In her mostly positive review of last year’s rom-com Anyone But You, Paste‘s Brianna Zigler gently suggests that comedy might not be Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney’s bag. After her first Saturday Night Live hosting gig, I’m going to have to go ahead and agree. The episode certainly gave the game Sweeney plenty of airtime to prove herself, but overall, the actor came off as one of those hosts who was capable at everything and excellent in nothing. Sweeney took a shot at her recent mega-flop Madame Web in her pretty dull monologue, and I’ll put her in the SNL hosting camp of co-star Dakota Johnson on that score, even if Johnson had at least one genuinely funny bit. (Destroying the Please Don’t Destroy guys, for the record.)
It’s not that SNL can’t find a comedy diamond amongst the stretches of beautiful movie stars it has to choose from. One of the show’s most enduring joys is finding out that the smiling hunk/hunkette gracing movie screens is actually a secret goofball. But sometimes, they’re just not cut out for sketch comedy. It happens. Sketch is one of the weirdest talents out there, with a degree of difficulty even tougher than it looks. And live sketch comedy on Saturday Night Live has humbled some of the greatest thesiapns of multiple generations. This is a long way to say that Sydney Sweeney on SNL was a dud.
I have to confess that Sweeney is one of those young actors I’ve somehow missed out on. I’m mostly ashamed at not having watched The White Lotus (yet), with Euphoria and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood right behind. (Sue me: the Robert Blake redemption arc and the Bruce Lee-bashing keep bumping Tarantino’s latest down my list.) Here, Sweeney was sort of in the Jacob Elordi camp—very attractive movie star with no conspicuous comic chops whatsover that Saturday Night Live clearly struggled to nudge into comic gear.
The Best and the Rest
The Best: Woof. Sadly, that does not refer to the so-timely Air Bud sketch (which starred a very good boy), but to the prospect of singling out one of tonight’s slate of sketches as the “best” of anything. The Airbnb filmed piece late in the show (also not getting best-of) is introduced with the line, “Bland, generic, downright uninviting.” Yup.
The Worst: Not to get all thematic, but same goes here. Nothing truly stank tonight, it was more a lukewarm beige morass of half-chuckles and uninspired performances all around. Oatmeal. Tonight’s show was oatmeal.
The Rest: Since it did star that very good boy (or girl), the Air Bud sketch showed off how Saturday Night Live was going to use its host. Playing a pretty, stuck up cheerleader, complete with revealing costume, Sweeney was the high school’s queen bee who glommed onto the new addition to the basketball team, a recent star transfer who won the big game even though the opposing coach raised a stink. Luckily, there was nothing explicitly in the rulebook about a dog playing basketball, and you get the central joke of a 27-year old movie that has [checks Wikipedia] somehow spawned 13 sequels. (Look, on a night like this, I Google stuff.) SNL loves to put a dog onscreen and see what happens, counting on audience dog-love to paper over the inevitably thin premise with some “awwww”s. (Here, the good boy eats a sandwich on camera.) And since there’s precious little else to talk about with this one, I’ll just go off on a little rant.
Twice during this sketch, cast members are tasked with explaining to us (the presumably slow audience members in the back) that Sweeney’s cheerleader is only coming on to Bud because she’s desperate to be attached to the most popular boy (or male dog) in school. We know that. It’s not hard. We (and he) should all be grateful that usual suspect Mikey Day wasn’t delivering the unnecessary tutorial, but it’s a joke structure that the show just can’t shake, and it’s deadening. There are sketch shows that allow us to accept the a premise and live in it, trusting us to follow the internal logic of the joke without holding our hands like timid third-graders on a field trip. See former SNL outcast Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave for gloriously successful proof (and an explanation of why Robinson never made it on SNL.) Oh, and there’s another good girl (or boy) at the end of the sketch, causing Sweeney’s suddenly jealous cheerleader to call a dog a slut and storm off.
