Jimmy Fallon, Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrell, and Matthew McConaughey turn quarantine into pretty funny soap
Look, if you’ve been a sketch performer for the last several decades, you’re going to have some props sitting around your house. And that’s good news for Tonight Show viewers, since Jimmy Fallon has been Zoom-calling some of his former Saturday Night Live pals to put together a reliably amusing running sketch. Appropriately called The Longest Days Of Our Lives, the bit—ostensibly the homebound adaptation of a daily soap opera—sees Fallon, Kristen Wiig, and Will Ferrell remotely plotting, scheming, tossing drinks (and hands), and, somehow, cheating on each other despite maintaining pandemic social distancing. In this second installment, Ferrell and Fallon are still brothers (Ferrell plays three different ones at last count), while Wiig is their shared love interest who—again, somehow—announces this week that she’s Zoom-pregnant. But . . . whose baby is it?
Enter Dr. DiNunzio, the suspiciously French-accented OB-GYN, who pops in on his own teleconferencing window to ostentatiously announce just who the father is. (Although not how.) Essayed by latest cast addition and guy presumably bored at home and who owns his own stethoscope, Matthew McConaughey, the doctor quickly gets into the old soap opera spirit with some shocking, gasp-inducing revelations of his own (he’s not only a baby doctor, but was once a baby doctor, if you follow), kicking the already wig, scarf, and face-tossable beverage shenanigans into melodramatic daytime/late-night overdrive. Essentially, the whole goof-around enterprise is a classic SNL TV parody sketch (think The Californians), in that it’s got one central joke, some lame ideas (toilet paper gags are proving the rubber chicken of pandemic comedy), and enough frantically funny mugging from unavoidably funny performers to make the thing work just well enough. Also, for those missing that early 2000s Saturday Night Live vibe, be assured that 2020 Jimmy Fallon still can’t keep his shit together on camera for four minutes.