Michael Keaton returns to Saturday Night Live as a supporting player

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but Saturday Night Live, the popular late-night comedy-variety series, is actually turning 50—in this season, its 50th on NBC, and also next year, when it will actually have been on the air for half a century. (If only this could be expressed via some kind of one-note recurring character with an appropriate catchphrase! Oh, I just remembered one: simma down now!) With regard to its hosts, the sheer longevity of the show places it in a potentially strange position for those who are neither five-timer-club veterans (or aspirants) nor one-and-doners who are either now too famous, not nearly famous enough, or otherwise unavailable (death, jail, etc.) for a repeat performance. I doubt that at any point in the past five decades, Michael Keaton considered his occasional relationship with Saturday Night Live anything like an Up-documentary-series-style look over his long-term career, yet it is possible to read it that way. He hosted in 1982, as an up-and-coming comic actor; in 1992, shortly after his second (and best!) Batman movie won the summer box office; in 2015, following what probably should have been his Best Actor Oscar for Birdman; and now, nine years later, actually his shortest-ever hosting gap. Most will assume he’s running a victory lap for the smash-hit sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, though he also has a movie called Goodrich opening in semi-wide release this very weekend. (If releasing a legacy-sequel smash followed by a barely-promoted adult-aimed dramedy isn’t a 2024 career snapshot, what is?)

In other words, Keaton has checked into SNL about once a decade since his movie career began; that he skipped over the 2000s feels perfectly in sync with his relatively withdrawn presence in movies during that period. His periodic drop-ins underline the sense that maybe he could have actually joined the cast sometime in those early-’80s seasons; he did do stand-up as a young man, and his later SNL appearances indicate that maybe he likes playing character parts and Second Weirdo more than he yearns to star in ketches built around some idea of his movie-star persona. Hell, Betelgeuse isn’t ever really the lead in the Beetlejuice movies, no matter how much various cast members want to show off their affinity for the role. (Mikey Day and Andy Samberg basically did a different version of the monologue the show put together for Keaton’s previous appearance; back in 2015, Bobby Moynihan and Taran Killam did a song begging him to “play Batman” and “play Beetlejuice” with them.) In his leading-man days, Keaton specialized in playing guys who seemed sharp and cunning. Though he still plays leads today, he also makes a great supporting player because he can come across like a guy whose quicksilver thoughts will take him to another plane entirely.

So while Keaton’s presence in this episode was the kind of sidelong approach that inevitably prompts some viewers to say he was barely in it or disappeared for a long stretch, I have to assume that’s partially by choice. (I admit I also tend to assume anyone who talks about a host disappearing for a long stretch is usually just talking about how the host rarely appears on Weekend Update or during the songs. Those segments do, in fact, represent about a quarter of the show on any given episode.) Anyway, he did get his showcase in the final sketch as a customer at a Mexican restaurant briefly sharing a memory and a connection with the server played by Heidi Gardner, who reminds him of his long-lost love Beth. It was an ideal showcase for that Keaton thing, where his mind seems to be racing toward distraction. Just an oddball little piece of performance for him and Gardner, who so often plays women whose barely-buried emotions rise to the surface at the merest provocation.

Before that, well, it wasn’t a stellar evening of comedy-variety. Despite three or four decent sketches and two Billie Eilish songs, the whole thing kinda felt like support for big moments that never materialized.

What was on

If one of these sketches had been just a little more deftly surprising, rather than pretty much revealing their game immediately and then executing it well, this episode probably could have been knocked up half a notch in the grading department. Andrew Dismukes setting interracial marriage back several decades by magically writing and performing “Hey Soul Sister” several decades early is very funny. (Just ask Ego Nwodim, who almost broke several times.) Nwodim playing a conspiracy theorist cab driver whose game show may or may not be streaming on WhatsApp Live is also very funny, with satisfyingly interlocking parts: Nwodim doing a character, Keaton offering weirdo backup, Yang doing the normie reaction, and Sherman adding some extra by getting genuinely into the ridiculous questions at hand.

