Dakota Johnson Is Too Placid To Bring SNL to a Boil

In the best sketch of a so-so Saturday Night Live, second-time host Dakota Johnson got into a verbal sparring match with the Please Don’t Destroy guys. Amidst the immediate and unexpected hostilities, one of the writing-performing trio deadpan mocks the Madame Web star’s  signature “whispering in monotone” delivery. Now, I get that the PDD boys cooked up their little fake feud with Johnson’s participation and all, but it’s a prime example of what Al Franken called “kidding on the square,” where the audience’s reaction rises and falls the closer each jab lands to its target.

And Johnson isn’t a bad actress. (She killed it in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake and I can’t be the only one still smarting at the too-early loss of Ben and Kate, right? Anyone?). She’s not even a bad SNL host, even if, yeah, she is resolutely low key in a format that sort of needs visible engagement. (Her live sketches almost universally trudged along on spongy tires.) Johnson might me a head-scratching choice for a Marvel hero (especially one virtually nobody knows anything about), but her actorly poise lends a uniquely offputting quality to her roles tonight, which were almost universally pitched for mild discomfort.

Her monologue got crowded out with a couple of inveterate hambones (musical guest Justin Timberlake and a visiting from downstairs Jimmy Fallon), leaving Johnson to throw to a couple of film clips, mainly. The shot of her from the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary show disses in-attendance Donald Trump for “most powerful person in the world” and seat mate Taylor Swift, while seeing the 7-year-old Johnson rolling her eyes at dad Don on a red carpet for Nash Bridges sort of set the tone for Dakota’s whole vibe. She also mocks her own penchant for giving unsatisfying interviews (“I say stuff and they write it down and it’s really unfair”), which, again, is some kidding on the square.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: Sort of jumped the gun here, but the Please Don’t Destroy guys came in with their strongest film of the season, as Ben, Martin, and John meet their match in the completely unimpressed Johnson. Things escalate quickly and acidly, as host and writers square off and launch unfailing on-target put-downs at each other, with the unflappable Johnson’s underplaying getting a much better showcase than any of her live sketches on the night. Setting the tone with a dismissive giggle at the guys pitch that one of them would play her boyfriend (“What is it, a Make-A-Wish thing? Or brain damage?”), things get personal. Ben’s previously mentioned jab at Johnson’s delivery is volleyed back with Dakota dubbing the team “The Lonelier Island.” (Which is so good, I’m envious.)

Even the combatants’ one moment of truce leaves someone wounded, as Ben is left out of the nepo baby truce ritual. (Martin and John being sons of former Saturday Night Live writers Tim Herlihy and Steve Higgins, respectively.) That Dakota only gets roles Aubrey Plaza turns down wars with the guys looking like “the last three men a lesbian ever sleeps with,” which breaks John. (He threatens to sabotage the host’s cue cards so she’ll drop the N-word during her monologue.) It’s catty, funny, and the sort of knowing backstage weirdness the PDD guys have been best at, leaving everyone involved looking good.

The Worst: Look to the recurring sketch report for the actual bottom of this particular half-empty barrel. Lacking that, Johnson’s wonted lack of snap really took the wind out of the book club sketch. Airily luring her confused friend group into asking why she hadn’t read that week’s book, Johnson draws out her character’s big news (she is pitching a product on Shark Tank) with a superior languorousness enough to provoke viewer impatience. (Which, to be fair, is partly a directing problem.) I just wanted to shake a jar of pennies to get Johnson moving. Regardless, the sketch hinged on a decently understated premise that benefitted from some patience, as her can’t-miss wordy t-shirt slogan turns out to strike at the very heart of the group’s collective, barely concealed desperation. Party host Heidi Gardner’s breakdown upon the shirt’s advice coming true (basically, it asserts that people should take every “I’m fine” as signal to just move on without followup questions) is a fine payoff, even if the drop-bys from sharks Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran do nothing whatsoever to juice up the laughs.

The Rest: Overall, this was a pleasant enough night, although 2024 Saturday Night Live could use the shot of energy Ayo Edebiri should bring next week. (Weirdly, having naturally funny people host a live comedy show is a good thing.) The family reunion restaurant sketch was another hampered by the host’s deliberateness, plus it could have used a more elaborate escalation. But it made me chuckle, as first Sarah Sherman then Dakota Johnson’s servers make hash out of a bewildered family’s dinner orders. There’s a fun idea here that needed more energetically loopy performances (get me my jar of pennies again), but the specifics of the increasingly wrong orders are solid, as straightforward items (shrimp scampi, a sandwich, chicken nuggets for the child) are transmuted into things like “Advil on the rocks, a table’s worth of “chicken fongers” (repeated by both servers), and a “mango-flavored Juul pod for the little guy.” Kenan jolts things awake as usual, his chef seemingly afflicted by the same aphasia as the rest of the staff (scampi becomes “shrampy skimpy” and then “Scooby shampooey”). Again, not a terrible ending, with the relenting Sherman appearing to finally write down the orders but only turning out to have sketched mom Molly Kearney. But, man, the pacing was sluggish.