Just because I like dogs, the courtroom show sketch featured a dog judge! With fake paws holding a gavel, even! Aww. Anyway, as with the Air Bud sketch, there were a few little original touches around the corners of a big, lumbering, labored premise. (The Judge Judy, etc. genre has spun out a show with 17 judges.) Ego presides, introducing all her wacky colleagues, all of which should have been a whole lot more wacky, or at least energetically presented. (Tonight’s show suffered from an almost total lack of coherence and commitment, leaving dead spots everywhere.) That the show’s needs should rope in various stereotypes as judges might have been something. (I enjoyed the intro of Kenan’s “sweet, simple pervert” judge, but that might just be due to his delivered judgement, “Maybe everybody should just kiss.”) And James Austin Johnson continues to pop in character roles, here matching Sweeney’s Southern white-trash vibe as the warring defendants/lovers. But man, this dragged even beyond the utter inessential nature of the whole enterprise. I’m on board with the idea that great sketches can be based on literally anything, but the trick is not to write your sketch down to the level of insignificance, but to find significance within the mundane. This sketch just points and laughs, too loudly and alone.
And let’s revisit commitment. The wedding sketch is the sort of loud, brash character bit the show traditionally loves, giving as it does cast members an opportunity to go big with their favorite ethnic/cultural stereotype. (Hey, sketch deals in broad strokes.) Here, Sweeney and Sarah Sherman are a pair of New York-ish(?) makeup artists whose pre-wedding efforts on behalf of blushing bride Heidi Gardner are put on the back burner by a note from the groom stating that the wedding is off. The joke (and here I’m being Saturday Night Live in explaining the hell out things) is that the makeup people really want to sympathize, but that they need to get paid, get a good Yelp review, etc., before they go. Again, nothing too promising on the surface, but it’s the sort of index card premise that allows for performers to really go for it, character-wise. Sherman and Sweeney try, but, is this thing sluggish. The duo’s catchphrase is an abashed, stereo “Shoot,” which emerges in this case like an abashed afterthought rather than the punchy interjection it should be. And there’s an abrupt cut where Molly Kearney’s mother of the bride is revealed cuddling her bereft daughter in sympathy so inexplicably dead that I’m guessing someone missed a line or a cue. (Or a camera move—direction has been noticeably flat this season, too.) The only odd line that made me perk up was Sherman asking if there was any shellfish in the cheesecake she’s stuffing in her mouth, but even that led to a wet fizzle of an ending.
Like with Elordi, SNL paid homage to its host’s physical traits in the Hooters sketch. (Ugh, even typing “Hooters sketch” in 2024 makes me tired.) Stuffed into the boobie-wing chain’s signature sexual harassment uniform, new hire Sweeney is very pretty, much to the chagrin of her supposedly less-endowed coworkers (including Bowen Yang’s Dennis). Raking in tens of thousands of dollars in tips thanks to being more attractive, Sweeney attempts to show that it’s her exceptional service and not her other attributes that net her so much cash, demonstrating instead that physical comedy is not her thing. (Andrew Dismukes chugging a pitcher of beer on camera comes off like Chaplin in contrast.) And that’s the joke, except for when JAJ emerges as the Hooters owl mascot to give a pep talk—and reaffirm that Sweeney is very attractive. Again, since I’m nothing but fair, I’ll say that Sweeney’s lament about her checkered employment history does include the line, “I was a crossing guard—thousands died.”
That Airbnb commercial would have taken the top spot tonight if I weren’t breaking format to make a pissy little point. Chloe Troast and Sweeney star as heteronymic spokespeople Chanel and Chanel, whose specialty is coaching renters how to transform their living spaces into the creepily generic, Home Goods-festooned blank spaces the rental app specializes in. From “politically ambiguous” wall art (“Lives Matter”), to the closet that ominously proclaims “Owner’s stuff, do not touch!,” to that one unsettling photo of the family that lives there, there are enough moderately amusing touches to get the sketch by. (Noting that, compared to hotels, their offerings’ “worse sheets and a camera in the toilet” might not be a selling point if Airbnb was doing product placement.) Troast is a good actor (she and James Austin Johnson are probably the best pure character people in the current cast), and it was the sort of above-average filmed piece that would add texture to a good episode. That it’s the best of this lot is not a good sign.
