Saturday Night Live season 49 finale: Jake Gyllenhaal hosts a wobbly sendoff

We did it, folks. Another season of Saturday Night Live has officially come to an end, with some real highs (Ryan Gosling! Kristen Wiig! Adam Driver!) and some woeful lows (two words: Shane Gillis).

And for this final edition—before that much-ballyhooed 50th season kicks off later this fall—Jake Gyllenhaal was back in Studio 8H for his third go at hosting, this time in promotion of his recent Road House remake for Prime Video and the upcoming Presumed Innocent miniseries for Apple TV+. (Pop Tinkerbell Sabrina Carpenter was also on-hand for the finale, making her musical-guest debut with that caffeinated earworm “Espresso.”)

Gyllenhaal came in with a good deal of “Don’t make me sing!” energy and enthusiasm, but, as has so often been the case with this season’s hosts, the actor got saddled with subpar writing that included poor remakes of better bits and revivals of sketches that didn’t need recurrence. All in all, it ends up a pitchy swan song for season 49.

Cold open: Done with Donnie

Our hopes were dashed with Ego Nwodim tweeted out on Saturday afternoon: “Devastated to announce I will not be playing Rep. Jasmine Crockett tonight. Please respect my privacy as I grieve.” Alas, we wouldn’t get to see the castmate take on the Congresswoman’s heated head-to-head with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from last Thursday’s tense House Committee meeting.

Instead, we got yet another one of James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump appearances, this time with the former POTUS speaking at the barricades of a Manhattan courthouse. JAJ’s impersonation is still a standout, but this didn’t offer up anything new about the contentious politician, who trotted out his picks for VP, including Heidi Gardner’s Kristi Noem (“She shot a dog, which you really can’t do…but on the other hand, she shot a dog, which is pretty awesome”) and Michael Longfellow’s Hannibal Lector, who Trump eventually ruled out because “he’s giving me Pence vibes.”

Opening monologue: He’s working late, ‘cuz he’s a singer

Jakey G. was busy sanging this episode, from that Ziegfeld Follies-esque “Beautiful Girls” bit to his opening monologue, which saw the actor warble through his feelings about hosting the season 49 finale, rather than the seemingly more prestigious season 50 premiere.

After lamenting about all of the people SNL asked to host before him (“Pedro Pascal but he wasn’t around / Zendaya said no ’cause she’d be out of town”), Gyllenhaal was joined by Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson, Punkie Johnson and Devon Walker in soulful cardigans to perform a parody of Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.” “We did a lot of sketches this year and most of them were fine,” belted Kenan. “It’s definitely one of the top 48 seasons, season 49!” That about sums things up.

The night’s best use of the production design budget:

A well-cast Scooby Gang—Mikey Day as Shaggy, Sarah Sherman as Velma, Gyllenhaal as Fred and Sabrina Carpenter as Daphne, alongside a CGI Scooby Doo—was busy doing what the Scooby Gang does best: solving a mystery. Except the group’s usual villain demasking took a gory turn when the bad guy’s entire face came flying off. The punchline was little more than cartoonish shrieking, but the whole thing looked a hell of a lot better than it sounded.

The most needless recurring sketch of the night:

Sure, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, yada yada yada, but if the show is going to bring back previously done concepts, we appreciate when there’s a new angle or twist to the bit.

Alas, this week’s roast on Southwest Airlines is pretty much a copy-and-paste of that Spectrum-focused sketch from the Kieran Culkin edition back in season 47, though the Culkin version was spikier in humor and the Bowen Yang reveal at the end more hilariously dramatic. In fact, the whole scenario would’ve been funnier last night had the Succession star cameoed as his character still trying to cancel his cable provider all these years later.

Weekend Update: the most brutal joke-swap yet?

As has now become tradition, “Weekend Update” co-hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che decided to celebrate the final episode of the season with their annual joke-swap, a custom that sees the anchors trade “fun jokes, almost supportive jokes that would never ruin our summer or our career.”

That is, until Che brought out an actual female rabbi to listen in while Jost winced through jibes about pro-Palestinian protestors and Harvey Weinstein victims. There were some good blows on each side—Colin forcing Michael to spark a feud with Kendrick Lamar; Che having Jost publicly diss his wife Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in Her (“I’ve never bothered to watch, because without that body, what’s the point of listening?”)—but the second that puppet came out, we were cringing right along with Colin.

The best sketch of the night:

There are few things we love more than character actors, so imagine our delight when we got a whole sketch devoted to those performers “whose faces you can remember but names you cannot,” like Stephen Root, Judy Greer and “the shockingly versatile” Michael Stuhlbarg.

Following an awful string of violent NYC attacks on actors like Stuhlbarg, Steve Buscemi and Rick Moranis, Gyllenhaal’s NYPD police sergeant hosted a press conference to warn those who’ve ever played “a girlfriend on Seinfeld” or “a boyfriend on Sex and the City” or had “a three-episode arc on a TV show whose title is just letters.” The most tightly written bit of the night (“We’ve asked Paul Giammati to shelter in place”), the sketch ended with a fun Jon Hamm cameo: “I can’t get punched! Without this beautiful face, I’m just a tall guy with a perfect body.”

Stray observations

• Frankly, in terms of scheduling, we would have voted to have iconic cast member Maya Rudolph host the big finale—but then we wouldn’t have gotten that incredible Mother’s Day monologue.
• Sadly, we didn’t get a cute Barry Keoghan cameo to intro one of GF Sabrina Carpenter’s musical performances. However, we did get a special, suitably naughty SNL rewrite of her viral “Nonsense” outro: “He is 30 rock hard cuz I said ‘hi’ / My sense of humor is, but I’m not dry / SNL, I just came for the first time.”
• Since the last sketch didn’t end until 1:01am, the season’s final goodnights were a bit anticlimactically rushed, but it was nice to see them squeeze in a memorial card for Dabney Coleman, who hosted the show in season 13.
• Who do we think will be in the hosting rotation for season 50? Michael Keaton for Beetlejuice 2? Lady Gaga for Joker 2? Paul Mescal for Gladiator 2? We’re sensing a theme here.
• MVP of the season? We’re giving it to Marcello Hernández, but who was your SNL standout of season 49?