'SNL' Season 50 Premiere Recap

Jean Smart Can’t Cut Through the Noise of Too Many Guest Stars During the SNL 50 Premiere

In May, Saturday Night Live’s 49th season rode off into the sunset via a good finale hosted by the always-money Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s the kind of personality you’d love to see hosting more than once in a blue moon, and skits like “Dad Has a Cookie” and “NYPD Press Conference” sparked just the faintest slivers of hope that this iteration of the show could finally find its bearings.

I’m a bit of an SNL lifer, but not a blindly faithful one. I rarely miss an episode, but I’m not ready to say that the show is as “good” right now as it used to be. But, then again, retrospect has greatly clouded everyone’s perception of SNL. “It’s not what it used to be,” says my father after I tell him the new season is coming up. He firmly believes that, from 1987 through 1995—when Chris Farley was fired—the show was firing on all cylinders. That’s his “golden era.” But, if you were like me once upon a pre-Peacock time and found yourself doing a marathon watch of old seasons on Hulu (at a time when the streaming service was still largely free), then you likely understand one truth: Saturday Night Live has never been consistently good. But that’s the whole point, I guess.

When you’re doing live comedy, you will certainly miss far more often than you hit. It’s why history has been kind to the Matt Foleys and the Mr. Robinsons, but has largely forgotten about that time Robert Downey Jr. was in a suitcase, or the entirety of Steven Seagal’s hosting turn. Remember when Rudy Giuliani fought against Will Ferrell’s Janet Reno in a boxing match? Yeah, I wish I could forget about it too, even if Ferrell’s Reno replying to Giuliani’s assertion that she fights dirty with a staunch “Then how comes my conscience is so clean?” was funny to my teenage ears once upon a time. Remember the year after Bill Murray left, when Joe Piscopo was the guy? Dark, dark, dark times, indeed, and they’ve spanned decades—we just let the really good ideas, like the cork soakers, or the Delicious Dish, or Sprockets, or Chevy Chase impersonating Gerald Ford but just acting like himself, feel significant.

“Live from New York…”

The Cold Open last night was fine, if not unexpected. We knew that, with election day just a month away, we were going to kick off Season 50 with a Harris versus Trump sketch of some kind, and in that sense, SNL delivered. Andrew Dismukes stepped in as news anchor and debate moderator David Muir, while the camera ping-ponged between Harris and Trump rallies. It was an easy way to get both Maya Rudolph and James Austin Johnson in one sketch together without defaulting to the well-worn debate format, and Rudolph arrived on a heater. She made fun of swing states by calling them “Wisconsapennsylvageorgia,” commented on reproductive rights (“I am going to protect your vageorgia”), likened her campaign to Sabrina Carpenter’s summer hit “Espresso” (“The lyrics are vague, but the vibe slaps”) and poked fun at Harris’s propensity for laughing and always meme-able looks of confusion.

One of the most underrated stand-up comics of this century, Jim Gaffigan, showed up as Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and put on a Dion Waiters-style heat-check in limited screen time. Gaffigan stuck the landing on all of Walz’s mannerisms and even did a bang-up job mimicking the governor’s style of copy and pasting his speeches verbatim at every rally (“In Minnesota, we have a saying: Mind your damn business”). But Gaffigan took his razor-sharp wit and applied it perfectly to the SNL format: “We also have another saying in Minnesota: My nuts froze to the park bench.” Also, as the child of a public school teacher, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when his remark about being Harris’s running mate landed: “This is personal for me; I love this country. And as a former teacher, I need the money.” The Menard’s rebate joke was a good deep cut from the depths of TikTok FYPs, too.

