Saturday Night Live Recap: Trapped in Purgatory

At the end of the stagnant black-and-white sketch that closed out last night’s Saturday Night Live, Michael Longfellow appears as a Rod Serling figure breaking down what we’ve just seen. He starts with a pithy synopsis of the sketch, about a trio of, uh, hotel detectives, before delivering the Twilight Zone twist: “Also, this is purgatory, and they’re all dead.”

If only there were a similar exonerating explanation for the episode itself.

A purgatory sitch, or perhaps just a haunting of some kind, would help account for an episode that felt cursed from the moment a college football game delayed its start by several minutes. Apart from the other technical glitches — a visible cue card here, a bumper held for so long viewers felt locked into a staring contest with musical guest Stevie Nicks there — the vibes were just off. Multiple sketches established one-note premises early on and then hung around for shockingly long.

The worst part? It was ultimately a waste of its host’s talents. When Ariana Grande was the musical guest back in March for Josh Brolin’s stellar episode, she had off-the-charts comedic chemistry with her Wicked costar Bowen Yang in their two-hander Moulin Rouge sketch. At the time, it was a tantalizing amuse-bouche for an eventual Ariana extravaganza on SNL whenever the Wicked promotional machine kicked into hyperdrive. Now that the moment has arrived, it feels like a bait-and-switch, through no fault of the singer.

About a third of the way through the episode comes to a block of two sketches that deliver exactly what Grande’s appearance in March promised. Both the charades game and Celine Dion sports promo rest almost entirely on her slender shoulders, and she carries them off into comic glory. But this chunk of the show feels beamed in from another realm — the same one that produced last week’s kickass Nate Bargatze episode. It’s a pity no Rod Serling figure appears to explain how that electric section got trapped within the purgatorial swamp of so-so surrounding it.

Here are the highlights:

Charades with Mom

What starts as a familial game of charades turns into an erotically charged showdown with Oedipal undertones. From beneath an auburn mom-mullet, Diane (Grande) stares daggers and shoots verbal darts at the interloper in her house — Josh (Yang), the guy dating her son (Longfellow.) Josh’s gentle teasing causes Diane’s brain to explode, and Grande plays her twitchy mix of anxiety and aggression to perfection. She probably couldn’t have pulled off such a bravura performance when she last hosted SNL eight years ago. It’s not that, at 31, she now has the age to play a middle-aged suburban Mom; it’s that she has since cultivated the range to play one this specific shade of twisted.

Celine Dion Sports Promo

Although Grande swiftly cycles through several vocal imitations in her charming monologue, the most impressive one comes later. In a sketch mocking Celine Dion’s recent, inexplicable promo for Sunday Night Football, the chameleonic chanteuse absolutely nails Dion’s French-Canadian accent, inflections, vocal tics, and confidence. It’s frankly uncanny. Plenty of spot-on jokes about UFC follow but, really, who needs them when all it takes is Ariana-as-Celine earnestly describing what takes place “in the octagon” to put this sketch into the end zone?

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My Best Friend’s House

A streak of Pee-wee’s Playhouse-style decorative anthropomorphism runs through this musical sketch about the disturbing revelations that greet a woman’s return to her childhood town. Although I personally found the eventual turn more dark than funny, the imaginative set design is a marvel that elevates the proceedings. Dan Bulla, one of SNL’s writing supervisors and the mind behind unhinged hits like Shrimp Tower, Pongo, and Meatballs, gets a title card at the end. What’s more intriguing, though, is the one at the start: “Saturday Night Live Midnight Matinee.” Putting fresh branding on a digital short is the biggest hint yet that the Please Don’t Destroy pre-tapes, absent from this season so far, might possibly be gone for good.

Maybelline

The mirror bit is an SNL institution at this point, and it proves a sturdy vehicle for competing Jennifer Coolidge impressions. Regular viewers already know how accurately Chloe Fineman can imitate The White Lotus star and all-around icon; who could have guessed, though, that Ariana Grande had what might be an even truer Coolidge on deck? Watching the two struggle to keep it together while spraying Windex in each other’s faces is an utter delight. The addition of Dana Carvey as a bonus Coolidge at the end, though, felt like an undercooked afterthought.

Cut for Time

• While playing Kamala Harris in the cold open, Maya Rudolph’s broken expression in response to the question, “How are you not winning by a landslide?” likely sums up how many viewers are feeling about the election these days.

• Anyone who enjoyed Grande’s incredible vocal impressions of Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and Gwen Stefani during her monologue should immediately check out this sketch from her last time hosting, back in 2016.

• Almost as impressive as her pretending to be other singers is Grande pretending to be terrible at singing, which she does convincingly in the bridesmaids sketch.

• Musical guest Stevie Nicks returned to the show last night for the first time in over 40 years since she performed “Stand Back” in 1983. Her new song, “The Lighthouse,” is a timely protest anthem about women’s rights.

• Although it’s still unclear what happened during the bumper snafu before Nicks’s second song, “Edge of Seventeen,” a live audience member described the experience on Reddit.

• “Okay, we’re finding the line,” said Colin Jost after this bleak-but-hilarious joke shocked the Weekend Update audience. Lately, there has been at least one joke per episode, which seems to be getting him and Michael Che closer to the line.

• Thanks to James Austin Johnson and Sarah Sherman’s Update desk piece, I will be thinking of the Gallagher brothers bonding over a shared love of Tommy Pickles all throughout Oasis’s probably-doomed reunion tour.

• I’ll give the bewildering Castrati sketch this much: It is very funny that Kenan Thompson plays himself here, despite the setting of Late Renaissance Italy.

• Apparently, hotel detectives used to be a thing. It’s too bad how the sketch they inspired turned out, though.