Really, though the most inventive bit of the might may have been a recurring feature: the TikTok Scroll; it also contends for the best recurring SNL sketch of the past five years, and I say this as someone without so much as a lurker TikTok account. There’s just something so joyfully format-breaking about the quick-hit style that nonetheless maintains an old-fashioned put-on-a-show by incorporating the entire cast or close to it… it’s the rare recurring piece they could do twice as often and still have me delighted by it, though maybe the fact that it averages about once a year is part of what makes it work so well. Chloe Fineman perpetually seems like an anchor of the scroll – I get the sense she and Bowen Yang are the show’s digital-culture whisperers – but it’s also so elastic that it can accommodate guest stars, political micro-bits, impressions, genre parodies, dopey meme shout-outs, and random nonsense. If real TikTok was like this (by which I mean, populated near-exclusively by SNL people), maybe I’d be as addicted as the unseen POV characters in these sketches.

What was off

I appreciate the characterization work that goes into Mikey Day and Heidi Gardner playing a couple of boundlessly enthusiastic Shop TV hosts who try to incorporate their growing horror at the visual innuendo of what their guest is selling into the broadcast; they got the accents going, they have to keep their dialogue going back and forth, they add a little intro with their over-it camera man dressed as a Minion… but it’s all in service of such a dopey joke for Keaton, and one they’ve done before with other hosts. Similarly, Day jumped to the other side of the “hey stop doing that, man!” formula to play a movement-coached Michael Myers in “Halloween Rises,” and he put his back into it. But it’s still just a movie-set sketch where someone does it wrong and the guy calls cut and blah blah blah, you know? Maybe it was the prominent placement both of these sketches had, one as the lead-off and one as the de facto anchor of the final half-hour, or the time they took up, but they felt like a drag on the whole show.

Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime time)

Take a bow, Sarah Sherman! She returned to Update for a funny Victoria’s Secret commentary that managed to stay on topic, still zing Jost, and also get super gross. Then she jumped into “Think About It” with the perfect normie zeal.

Next time

John Mulaney and Chappell Roan give everyone on the internet ample opportunity to be super cool and normal!

Stray observations

• • Without much fuss, and still perhaps one or two too many cutaways, that Kamala Harris interview spoof might have quietly been the best political cold open so far this season. A low-stakes competition, to be sure, but at least it felt like a sketch and not a walk-on parade.
• • Please Don’t Destroy is back! They also never went anywhere, but they’re back on-camera with a video that gets them out of their office. I generally prefer their live sketches to their video pieces, and indeed, their skydiving bit seems like it could have been a live sketch at a different pace. That said, if the idea is to do four or five PDD videos this season, and have them venture into further-flung locales than “in the office, screaming,” that’s fine!
• • It’s the ’90s, Colin. Maybe if Michael Che says that another two or three times per Update it’ll get really, really funny, because, you see, it is not the ’90s. If Jost has become faux-exasperated company man, the past year or two has seen Che alternate between employee gathering the energy to finally quit and smug lifer. Maybe having the same people do Update for a decade isn’t a great idea?!
• • Emil Wakim had the standard do-some-stand-up-at-the-desk introductory piece, but he was funny and got in a good ad-lib when one of his jokes died.
• • This is a stray observation about Goodrich, a movie I have seen: Single-season SNL player Chloe Troast has a single scene as a gal who sells Keaton a ticket to a live show at a jazz club. I was happy to see her.
• • Last time Keaton hosted, the musical guest was Carly Rae Jepsen, in an attempt to create some kind of Jesse hypnosis. (The Paper is one of my favorite movies.)
• • Where the hell was…? This is the part of the recap where I ask where the hell a particular cast member was. The TikTok feature sort of invalidates that because it almost always includes everyone. But it’s a little odd that TikTokker Jane Wickline was in so little of an episode that featured a TikTok sketch.