It’s relatively unusual, in this era of Saturday Night Live, for someone to host for the first time after becoming a massive global celebrity. Yes, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson still drop by on the regular, but their respective involvements with the show predate their arguable career peaks, and in many cases involve actual relationships with current or former staffers (though Eva Mendes was not ever a Lornette, as far as I know). Pop singers, though, are an exception: You can still expect a massive pop singer to stroll into the studio for the first time during their peak fame, and offhand, Taylor Swift seems like about the only one who seems too famous to host again. (If I’m missing someone who seems equally unlikely, I’m sure someone will let me know in the comments. And remember, I said too big, not too old or too retired or too niche or too dead!)
Maybe that’s because pop stardom can happen more meteorically than movie stardom these days; hardly anyone gets blasted into the latter without making their way through a series of rickety test rockets first. Olivia Rodrigo, on the other hand, was huge from her first record, and remains huge now that her third is imminent. Like a lot of younger pop stars, she has enough child-star background to seemingly feel comfortable enough to perform live comedy/variety material, but still thirsty enough to want to do something she has no actual need to do, even to push a new album (like, for example, sing her way through a belated “Trapped In The Closet” parody).
And yet: As chipper and fun as Rodrigo was on her SNL double-duty debut, her episode also made it abundantly clear how much better-suited someone like Sabrina Carpenter is at this particular enterprise. That’s not meant to pit two young singers with a past squashed beef back against each other. Then again, they’re similar ages, similarly famous, and similarly experienced with acting before their singing careers took off. And it gives me no particular joy to say that Rodrigo’s episode was slightly lacking by comparison to Carpenter’s. In fact, I’m quite biased in the other direction: I’ve spun Guts way more often than Man’s Best Friend. (Shout-out to my daughter, whose interest brought Rodrigo’s albums into our house.)
I’ll just come right out and say it, though: Some of these Rodrigo-centric sketches had All That vibes. That would probably hit different if I were a little more young-millennial the Xennial cusper, but I am old enough to recoil at the thought of All That despite its essential harmlessness; it took me a few years to really warm up to Kenan as a result. (At the time—at the time—bringing him over to the SNL major leagues felt as weird to me as randomly hiring Little Pete from The Adventures of Pete & Pete to do All That sketches, although in that case the older show was obviously superior.)
Obviously, content-wise, this week’s episode didn’t have much that would make it on Nickelodeon a quarter-century ago, not even in the comparably risqué wild west of Snick. At the same time, that leadoff sketch that involved a succession of characters in crazy soap-opera get-ups getting pushed down the stairs… doesn’t that feel like something Amanda Bynes could have anchored in 1998 with virtually no changes? Maybe that one was more fun to watch in the room; it did get a pretty impressive crowd reaction, which I assume is what kept it in that plum position all the way up to the live show. It was clear there was some fun (and from the looks of it, deceptively simple) camera-tilting rigging going on to allow each cast member to endlessly but safely bounce down a comically long staircase. Probably watching it on the monitor and in front of you simultaneously has an extra kick, which is always neat to see in a live show. At home, there needs to be a more delicate balance between the obvious for-fun fakery and the comic illusion. Otherwise: yikes. This one didn’t clear the “yikes” bar.
For that matter, the far funnier “Trapped In The Closet”-ish R&B-accusation song follows a pretty similar kid-friendly progression (if less thematically appropriate for that audience): The same thing! Happens again!! With more people!!! The parade of characters worked better because their entrances were more outlandish even as the characters themselves were less so, and it was short enough to qualify as snappy. It might even qualify as proof that a concept that could have easily been rewritten for tenth-graders can still work in the right hands; Rodrigo, Marcello Hernández, Jane Wickline, James Austin Johnson, Chloe Fineman, and Kenan Thompson were all having fun with it.
It also shared connective tissue with the rest of the night’s best moments: Music, including a Dan Bulla pre-tape with Rodrigo singing about her idyllic bedroom as part of a bug-planet zoo, and a command performance from Andrew Dismukes as a cabbie who discovers to his great dismay that he is a sterling white Rasta performer. In the latter, Rodrigo, paired with woo-girl expert Veronika Slowikowska, slipped into character work more seamlessly; in other sketches, she acted more, well, like someone reading her lines off of cue cards. (I don’t usually pay much mind to darting “cue-card eyes” but multiple full-on head turns tend to grab some attention.)
That didn’t undermine her performances of “drop dead” and the new ballad “begged” off of the upcoming You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love; if anything, those compelling songs undermined the weaker sketches of the night. It turns out that while Rodrigo’s music works better for me personally, Carpenter’s persona—saucy, not quite ironic, but slightly opaque—works better for Saturday Night Live’s vintage-variety-show DNA. Some of Rodrigo’s songs are playful, but she sells them with earnestness, even when it comes to droll ones like “bad idea right?” For much of her SNL appearance, she could only fake it with gusto.