The cold open ditched politics (which is okay with me, considering), instead focusing on tomorrow’s AFC championship football matchup and seeing the assembled jockish announcers and commentators all succumbing on-air to collective macho malaise over the looming lack of the sport for the foreseeable future. The real-life impressions aren’t anything special (James Austin Johnson does his usual yeoman work as the crisply businesslike Jim Nance), but there’s a lovely silliness to the boys’ confessions of bereft post-seasonal depression, coupled with a few nice side-trips to outright panic. (“Oh Jesus, we’re doomed!,” Mikey Day’s Bill Cowher moans at the prospect of just hanging out with his male friends on Sundays with nothing to talk about.) Kenan’s James Brown gets a laugh by bemoaning the fact that “no live TV” is worth a damn other than NFL games, they all get irate that the only other show they care about (Blue Bloods) is being replaced by So Help Me Todd, and the group’s auto-tuned farewell football song sums up the sketch’s portrait of American maleness with variety.

The home movies filmed piece is a nice buildup to an unexpected (yet expected) payoff which I liked well enough. Andrew Dismukes finds his aging parents home movies and pops them in for some feel-good family viewing, so the swerve to the final VHS tape about the day beaming dad Mikey Day found out he was going to be a father turning out to be the younger couple’s appearance on a Maury-style “you are not the father” trash TV segment allows Dismukes to goggle with amusing mortification. Day and Johnson (and Marcello Hernandez’s bird-flipping co-worker of the unwed new mom Johnson) are on-point as the sort of terrible, horrible trash monsters who’d appear on such a program, while the grey-haired older versions only nod and smile appreciatively alongside their shocked son. (Sarah Sherman’s wheelchair-bound granny was, it turns out, also sleeping with Hernandez’s randy Spooky.) The twist that Spooky is now granny’s new nurse (and clearly Dismukes’ real father) works, as does the long-ago reveal of just why Day’s stately old dad walks with a cane (Spooky tossed him against the TV studio wall). Plus, Johnson’s remove is better suited to the pre-tapes.

Weekend Update update

Jost and Che aren’t going away, no matter what the pre New Years rumors might say. Or have said. (I went with the rhyme, so sue me.) I’m fine with it—the duo has worked up a nice soft-shoe routine born of baiting each other (or mainly Jost) and seeing who can out-smart aleck each other for audience outrage points. Che usually comes out on top in that last category and he does tonight, his loose ad libbing expressing admiration for the crowd’s tacit approval of his signature cheek. A joke about the punishment of a sexual harasser soccer coach got the delayed recognition he was patient enough to wait for, while referring to Oppenheimer as the prequel to fellow Oscar nominee Godzilla Minus One was a similarly dark thinker that worked.

Jost was no slouch, taking a few mid-strength shots at recently much-poorer adjudicated rapist and defamer Trump’s 83 million dollar judgment against (even O.J. only lost 33 million) and going to the trusty video clip well to highlight some more of the increasingly makeup-sweaty and incoherent Republican candidate’s sundowning. Che matched him with a clip of failed Florida candidate Ron DeSantis’ recent proclamation that “only the most worthless Republican in America” would endorse Donald Trump. (Ron DeSantis recently endorsed Donald Trump.) Sometimes it’s ice-coldest to let them hang themselves on live national TV with their own words.

Bowen Yang didn’t quite create a franchise with Ethan Oscars, the indeterminately aged movie enthusiast who’s just come out with his own cinematic awards show, The Ethans. The characterization is good enough, with the self-obsessed fan attaching his nominees to how well he relates to the movies at hand (the In Memorium is blank since he didn’t personally know anyone who died this year), but I don’t know how much more Ethan Oscars we need going forward.

Better was Heidi Gardner’s tarot reading psychic Jan Janby, who’s unerring accurate predictions all seemingly foretell embarrassing misfortunes for Che, who plays along gamely. (This would usually be a Jost-centric takedown, according to Update tradition.) Apparently, Che’s cards (one called “The Newsman” looks eerily like him) is broke from his OnlyFans habit, is headed for career meltdown with his upcoming stand-up special, and is being wedding catfished by one Colin Jost. Gardner’s singsong British prognosticator is a hoot, enticing Che to kiss then lick her cards for luck (making fun of his “strange little tongue”) and delighting in baiting the usual top dog. Heidi is good on Update, what can I say.

Political Comedy Report

Confined exclusively to Weekend Update tonight, albeit marginally as per usual. I can’t really complain, since my exasperated disappointment the last few seasons has come down to “either do politics or don’t.” Seems like Saturday Night Live is largely deciding “don’t.”

