Ariana Grande vocalizes her way through a belated return to Saturday Night Live

Was it COVID that denied us a Justin Timberlake-like reign over the SNL microphone from Ariana Grande? Or did she just get a “thank u, next” during the increasingly competitive main-pop-girl wars? Of course, the lingering presence of her boyfriend-then-ex Pete Davidson, who was engaged to Grande for a brief period in 2018, might have played a part, too. But there was plenty of time before their break-up and after his leaving the show where she could have been burnishing her reputation as a consummate musical impressionist and down-for-whatever sketch actress who, as a bonus, would not spur the writing another one of those “bring it on down to omeletville” sketches. Her musical monologue, with a jokingly insincere bit about how she was going to keep things low-key, did admit that she hasn’t hosted since 2016, but also kinda-sorta implied that she’d been doing this regularly enough that the audience would be expecting a litany of famous voices, characters, and powerhouse tunes – hence the false warning that she wouldn’t be doing any of that. Maybe she was folding in whatever she gets up to when she appears on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, which I am to understand involves a fair amount of impression stuff – furthering the unspoken connection to Timberlake.

Actually, before getting notes from Grande herself about her last hosting gig, I had no particular recall about when that was, or if she had ever done it before without also serving as musical guest (nope!). Though she copped to being a theater kid in the monologue, there’s something slightly nebulous about Grande’s image, at least in terms of how she functions on a comedy-variety show. (I’m sure a full-time music critic or even just a hardcore fan could give me the full rundown on her persona.) Her vocal impressions are, indeed, technically astonishing; putting her more dead-on Jennifer Coolidge voice alongside Chloe Fineman’s (very good!) Jennifer Coolidge voice felt like exactly the kind of showing off she joked about avoiding in her monologue, where she also ran through mini-impressions of Britney, Gwen, and Miley. (Celine Dion would show up to bigger but not necessarily better effect later in the episode.) But her “regular” voice, too, sounded like she was doing some kind of Broadway Thing, as if she couldn’t shake Kristin Chenoweth from her Wicked job, the way Austin Butler couldn’t shake Elvis. It puts her whole deal in protective quotes.

That’s not necessarily a negative. Her vocal control was a highlight of the episode, which cheekily broke her monologue promise with a majority-singing sketch line-up. Of the seven sketches Grande appeared in, she sang in four, lending the episode an unusual degree of cohesion – even in the non-musical sketches, there was musicality in her vocal mannerisms. It was a weird twist, then, that Grande’s control was arguably most impressive in a sketch where she not only studiously and gamely sang off-key to stay in-character, but one that didn't even make that the real joke of the piece. SNL has done the getting-cucked-at-your-wedding scenario in different guises before, but having Grande, Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim, and Sarah Sherman play woo-girl bridesmaids performing a clunky “Espresso” parody with such intentionally choppy gusto did wonders for the temporary verisimilitude of their bizarre confession – at least until the sketch failed to land its final punchline of Marcello Hernandez running on stage to yell something. (Also, he’s obviously a cute and charming guy, but any time a comedy show takes as a given that one of its performers is absurdly hot, you kinda have to scratch your head a little.)

The bridesmaid song was the most purely unaffected Grande felt all night. Most of the time, she was able to turn her affectations into something memorable: a mom unable to stop cruelly taunting (or negging?!) her son’s boyfriend; a woman in a tangle of intrigue involving a series of hotel detectives; an Italian castrato with a perpetually faraway look in his eye as his parents enthusiastically explain the mutilation he experienced. She was arguably the performance highlight in all of those, which is rarely the case with a host. What, then, was keeping this episode from full-on instant-classic status? Was it just that most of the sketches happened to be pretty good, rather than laugh-out-loud great?

Or perhaps I’m detecting a touch of pop-star vanity in the proceedings, a remnant from those Timberlake episodes where the point of roughly half the sketches was to show off what a game, energetic, versatile guy Timberlake could be. Grande isn’t nearly so overt about it – and she’s seemingly more able to disappear into character. For example: It’s not unusual for a Saturday Night Live cast member in her thirties to play a middle-aged mom; less so for a similarly aged singer, who often presents as even younger, to do the same, and do it so well. Yet Grande’s showcase work occasionally felt like something the cast was knocking against, rather than fully syncing with. That's not a knock on her, or the episode, which were both good by most standards. But especially in such a large cast, it can be disorienting to watch someone rush in and become the star of the show, as if finding a credibility shelter in a ravaged music-industry landscape. If she can't be Sabrina Carpenter, she can damn well commit to singing her off-key.