Andy Samberg joined Rudolph as Kamala’s husband Doug Emhoff (or, as he calls himself, “the first gentlemensch” or “Charlie Brown, if he was a grown-up”), and he was as delightful and refreshing as Gaffigan, leaning into Emhoff’s golden retriever persona while making jokes about his Jewish faith and his excitement about decorating the White House. We only got a sample-size of JAJ’s Trump (probably a good call), but he gave us one terrific line (“I didn’t know the kettle was black until very recently, I thought the kettle was Indian”) and some quick riffs about Haitians eating dogs, not pronouncing Kamala’s name correctly, the recent arrest of Sean Combs and regretting choosing J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Speaking of Vance, Bowen Yang popped in as the Ohio senator and wannabe second-fiddle, eyelashes pronounced with mascara and all, and gave us an impression that, if Trump gets elected in November, could be a dependable one moving forward. An underrated joke of the night hits when, as Trump leaves the stage and Vance takes the podium, the protective bulletproof glass is removed. The camera cut back to Harris’s stable quickly, where Dana Carvey came out as Joe Biden. “Thank you for handing over the reins,” Rudolph said. “I didn’t want to!” Carvey replied, nailing Biden’s cadence and the memory-scrambling, non-sensical ramblings. But Carvey couldn’t quite sell the impression all the way. To me, there was a little bit of his famous George H. W. Bush impression still in there somewhere, but I will never say no to having him in Studio 8H. Once Rudolph’s Kamala was done dancing to TLC, we finally got to swing into Jean Smart’s monologue. A 13-minute Cold Open is far too long for my liking, and last night’s episode never really settled in after it.

“You look mahvelous!”

No sketch went above and beyond last night, so deeming one of them as the “best” is going to be a stretch. If I had to land somewhere, however, I’d give it to “Textbook Writer,” the only moment where we remembered that Jean Smart was actually hosting the show. Sometimes SNL remembers that they have bulletproof formulas always at their disposal, and this is where they, refreshingly, leaned into what almost always works: a very unfunny thing colored by an absurd tone. In this case, Scholastic hires a smut writer named Barbara Berkman to author their new mathematics textbook, and things go a little haywire when age-old math problems become vessels for some seriously sensual happenings.

“William has five apples and the body of a god,” Barbara reads. “Clarissa watched in awe as he bit into the apple’s flesh, the sticky-sweet juice running down his muscled neck and into the forbidden mystery that lay beneath his sweat-stained undershirt. How many apples does William have now?” When the concept is a hit, the punchlines practically write themselves: Clarissa stares into the eyes of an Italian hunk and “los[es] herself completely in his musk”; no part of her body went unexplored by the aforementioned hunk’s gorilla-sized hands; Clarissa finds herself “bosom to bosom” with another woman, Lady Harrington. “Let’s begin by subtracting you out of those panties” wins the “best line of the night” award. I’m not entirely sure that Smart’s dry delivery made the most sense for Barbara’s character, but the premise worked well enough that her disinterested deadpan style wasn’t reductive.

“A wooden bowl, some oversized index cards, and a funnel…”

A weak episode elicits very few sketches to report on, but I’ll give a shoutout to “Charli xcx Talk Show,” a direction I expected the show to go in, given that Brat Summer continues to dominate the zeitgeist. Yang’s Charli impression wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s the absurdity of it all that pays dividends, like Sarah Sherman‘s Troye Sivan impression (six-pack abs and all) or when Yang runs through a “brat or nat” checklist—deeming Mark Robinson’s search history as “nat,” but Charli’s aunt’s breast reduction surgery as “brat” (“So happy for you, Carol! You can run again”). Smart took a turn as Susanne Bartsch while Chloe Fineman played Kaitlan Collins, but the real winner of the sketch was Ego Nwodim, who played Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and did a “mean-girl cam” roasting gerrymandering, Matt Gaetz and J.D. Vance (“can’t order donuts but has donut body”).

“Yipee! Jerry Rubin died last week.”

When I first got into SNL as a kid, the thing I was most attracted to was the weekly Weekend Update segment. The first live episode of the show I ever watched featured Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers behind the desk, and it’s actually insidious to think about how only three other cast members have been an anchor in the 17 years since then. This is all just to say: Colin Jost and Michael Che need to pass the torch on to somebody else. While their chemistry remains rock solid, they reserve their risk-taking efforts for their annual joke swaps and play it safe during every Update in-between. Who wants that?

This week was relatively politics-heavy—formulaic, given the summer’s never-ending streak of WTF news stories, especially those surrounding the election. There was no commentary around the Israel-Palestine conflict (I’m not sure I’d want Jost or Che commenting on it, anyway), nor did they pay much critical mind to Kamala Harris. Instead, it was a heavy dose of Melania Trump, Eric Adams, Chinese drivers, women and COVID. Jost poked fun at how, just a few hours before the show hit the air, Donald Trump called Harris a “mentally disabled person,” but there was no envelope-pushing from either anchor—there never is. If the best moment from a rapid-fire news segment is Che questioning the audience’s applause when Jost drops a Minions/Mark Zuckerberg joke, then we’re gonna be in for a long, boring and disappointing season of Update. Sigh.