Recurring Sketch Report

I’m so gullibly hopeful that I thought the fakeout with Jimmy Fallon coming out in full Barry Gibb getup during the monologue (only to embarrassedly slink away when Timberlake’s pitch to dust off old sketches is brushed away by the unimpressed Johnson) meant the show understood. Let Jimmy join his old giggle-buddy, wear a costume, and bug off—that sort of gag. When they actually did the Barry Gibb Talk Show (last seen in 2013), I literally ground my molars. Look, I think the first iteration of this sketch was out-of-nowhere hilarious, the conception of the former Bee Gees frontman as high-pitched alpha male bully and Timberlake as the singularly uncommunicative Robin leaving me in almost as many stitches as the breaking-prone central duo. But, like all but the rarest recurring bits, familiarity bred hammy ennui, and the thud of this one actually living past the monologue tease to actually take up nearly seven interminable minutes really bummed me out. The audience’s recognition applause died pretty quickly too, with none of the clearly winded Fallon’s Gibbsian insults coming off neither specially sharp nor funny. (Having Kenan kitted out as always-provocative commentator Ellie Mystal only so Gibb can make fun of his admittedly singular appearance is nearly dumb enough to work.) The world turned on Timberlake and Fallon at around the same time and the thinking that that same world was clamoring for this relic once more is just plain incorrect.

The Big Dumb Cups conceit brought back the exact same jokes as its Big Dumb Hats forebear—that the latest supposed status symbol is confined to a subset of female influencer vapidity. It’s equal parts hoary prop work (Dakota Johnson’s travel mug keeps getting comically bigger between shots, while Chloe Fineman’s becomes pregnant with itself somehow) and sort-of pointed punching down at the women who, the sketch contends, view lugging around a heavy branded metal drinking vessel as the thing to complement their superficially swoony lifestyle. According to the sketch, these Stanley mugs (which have inexplicably caused a real world epidemic of mug-snatching) go great with kids named Braxton, Brixton, Brownstone, and Li’l Stanley, and their bacteria-collecting metal volume is just right for an entire bottle of that mass market red wine with the puzzlingly unassuming name. Attempts at bringing the weird are meh (Heidi’s mug transforms into a fuzzy Uggs model, Chloe’s boots become fashioned from bisected mugs), and maybe I’m just not clued into the wavelength of the writers who thought this one really gave it to those blonde women I’m supposed to lump together for some reason.

Not Ready For Prime Time Power Rankings

There was sort of a, I’m gonna call it Johnsonian torpor infecting much of the cast tonight. As far as airtime, Sarah Sherman got a couple of larger roles, while Michael Longfellow finally got into multiple sketches on the same night. But it was Heidi’s show, with a solid Update turn to her credit along with some plum ensemble work.

Another good week for Devon, who anchored the 10-to-one sketch with Thompsonian aplomb (since I’m making up words), and bookended with a spot in the cold open. Bowen got his, while Kenan was Kenan, thankfully.

Not much for Punkie, Ego, Troast—gotta make space for those up-and-comers Fallon and Timberlake. (Whose two numbers from would-be comeback album have been getting, um, colorful feedback elsewhere.)

10-To-One Report

I wanted to like Devon Walker’s new character a bit more than I actually did. I’m here for the talented featured player’s gathering breakout on the show, and his lisping weirdo of an airline lost and found attendant edged right up to being truly memorable—at least until Kenan swooped in to effortlessly swipe the sketch out from under him by doing the same thing better. There’s no shame in getting overshadowed by one of the best to ever do it, but up until then, I was rooting for Devon’s new character (I could practically hear keyboards tapping out a followup) even if this outsized characterization never quite achieved liftoff. Johnson—wait for it—underplayed hesitantly as the irritated passenger vainly attempting to prove that the bag in question is hers by answering the eccentrically officious Walker’s probing questions about the contents of her diary and just why she needs extra strength laxatives for “unusual diarrhea.” Michael Longfellow has a very Michael Longfellow deadpan line in response to the disillusioning contents of Johnson’s duffle, and Kenan and Devon eventually make a fun little team as the identically odd father and son baggage handlers. In all, it’s just enough of a weird doodle to earn a place in the final spot.

Parting shots

What the hell was Dave Chappelle doing in the goodnights? My evolving disappointment with the undeniably influential stand-up’s soured old man trans-bashing aside, was he just hanging out at Rockefeller Center? (He and Fallon got all huggy.) Regardless, there was a mini-revolt among staffers last time he hosted, and it can’t have been a delight for non-binary featured player Molly Kearney, who was stationed nowhere near the guy.

Fun callback to Johnson’s outrage-inducing ISIS sketch from her last time hosting in the airport sketch.

“A foot in the door and so much more” is the nepo baby’s mantra.

Johnson’s “finish him” Workaholics jab to end the Please Don’t Destroy duel is a fatality.

Update finally did a Gaza joke, although Che’s line about the CIA being the Draymond Green of appointed Middle East peace mediators is a long way to go for not much.

Next week’s Saturday Night Live: As mentioned, recent Golden Globes winner Ayo Edebiri hosts alongside musical guest Jennifer Lopez.