What was on

Besides the bridesmaids song, which felt very much in the style of current SNL, two later-show sketches felt very much like pieces that maybe could have aired in the first five seasons: the castrato sketch and the hotel detectives sketch, both rife with commitment to silly voices. James Austin Johnson seems especially enamored of the chance to act like he's in a thriller from 1941 or so, and he might make MVP of this episode if it made any sense for a cast member to take the title. But no, this is very much Grande's show.

What was off

The triple Jennifer Coolidge routine was obviously there for the sheer delight of it, and while it’s novel to see the mirror-image bit performed by three impressionists, rather than one impressionist and the real thing, I don’t really see the utility of elaborate impressions of someone who’s mainly a comedy performer to begin with. Similarly, while Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg were funny in the castrato sketch, and it’s hard to say no to a little bit of all-star action on the side as long as Rudolph, Samberg, and Carvey are there to do their little political sketches for another month or so, there’s a neither-here-nor-there quality about their presence later in the show.

As for the cold open itself, yeesh. Family Feud is an ideal format... for swelling an impressions-based sketch past toward the 10-minute mark because it takes at least half the sketch just to do cursory intros. This dusty framework did highlight something cutely appealing about these middling 2024 election sketches: how no single performer has been expected to shoulder the burden of bad cold opens alone. Three weeks in, it’s been Rudolph, Carvey, Samberg, Johnson, and Yang, doing their little show together every time, and this week Mikey Day joined in, too. It feels very supportive of the fact that three-quarters of every overlong sketch is canned and toothless, propped up by Rudolph and Johnson as the actual candidates. I try not to get too rankled by SNL’s both-sides-isms – it’s part of the show, what can you do? – but three weeks into the season, the idea that making fun of Doug Emhoff is at least as crucial as making fun of J.D. Vance has crossed over from slightly odd to genuinely insane.

Next time

Michael Keaton, whose nine-year gap between episodes is actually his shortest ever of the three-going-on-four times he’s hosted.

Stray observations (mostly about music)

• The “My Best Friend’s House” music video was specifically credited to longtime writer Dan Bulla at the back, and branded as "Saturday Night Live Midnight Matinee" out front. Does this mean other writers are being given shots at their own videos in place of a regular Please Don’t Destroy Piece? The PDD boys are still writing sketches, and their videos would probably be more refreshing at three or four times a year, rather than 10 or 12.
• I fear that James Austin Johnson and Sarah Sherman do not precisely “have” a Noel or Liam Gallagher, respectively. (Not least because Johnson started sneer-singing “Wonderwall” in Liam’s voice, not Noel’s.) They also don’t have a basic grasp on when Oasis was playing stadiums or when the Spice Girls were around. They do, however, understand that it is funny to hear lads in a rough approximation of a Manchester accent say “legend” and needle each other like children, so the Update piece worked well enough!
• Clearly the three characters entwined in the hotel detective drama were meant to represent the three songs in They Might Be Giants’ trilogy of hotel detective songs. James Austin Johnson is “(She Was a) Hotel Detective,” Ariana Grande is “She Was a Hotel Detective,” and Dismukes is “She Was a Hotel Detective in the Future.”
• If that last item made any sense to you, I’m sorry. If it didn’t, it probably at least makes sense for me to reveal that I’ve never been a big Fleetwood Mac guy, and as such, I don’t feel entirely qualified to evaluate either a new Stevie Nicks song, or her performance of “Edge of Seventeen.” It’s also a neat gesture to the show’s past, inviting back a musical guest who hasn’t been on since 1983. With that said... she sounded bad, right? Especially on that first song?
• Where the hell was? Here’s the part of the recap where I ask where the hell a particular cast member was. Where the hell was Ashley Padilla?