Mikey Madison is the youngest Best Actress Oscar winner in over a decade, as well (less consequentially) as the youngest Saturday Night Live host in a couple of years. Her fellow recent-ish twentysomething Oscar winners Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone both hosted during the promotional cycle for their respective first-Oscar movies (albeit both before receiving the actual awards), but young as they were at the time, there was a sense that they were both ascendant superstars. Lawrence in particular felt like a get-her-while-you-can choice (and indeed, she hasn’t hosted since), while Stone was already a show fixture.
It’s not especially strange that Madison was announced as an SNL host after her Oscar was locked down—the post-awards victory lap has become a tradition—but a feeling of slight hesitation over what, exactly, the show was supposed to do with her did linger in her episode. At first, she seemed to receive a huge vote of confidence via her placement in an unusually strong political cold open, where the show would often prefer to place entirely unrelated celebrities (presumably to the relief of the actual hosts, given that the cold open is the week’s buzziest opportunity to see SNL at its worst). It then gave her the kind of clip-and-photo-heavy personal-touch monologue that had been more in vogue a season or two ago; this format may not showcase a star’s singing or pole-dancing, as the case may be, but has a nice introductory warmth.
Then, naturally, she disappeared for an hour.
I know this is both (a.) not literally true; (b.) a common thing to say when hosts take supporting roles in sketches rather than showcase parts; and (c.) not a proper criticism unto itself. Sometimes a more recessive host role is actually fine; it can be endearing to see an actor become a game SNL stringer for 90 minutes, especially as an alternative to young female hosts getting the humina-humina-humina treatment from multiple sketches. (At least we didn’t get a news crew puzzled over how and why Mikey was married to the other Mikey.) But with a couple of exceptions, the show kept feeding Madison secondhand material—odds and sods turned into diminished recurring sketches, like Marcello’s manic, bellowing commercial-acting instructor returning for the plum first-real-sketch spot. (When a bad recurring piece goes here, I think of it as the “Buh-Bye” slot, in honor of how the show followed an off Season 19 by… reviving a one-note sketch ASAP in Season 20.)
There was also another pre-tape where an earnest young-adult drama happens in the background as outrageous slapstick unfolds in the background, and another appearance from Bowen Yang’s Barry the Midwife character who does the Bowen Yang thing of saying pop-culture-related non-sequiturs in a voice of haughty confidence. (Yang is great, and also comparable to Kristen Wiig in that the show is perhaps overly aware of how easily he can get a laugh from the crowd.) None of these three recurring sketches were quite the bottom of the barrel as far as repeated gags go, but they did come expend a lot of time and effort on stuff that might have gotten by on a sense of surprise the first go-round. That surprise shift is at least half the game of those background-action filmed pieces, especially, which don’t even really bother doing a decent job parodying teen dramas (or whatever is supposed to be happening in the foreground).
Even a standby format I usually love, the parade-of-weirdos sketch where everyone in the cast (minus the Update anchors) gets to step up to the camera and do one very silly bit, fell a little flat this week, hanging on the weak peg of jury-duty excuses. Doesn’t a marathon of attempts to get out of jury duty feel a little corny? Like something, say, a gut-shot mobster with lifelong ambitions of trying stand-up might come up with? Now that Andrew Dismukes-led sketch really worked, and for a few minutes, Madison’s utility-playing had the perfect outlet as a mob wife who has been secretly helping her now-dying husband with his subpar material and catchphrase. Madison also gave a rock-solid, unwavering performance in what could have been an intimidating one-on-one set-up, the “So, Like, What Are We?” game-show piece that closed out the episode. It was a totally serviceable piece that more or less died with the audience; it almost felt like the show was somehow manifesting that flop.
To be honest, this uneasiness could very well be due to recently reading Lorne, the new Lorne Michaels biography by Susan Morrison. The book is often fascinating and, if not exactly excoriating, relatively even-handed in portraying Michaels’ strengths and weaknesses as an impresario and (secondarily) a human being. But it’s most damning (maybe unintentionally) in the sections where the author follows Michaels through a week at the show back in 2018, where he comes across as a condescendingly self-styled expert in who is famous or charismatic enough for the show to deign to allow them on. It’s therefore easy—and baseless, I know—to picture Michaels unconvinced that Madison is well-known enough to anchor the show and having those vibes dominate the final sketch line-up.
Regardless of why, sketches that overpowered Madison with loud recurring concepts dominated the episode, leaving the few instances of her best work buried at the end. Make that make sense!
What was on
In addition to those aforementioned post-Update sketches, the pre-tape song about “Big Dumb Lines” was a delight, even if it could have been waiting as long as that lady who’s been in a gummi-bear line since 2011, and another example of Madison blending in with the show’s regulars. It also had a nice echo in the show-ending cartoon about the remaking of Manhattan island, though that one was pretty clearly “Washington’s Dream” for city planners. Also: It bears repeating that the political cold open really was pretty funny, even if it didn’t need the double-underlining of the Atlantic guy coming on at the end.
What was off
In addition to the three recurring sketches, the Please Don’t Destroy SpongeBob sketch felt like it was pretty much just a remix of their Bad Bunny Shrek sketch, and then they acknowledged as much, even after it seemed like it was drifting further from self-plagiarism, in a way that honestly felt kind of cheap! It seems like there was probably a funnier way into a DIY SpongeBob-characters-as-twentysomethings promo than the usual “PDD reacts to the host being weird” shtick.
Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime time)
No one had a truly standout week, but Dismukes gets it by default for anchoring the stand-up mobster thing, and for his very silly sleep-face in the acting-class sketch.
Next time
Jack Black, the only host in this batch I correctly predicted last time around, returns to the show for the first time in nearly 20 years; he appeared as a musical guest with Tenacious D in 2006, and last hosted in 2005, when his all-around excellent episode included the debut of “Lazy Sunday.” Elton John and Brandi Carlisle are teaming up for musical-guest duties. Guys, that Lorne biography has some choice behind-the-scenes moments of him completely dismissive of Maggie Rogers, all but openly regretting booking her as a musical guest as she rehearses, because he doesn’t think of her as popular or well-seasoned enough. (Admittedly, she’s deficient in the area of being in the Rolling Stones.) I’m not even a particular fan of Rogers and I still winced every time the author describes him talking about her. It made me see any genuinely interesting or out-of-the-box musical guest bookings on SNL since the turn of the millennium as, essentially, a happy accident.
Stray observations
- • Devon Walker’s Update piece goofing on the guy with the absurd and Saratoga Water-heavy daily routine (shout-out to my hometown!) had a lot of potential, and a couple of big laughs (the cut to the ambulance in his second TikTok excerpt, for example), but it was also pretty meandering, and seemed to try to turn the good-natured Jost-ribbing around into a Che thing, too. (Though I do 100% believe that Che doesn’t spend much time around the offices early in the week.)
- • Ashley Padilla’s Joann Fabrics commentary, on the other hand, was more focused and funnier, even if she felt like she was embodying Wiig, Yang, and Heidi Gardner characters all at once.
- • What was going on with Morgan Wallen high-tailing it out of the goodnights after five seconds? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone head straight up the aisle that way before, rather than just discretely slipping off to the side or out the back.
- • I do have an answer to what was going on with Morgan Wallen’s music and that is that he sucks.
- • I can’t tell if the perfectly unexplained English accents on “Big Dumb Line” were intended to remind me of Charli XCX, or if I was just instantly reminded of waiting on a Big Dumb Line for a Charli XCX album-signing in 2019. (My wife and I thought it would be charming to get her picture with our four-year-old daughter who loved “Boom Clap.” We bailed after an hour of waiting.)
