remember anything past that. He may have done a political impression, though, those definitely blur together to me.
He made an appearance in the goodnights in either S44 or S45 after Pete Davidson’s mother mentioned him in an Update bit.
Jon appears briefly in the “Days of Our Impeachment” cold open from…um…the Harry Styles episode (?), to give Melissa’s AOC a passionate kiss and led to some “SNL is sexualizing AOC!” hot takes on Twitter.
Regarding Noel, I already said this, but her impression style reminds me a lot of Melanie Hutsell (who also had to fight for audience recognition), where she leans into a lot of face-pulling to be noticed. This can be funny in certain doses, but can quickly become draining and desperate. Noel seems to have found more success in other musical and comedic avenues post-SNL. I wish she’d been able to try some of that in her season, as we were already at a point where Kate was dominating the female side of the cast in impressions.
I thought that Just Poppin’ was in the Parsons episode. The ending was a bit abrupt, like it the sketch just ended. It also could have been recurring like the Katt Williams talk show as it was set up.
Brooks and Mike seemed to got some more airtime in this episode. With SNL giving Mike (and even Tim the season before) another shot as a writer, why couldn’t they do they do the same with Brooks?
Lena’s line in that sketch “well a wallaby could follow me” has stuck with me for 6 years for some reason.
Also am I just spoiled by Chloe and Melissa or is Noel nowhere near as strong an impressionist as I remembered? Her Dunham isn’t bad, and her Deschanel and Stone were pretty great, but I haven’t been wowed by any other impression she’s shown off at this point.
I wasn’t crazy about her Nancy Grace. I thought Amy did that impression better. Still, Noel deserved better on SNL.
People have mentioned this before, but I thought Brooks had a fun style that made him stand out on SNL but also perhaps isolated him from the general vibe. If he either could have leaned into that (and carved out a niche, which is admittedly very hard to do on SNL) or gotten some regular writing partners (I think he could have fit in well with the Kyle/Beck group), he might have had more success.
At the time (before they announced Colin Jost as the new host) I almost thought Brooks would’ve been an interesting choice for replacing Seth in the role being the new stand-up guy in the cast. True, he probably would’ve seemed pretty miscast as a news anchor, but I could see him growing into it over time, especially with how the Jost/Che era has once again become more in the vein of stand-ups doing jokes like a Norm/Quinn/Miller rather than doing the straight up news anchor persona like a Chase/Curtain/Nealon.
I remember Dunham being known as a huge Scandal fan, hence the sketch.
Brooks-as-Jared Leto’s “Hello, friend” line as he’s being removed from the stage was a good subtle touch. I have no idea why I still remember that.
Is Kate only in the monologue in this episode? Interesting.. but it’s sometimes nice to have a little break from her.
I expected to immediately be annoyed by Cecily in the Weekend updates, but at the start she actually didn’t bother me that much. But now it really feels like she is actually playing a character, and not ‘being herself’. It’s weird, because I really like Cecily in sketches, but on Weekend update, she just doesn’t work for me.
She’s also in the Scandal sketch
Just wanna to say here that The National was the last musical act on my SNL wish-list that made the cut. (Yeah, SNL has been sparing to the indie rock world I once kept up with. It’s not like it was that one period between ’06-’09…)
I can think of plenty of great indie artists coming up. St. Vincent, Courtney Barnett, Father John Misty, The xx, LCD Soundsystem, Tame Impala, King Princess. It’s certainly not as hip as it was in the years you mentioned, but you’re really into the indie sound and don’t vibe with any of those acts?
Every time a name like that came on the roster, my first thought was “who in talent slipped?”
(Great acts! None of them were on my wish list….)
Fair enough. 2 of those are all timers for me (St Vincent & LCD) and the show’s had a couple of my other all time favorites since (Prince, David Byrne, Jack White, D’Angelo, Tribe) so I can’t complain too much about the last decade’s MGs. A little too many bland pop star’s and B list country singers but it’s better than the Fey era.
And they were phenomenal
It was very brave of Ashton Kutcher to host this entire show in drag.
Unnecessary.
Brooks Whelan is credited as a writer for the first episode of I Think You Should Leave’s new season. That episode contains Little Buff Boys, which (thanks @Stuart Allard for remembering this part) was cut from this episode. Apparently Brooks mentioned this, complete with photo of the sketch, in his 2015 Seth Meyers appearance, but that video is gone.
While I agree with you on this episode, I actually found the Jewelry Party sketch really strong (I personally give it ****), Mike’s uncomfortableness as his character I found really good. The Planning pre-tape with Beck and Kyle is the best part of this episode.