The “Bowen Yang is actually a straight ladies’ man” filmed bit was on the same level, despite the premise promising to let Yang loose more than he’s been allowed of late. Sweeney’s doomed crush on the openly gay Yang proves un-doomed by Heidi and Ego’s revelation that Yang is only gay for comedy, leading to the sort of backstage-at-SNL dramedy that, frankly, was a whole lot funnier when it was Leslie Jones and Kyle Mooney. Once more, the fringes are funnier, as when Sweeney endures Mikey Day’s pitch for a “Sydney Sweeney Todd” sketch, or Heidi and the heartbroken Sweeney’s immediate and furious response to Marcello Hernandez’s roses-toting attempt to swoop in and pick up the pieces. It was amusing enough, but the idea carried such hope that the so-so execution knocked it down.
Sticking to film, the Please Don’t Destroy Guys’ stuff hasn’t been as fresh this year as it was in their debut season, I’m sad to say. Maybe it’s just that—being big movies stars and all—their SNL backstage outcasts schtick doesn’t play as well. Regardless, this was another good, not great outing as the visiting Sweeney stumbles across the guys mourning the death of a friend and unwisely assumes they’re doing a bit just because the deceased name turns out to have been Reverend Buttcheek P. Rosenthal (middle initial standing for “Pagina”), who died after being kicked in the nuts by a mule while on roller skates before exploding after “skidooshing” off of a fat man’s belly at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The pileup of absurdity used to come a lot more frenetically (and cleverly) in the guys’ older shorts, but this is funny, even if they’re forced to play off of Sweeney, whose straight-person skills makes Dakota Johnson look like Carl Reiner. The mourning tweets from everyone from Joe Biden to the Pope aren’t anything special, and the button where the dead guy’s dad pops in for a callback (the Reverend’s father was Chef Boyardee if I forgot to mention) strikes the same underwhelming note. Everyone (including them) has made the nepo-babies joke at PDD’s expense, but they really have to pick up their game to prevent the label from sticking.
And the first sketch after the monologue was—wait for it—fine, with Sweeney and Chloe Fineman (who teamed up more than Timothée Chalament and Pete Davidson) as a pair of NYPD interns whose 22-year-olds’ social media skills prove preternaturally adept at tracking down suspects. Adopting flat, affectless voices as the terminally on-line millennials might fit the conceit of the sketch, but it hardly makes for a rip-roarer right out of the monologue. The surrounding detective cast works to find some color in the proceedings, but it’s all fairly limp—Kenan’s chief keeps commenting on the attractiveness of all the dead, naked women whose murders they’re investigating, and the interns suss out one 40-year-old suspect’s whereabouts though his Facebook page (because, of course.) As a harbinger, this one was pretty accurate—Sweeny was dull, the writing was half-assed, and the whole thing was just sort of… there.
Weekend Update update
An episode so devoid of inherent interest sends my mind seeking other topics. For one thing, I’m never a fan of reviews of any kind plastering a big old score (letter grade, numbers, stars, whatever the cool kids are doing nowadays) right at the top. I think back to my teenage preference for Rogert Ebert and his coveted star ratings over Pauline Kael’s tight little paragraphs, and have come to flip my fandom with the gradual understanding of how an easily categorizable up-front grade takes the reader’s ambition away. That said, I found myself ruminating on why I planned on giving this episode the identical Paste grade to last week’s Shane Gillis episode since that one at least has a few jokes that struck me as better than anything here. It’s both a good question (thanks, me) and indicative of the needless/uselessness of such grading tradition, since all such things serve to do is fuel internet griping that pits one grade against another. (Did the fact that last week’s booking of a jackass fired for being bigoted on his deeply questionable podcast influence my grades? Discuss.) When I was writing for another site that used letter grades, my standard (snotty) comeback was always, “Maybe, crazily, check out the thousands of other letters that make up my actual review instead of carping on the single, vaguely arbitrary letter grade.” (No, I was not popular amongst the commentariat.)
This is a roundabout way of addressing how Update affects my overall perception of an episode. I’ve made it abundantly clear over their many years that Jost and Che are funny guys whose ability to bounce different sensibilities off each other makes for an energetic, entertaining Update. I’ve also been very clear that their smirky, chummy bro-vibe is exclusionary, not just to those outside their two-man cool guys club, but to nuance, satirical courage, or the sort of comedic insight regarding the news other shows inspired by Weekend Update have adopted. Even when Jost and Che do a segment-long runner bashing departing obstructionist ass-kisser Mitch McConnell, the jokes are more about how clever than can be than about the enemy to democracy at hand. Plus, while I’m not sure who started the trend, the whole “Seen here, watching a single mother sell her blood for diaper money” (over a smiling picture of McConnell) joke structure is done so well by John Oliver that everybody else seems like a bandwagon-jumper.
