Saturday Night Live kicks off season 50 with a low-key, uneven episode

There is a lot that is supposed to happen in the 50th season of Saturday Night Live: a series of retrospectives, a big anniversary special in February, and some beloved cast members and past hosts coming back for new appearances, whether hosting or in cameos. Of course, that last thing happens just about every season, increasingly so as the show accumulates a larger index of both, and so far, it looks as if season 50 will be pretty typical in that respect. Though the host lineup only includes one alumni with John Mulaney scheduled in a few weeks, the political cold open of the season premiere crammed in no fewer than three former cast members, plus a bonus Jim Gaffigan. 

The season is looking typical in other respects, too. There were rumors a few years back that Lorne Michaels wanted the then-current cast to all stick around at least through season 50 and/or was hoping to parlay that familiarity into some kind of quasi all-star season. Instead, performers continued to cycle in and out as usual—including Chloe Troast, who was unceremoniously (and foolishly!) dismissed this summer following a promising freshman season—and the only real ongoing cast-related legacy for this season is already familiar: the continuously record-breaking runs of Kenan Thompson as a main cast member and the duo of Colin Jost and Michael Che overstaying their welcome at the Weekend Update desk. (Jost is yet another staffer who semi-recently made noise about leaving; he casually speculated in his 2020 memoir that he’s probably got another season or so in him. This is his fifth season since that publication.) It’s not even likely to be the final season for Michaels, who once expressed that he’d hang it up after season 50 and has more recently walked that idea back. He’s now free to bask in the glow of his de facto biopic Saturday Night, now playing in select cities before expanding in the coming weeks, without feeling like he’s watching his own retirement party. 

None of this should be especially surprising. There were no major format shifts or cast overhauls to celebrate the 15th, 25th, or 40th seasons (the other rounds that warranted anniversary specials). But there will always be some viewers who hunger for a less regimented, less formulaic SNL. People who are, in other words, always waiting for the second episode of that unpredictable free-for-all promised by the first episode so fancifully dramatized in the new movie: a show that could include multiple musical guests, stand-up segments, short films, super-short sketches, puppetry, unannounced cast changes, and as many as three or four commercial parodies in a single episode. The season-50 premiere was emphatically not that, was never going to be that, and doesn’t need to be that. Within the history of the show, however, it was arguably a semi-throwback in that it lacked a lot of recent features (music videos, Please Don’t Destroy/Digital Short pieces, other pre-tapes), including just one traditional fake-ad filmed piece. The rest of the sketches were familiar stuff like game-show parodies, talk-show parodies, and low-hanging-fruit political bits. 

And look, folks, there was a little bit of a class-reunion charge to that 15-minute barely-satirical political cold open, even if it took up nearly a quarter of the episode’s actual airtime. No, Gaffigan doesn’t have a particular relationship with the show to justify his presence, but he’s undeniably got the right energy to play VP candidate Tim Walz. And Maya Rudoloh’s Kamala Harris was a foregone conclusion, and she’s got the voice down. Andy Samberg as Harris’ sweetly dorky husband Doug Emhoff was more of a gimmick, but it’s not like he snatched a plum role away from a regular. And Joe Biden has come to seem like such a burden of an impression (not to mention a lame duck of one) that it’s hard to imagine anyone minded Dana Carvey stepping in to work a little of his old “find a couple of vocal hooks to yank over and over” magic. 

Even I, someone who held Carvey in considerably higher esteem as a 12-year-old viewer than as a [redacted] one, laughed out loud the first time he perfectly interrupted his own “guess what?” with “and by the way.” (It’s really the “and” that sells it.) It’s not at all biting or insightful, simply selling the “Biden is old” joke with a little more finesse than the various comics who have tried their hand at it in the past. (Has Biden passed George W. Bush to become the president whose impressionist has shifted the greatest number of times?) But I think this now counts as retro charm, which in turn felt genuinely surprising in the context of the cold open. So often these are a dreary parade of guest stars trudging through a week, a month, or, in this case, a summer’s worth of impossible catch-up. Is this how people who like endless cameos feel all the time?!

Regardless, the rest of the episode had less of that charm or surprise. This wasn’t a pleasantly unceremonious 50th season opener that only viewers bitter over the show’s established format would fail to enjoy. It was a genuinely disappointing episode. You can’t blame host Jean Smart, even if her timing and card-reading fell off-rhythm a few times; it’s not as if some massive reputation or seeming ego was looming over the proceedings. In fact, she was a refreshing choice for a kickoff host: an experienced, familiar actor whose career stretches back nearly as far as Saturday Night Live itself who has found new recognition as the star of Hacks, a show about comedy, no less!