What was on
The detail-packed bug-planet song was a great justification for continuing to give different writers and cast members the non-fake-ad pretape slot, even though I’m sure for years there was some hope that the show could find a new Lonely Island to make it their steady gig. The batting average on these things isn’t perfect, but it’s much higher than the average live sketch, for any number of reasons. Too many in an episode can feel like cheating, but in a particularly uneven (and occasionally bomb-laden) outing, Olivia Rodrigo singing with a kind of melancholy resignation about living in a zoo for the entertainment of bug people is the kind of bizarre backstop the show really needs. That Dismukes sketch, the spiritual ten-to-one of the night (which actually did air pretty close to that timeslot, even if the also-funny home-security pretape went on after), will be discussed further elsewhere.
What was off
I’ve already mentioned that deadly staircase sketch. So let’s give a shout-out of shame to the beyond-played Shop TV bit where a home-shopping seller guilelessly commits acts of near-obscenity with their product to the panic of hosts played by Mikey Day and, in later incarnations, Ashley Padilla. This was also one of the weaker sketches on Sabrina Carpenter’s episode; do the innuendos of pop music in general just make the writers think of this piece, even if the pop star in general doesn’t really traffic in innuendos? Do pop stars just gravitate to that material for the same reason? Is doing this sketch the new mostly-naked Rolling Stone cover now that print is mostly dead? Did Rodrigo and Carpenter’s now-cordial relationship include the latter actively recommending this sketch format to the former? The mind boggles, just as it will the next time this one comes back.
Most valuable player
Sure, Ashley Padilla gives one of her usual bravura turns in what felt more than ever like the Designated Ashley Padilla Sketch, where exes played by Rodrigo and Ben Marshall attempt to make each other jealous at a birthday party. Rodrigo has some success recruiting Tommy Brennan to act like a boyfriend; Marshall has less with an overly enthusiastic Padilla. It sort of writes itself, right down to Padilla breaking at the over-the-top silliness. I can’t lie; it got laughs out of me, too, Padilla’s personal unpredictability mitigating the clockwork predictability of the sketch’s framework.
But the truly brilliant performance in this episode was Dismukes as that rideshare driver, first by launching into his trancelike white Rasta routine when he puts on some party music for his passengers, and then, even better, by his utter shock and confusion conveying just how involuntary his outburst apparently was. Dismukes actually has a quality similar to what makes Padilla such an exciting sketch performer: He really knows how to add some extra human dimension to his ridiculousness through pauses and small gestures. The way his hand curls in tension after his song, his reading of “I have as much information as you do,” the way he casually deconstructs the joke structure that the sketch seemed to be developing before his character stole the spotlight… it’s all just masterful. And not for nothing, but he breaks far less than almost anyone in the cast, Padilla included.
Next time
Matt Damon can only lay claim to being the season’s second-oldest host, after Jack Black, who has a year on him. Better luck next time, Damon! Meanwhile, Noah Kahan steers the musical-guest slot back into comfortably opinion-neutral territory for me.
Stray observations
• OK, Aziz Ansari as Kash Patel… sure. Good enough. But him showing up for the presumed tail-end of his tenure really makes the whole Trump Cold Open Industrial Complex feel like the skeleton-crew version of the first-term edition. On the whole, it’s probably better, both from a technical standpoint of James Austin Johnson’s superior Trump impression, and the overall health of the show in terms of bringing in only the occasional ringer (or quasi-ringer, in Colin Jost’s case). It also feels pretty meager and repetitive. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume some of the writers are wishing for a break, too.
• A minor note, but right after the (not bad) Weekend Update joke about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act feeling “more like a firehose” to Black people, Che totally did the little “who me?” eye-dart before he even got the scandalized reaction that his “who me?” is itself supposed to be reacting to. That kinda sums up his later-period Update energy in general.
• Speaking of Weekend Update: Kam Patterson has an infectious smile, great energy, and a tendency to get about halfway to bombing in most of his Update appearances, regularly losing the rhythm that he would almost certainly have in a stand-up version of whatever bit he’s doing. There just wasn’t very much to his televised sidling up to Megan Thee Stallion. It often feels as if he’s casting about for some TV-friendly version of himself that can work on the show, and coming up, if not exactly empty, a little short.
• Speaking even more of weekend Update: I did enjoy Chloe Fineman and Veronika Slowikowska doing a non-explanation of an online-celeb fight that I only know slightly more about than Che. Fineman offered consistently strong support for this episode and if Dismukes didn’t conduct such a symphony of simultaneous self-regard and self-disgust at the end of the show, she might have stolen the MVP title.
• How do we think this episode affects how much of a pain it will be to get Olivia Rodrigo/Wolf Alice tickets next week? Will it simply be impossible, or will it be impossible and also crash my laptop?