The guys are good at being funny. They’re not so good at playing fake news anchors, which is, you know, sort of their job. Their only job, I’d add. I see comments from those who claim that Update is their favorite part of Saturday Night Live these days, and, sure, some nights, it’s the only reliable oasis of laughs going. The thing is, it’s only funny. That sounds petty, but Update has, for all its many precipitous ups and downs, at least been the place where the show has let its hair down, politically speaking. With the aging Lorne showing just how middle-of-the-road he’s drifted (maybe always secretly been) in his overarching comedy both-sides-ism, Update still holds the keys to the show’s political comedy ammo closet. If sketches like tonight’s cold open (oh, we’ll get there) creak under the interminable weight of not pissing anybody off, Update should use its topicality to really take some brickbats to the right people. Jost and Che do that—as long as it fits with their personas as two hip, above-it dudes who are more concerned with being clever than saying much. That’s why a good, bad, or indifferent Update doesn’t factor much into my overall scoring; Update, unless someone takes the reins and actually says something, lifts right out. It is. It’s fine.
The correspondent pieces have always served a few purposes. Sometimes, it’s to really lay into a political impression or issue. Sometimes it’s to give an underserved featured player a boost. Sometimes it’s a chance for someone to debut a can’t-miss character, one that they can bring back time and again. (Even if they usually should stop at one.) I keep waiting for Heidi Gardner to truly own Update like she did in her first season or so. She’s reliably good, committed, and versatile, but nothing she’s done in a while has really captured the Update guest magic that I was so sure would be her thing. Here, as new character Woman Who’s Aging Gracefully, Gardner brings a tight, woozy speech pattern, an ably post-surgical kisser, and a so-so conception to the desk. The joke, that the Woman’s claim to natural aging bliss is belied by all her plastic surgery and the occasional affair with a grown stepchild, isn’t much, even if Gardner, as ever, holds the screen through sheer performing presence. There’s a low blow gross out joke I found pretty funny when she spins in her chair to reveal that her back fat is stretched tight with a chip clip, but, again, I keep waiting for Heidi to really land one of these like the old days.
Ego Nwodim in a stingray suit, what else can I say? Based on that real-life female ray who has become pregnant despite living alone for years (nature finds a way, y’all), the joke of Ego + fish costume is, in Nwodim’s signature brashness, amusing for a bit, with the added running joke that it’s Michael Che’s baby playing into Che’s wonted bad boy comic persona nicely. Responding to the defensive Che’s inconvenient facts with, “Okay, NatGeo, that is nat-geo business” is about as funny as the piece gets, though. It was really that kind of night.
Recurring Sketch Report
Look, I’m not abandoning my praise of this season’s brave avoidance of tired come-backers, but a night like this could maybe have used a little recognition applause to goose things up. Just saying.
Political Comedy Report
Not to shift focus to another late-night institution, but Stephen Colbert, on The Late Show, this week went on a pointed tirade against media priorities. Noting the press’ lucratively lazy fascination with one particular subject (Biden’s age) over another (Donald Trump is a traitorous, rapist, Russian asset national security risk sundowning to the extent that giving him the keys to our nuclear arsenal is literal national suicide) is, you know, something of a problem. Joking/not joking that Trumps’ myriad unsuitability issues for the highest office in the last get less coverage than “the scandal of ‘old man is old and likes ice cream,'” Colbert fused rage, comedy, and politics in one joke.
Tonight’s cold open asserts that Joe Biden is old. With various real-life Democratic talking heads impersonated as assuring the TV world that President Biden “behind closed doors” is alert, ready, and competent, the show-opener muddles along without a single identifiable wrinkle or additional shading. I know I’m a lefty soyboy cuck or whatever deeply unoriginal epithet Twitter trolls have stolen from Joe Rogan this week, and I concede that, yeah, having an 81-year-old person saddled with the most trying and difficult job in the world is a little worrying. If you have some great “Biden = old” jokes, I’m up for hearing them. But these are not those, as everyone keeps parroting the same party line about Biden’s supposed vitality, which could be an interesting theme, I guess, if anyone bothered to put a little effort in. There’s some effort, to be fair. The fact that everyone’s stories of Biden’s improbable prowess end up with the President offering the post-victory encouragement, “Next time, youngblood,” taps into some of that old-timey, out-of-touch folksiness, and bringing in Devon Walker as NBA enforcer/nut-puncher Draymond Green to prop up the Dem side’s argument that Biden is made of steel is at least weird.