Given all that, the premiere had all the hallmarks of a relatively low-key, uneven but largely solid, no-fuss episode—except the actual laughs. In that sense, season 50 is off to a very SNL start. 

So let’s get further into it. 

What was on

Out of five proper sketches and one pre-tape, only the Spirit Halloween ad really deserves a spot here. It’s not exactly packed with revelations, but the framing of Spirit Halloween bragging about bringing economically devastated communities together was a good one. 

I’ll also give a pity-shout-out to that final sketch of the night about the Real Housewives of Santa Fe, even (or especially?!) if the whole joke was just Andrew Dismukes becoming increasingly dismayed by the lack of a place to set multiple trays of sizzling-hot fajitas. It probably needed more physical comedy to work, or at least a raucous crowd reaction they may have been expecting but didn’t get, but I’ll say this: I liked it more than the crowd did. Any sketch with Dismukes bumping up against Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim, and Chloe Fineman yelling at each other is bound to work at least moderately well for me.

What was off

Yeesh. Let’s just brush past the “$100,000 Pyramid” post-summer topical-joke clearinghouse (at least the chimp puppet was funny?) and talk about Smart’s two big showcase sketches, which shared a strange problem. In one, she played a romance novelist charged with writing a math textbook, whose word problems were therefore inappropriate and eventually nonsensical. In another, she played a more serious dramatic actor originally miscast on I Love Lucy. The premise is more or less the same: Someone taking the “wrong” approach to a familiar job. And in both cases, the explanation feels sweatier and wobblier than necessary. I’m not a comedy writer, so I’ll certainly not endeavor to figure out how these premises might have been explained more quickly, concisely, or convincingly. But it seems especially important to get there faster and easier when your central performer is, of late, more of a character actor than an experienced sketched comedian. It was hard for either sketch to recover with escalation, though “Textbook Writer” made a decent try by making the author’s romance prose nuttier and its math content even more questionable as it went on. But ultimately, it’s still just a sketch where people read word problems, and it made the subsequent Lucy sketch look worse for not even reaching those heights.

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

This might sound lazy, but I think it has to be Kenan this week, just for the number of laughs he got in sketches that mostly didn’t work, namely the $100,000 Pyramid and the romance novelist bits. I will say, Devon Walker showed more energy in the game-show sketch and in his Weekend Update appearance than he did for much of last season. He made an endearingly dopey Eric Adams, but as a New Yorker it’s hard not to remember that Chris Redd captured the man’s essence more accurately when he impersonated him in back in 2022. 

Next time

Nate Bargatze tries to pull a Mulaney-speed turnaround by hosting twice in under 12 months!

Stray observations

• • Hi, I’m Jesse, and I’ll be your SNL recapper this season. Usually I write about movies here at The A.V. Club. But I’ve been watching SNL regularly for more than three decades at this point, I often enjoy it more than anything else on TV, and I have experience loving allegedly popular things lots of people nonetheless think are very stupid. I hope to take on the mantle of the great Dennis Perkins with honor! 
• • Where the hell was…? Here’s the part of the recap where I ask where the hell a particular cast member was. Where the hell was Sarah Sherman?
• • Actually, here’s an answer: She played Troye Sivan after famously(?) being haunted by the Troye Sivan Sleep Demon last year. She may be the first SNL cast member to play both the regular version of a celebrity and the victim of that celebrity’s sleep-demon haunting.
• • The once and future Sarah Squirm was also spotted driving a bus in those new opening credits? No joke, that may have been my favorite part of the episode. Chloe Fineman may not have had much to do in the episode besides play Hawk Tuah, but I saw Megalopolis tonight and then saw her dancing in the subway in the new opening credits, so it felt like a very Chloe Fineman evening regardless.
• • Between merging baby hippo Moo Deng with the plight of Chappell Roan and hosting a talk show as Charli XCX, this was a big week for Bowen’s pop fandom. The Moo Deng/Chappell mash-up made me laugh in an otherwise routine Weekend Update. I’m not fully sold on his Charli XCX, though. Yang is hilarious, but his impressions are funny mainly because you can hear his own-voice commentary overlaid on whoever he’s nominally imitating, and I think in this case I’d rather see someone just actually imitate Charli.
• • As far as Jelly Roll’s music goes, I really like Charli XCX. (Actually, he was fine. He’s just not really my thing.)