It’s not that Biden’s age should be off limits. Nothing should be off limits in comedy—you know, if you can make it funny. If you can dig into the hackiest or most sensitive subject matter and find the tiny nugget of universal truth to smelt into art. Or you can just put everyone in wigs and fart out the same old tired jokes. I remember real North Korea-style, under-penalty-of-the-gulag public ass-kissing during the Trump administration. Like when Anthony Scaramucci (himself now a hacky punchline) expected reporters to swallow his tales of Donald Trump sinking three-pointers from half court in his suit and dress shoes. What Biden supporters are doing isn’t that, nor is it the MAGA cult’s daily flood of AI-generated images of a shirtless Trump storming foreign beachheads or striding like Schwarzenegger into his second term, sweeping all us liberal pantywaists afore him. Joe Biden is old, and it’s worrying that the literal fate of American democracy depends on helping him across the finish line before Trump (a whopping four years younger, and clearly hoovering down his Adderall supply in order to get through his incoherent hate rallies) can finish the assault on America he started. There’s nuanced, thoughtful, courageous comedy to be made from a democracy so precariously brought to this point. This isn’t it.
Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings
Chloe Fineman should get hazard pay for being paired so often with Sweeney in an attempt to piggyback the unsuited host to the goodnights. Chloe’s always a pro, and she got her jokes in.
Bigger spot than usual for Michael Longfellow in the cold open, even if his Gavin Newsom impression isn’t going in the hall of fame.
Heidi and Ego felt like the most important players in the mix tonight, again even if nothing they got to do was truly memorable.
I like this cast, and I like the commitment (even if it’s through necessity) to the ensemble concept the last few years. But the chance for someone to truly rise above the mean and seize the show for themselves is evident every week. Honestly, I haven’t seen much proof that anybody in this cast is capable of doing that. (Kenan doesn’t seize. Kenan is.)
10-to-One Report
Following up on, and perhaps contradicting, my last point there, Andrew Dismukes can steal him a scene. The last sketch tonight had some of that “last sketch” spirit, in that it hinged on a tough-to-define concept that made for unusual laughs. A date night couple (Dismukes and Sweeney) both attempt to silence the rowdy all-male and all-female tables at their chosen restaurant, only for the expected anger to turn to individual appeals to subjects they know the rambunctious same-sex groups will find uncomfortable. Dismukes, coming in hot, switches to a sincere and emotional appreciation of how much the dudebros obviously love each other’s friendship, while Sweeney whips out a picture of her mom to shame the women into reevaluating letting their own moms’ calls go to voicemail. So far, so 10-t-one: no impressions, no catchphrases, no easy hooks. A single writer’s closely observed idea.
And then the show nearly ruins it by indulging in that aforementioned need to poke viewers in the ribs and urge, “Did you get it? You got it, right? Say you get it.” We get it. And even if a few viewers don’t, then why slow the train down to a crawl, to the detriment of a fine little sketch with both Dismukes and Sweeney tasked with telling us that, yes, what they did is exactly what we saw them do. On an night devoid of originality, why punk us by grinding the gears of the one, final sketch that seemed poised to do something at least moderately clever?
Parting shots
Um, where did James Austin Johnson go. In that last sketch, he’s just suddenly missing from the guy table. My theory—that weird-ass looking “steak” he was supposedly eating.
Wait, Anyone But You is a riff on Much Ado About Nothing? Fair enough, although this as good a time as any to urge you to watch Amy Acker murder it as Beatrice in the actual 2012 movie adaptation.
No offense to Sweeney’s co-star in that film, but Glen Powell’s pair of appearances tonight only reinforced my indifference to ever seeing Anyone But You. Look for Powell to host soon.
Is it me, or did it look like Marcello was wiping tears from his eyes during the goodnights? You okay, buddy?
Next week: Josh Brolin and Ariana Grande.