Thankfully, both Update guests—Eric Adams (Walker) and Moo Deng (Yang)—were little miracles. Devon Walker should be reprising his Eric Adams impression for as long as the NYC mayor is in the news about his indictment. It’s a gold mine, and I could listen to Walker saying “Swagopolis” forever. When Che asked him why he chose to get entangled with Turkey, Walker dropped the mic: “Two words, Michael: Gobble Gobble.” Tacking on a “Free Diddy!” before his departure was a perfect finale.

Yang stopped by the desk to do exactly what Bowen Yang does best: play outlandish, meme-worthy characters. This time, he came dressed as Moo Deng, a pygmy hippo from Thailand who’s been the face of the internet lately. Yang took a fresh approach to the hippo, though, relating her recent struggles with virality and mental health to that of Chappell Roan’s. Every time he demanded hose water, my laughs got louder. The Mood Deng of it all was more of a bit than a sketch, but it was easily the most rewarding effort of the night.

“Who’s the barber here?”

I won’t count JAJ’s Trump or Rudolph’s Kamala here, so there were no recurring characters on the show last night—though Sarah Sherman did grab the baton from Timothée Chalamet to do a quick Troye Sivan impression. In an episode where Sherman was painfully underused, I would have gladly taken 40 more minutes of her as the Australian pop star.

“In a word? Chaos.”

Tonight’s cold open picked away at the good and the bad of modern-day SNL. While we got to see two current cast members step out and deliver great, bite-sized performances (Yang as J.D. Vance and JAJ as Donald Trump), we were also subjected to four guest stars. Cameos always do well on SNL, likely because veterans and big-name celebrities are often far more interesting than the schlock of amateurs filling out the cast list, but having Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan, Andy Samberg and Dana Carvey come out back-to-back-to-back-to-back felt like overkill. Yes, SNL 50 ought to be a celebration of the show’s half-century of comedy, but let’s not forget that there are 17 comedians vying for a taste of TV history right now. At what point do you stop caring about the marquee and start putting trust in the talent you’ve hired?

“You are weak like H.R. Pickens!”

I’ll give the worst sketch of the night designation to “$100,000 Pyramid.” How the writers thought it was good enough to warrant a post-monologue placement I’ll never understand. Michael Strahan (Walker) hosts the titular game show with two teams made up of celebrity guests: the Hawk Tuah girl Hailey Welch (Fineman) and Chimp Crazy’s Tonia Haddix (Smart) versus Bad Bunny (Hernandez) and North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (Thompson). In no way should Hernandez’s Beach Bunny impression have been the best thing about a skit like this—the whole point of the game show sketch model is to widen the space for character work. Good luck finding a shred of humor in what was easily the longest five minutes of my weekend.

As the “hawk tuah” meme still makes its rounds online, coupled with Welch’s new podcast, it’s no surprise that SNL felt obligated to comment on it somehow, but Fineman failed to do anything with the character beyond fumbling through a horrible Southern accent. Thompson spent his chunk of airtime regurgitating the inflammatory comments Robinson made on porn forums, and I so badly wanted the camera to be on anyone but him. Kenan is rarely the worst performer in a skit, but everyone’s bound to swing and miss once in a while. Smart channeled Haddix well, showing up with her “husband” who is, you guessed it, a chimp.

Nobody could seem to answer any question correctly, until Haddix got one right about breastfeeding—and then the camera panned to her nursing her chimp husband. New cast member Emil Wakim made a quick appearance as the Turkish sharpshooter Yusuf Dikec, who went viral during the Olympics this summer, but the sketch ended without any sort of worthwhile resolution.

“You guessed it… Frank Stalone!”

I expected Jean Smart’s Hacks co-star (and the daughter of show alum Laraine Newman) Hannah Einbinder to make some kind of appearance tonight, and she did, joining Smart for Jelly Roll’s first introduction. It would’ve been nice to see her in a skit, though. Otherwise, the cold open was filled with guest stars: Jim Gaffigan, Andy Samberg, Dana Carvey and Maya Rudolph, though everyone could have guessed that Rudolph would be making an appearance this week. If Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November, Rudolph’s presence here will be null and void, as she would end up more prominently featured in the show than some of its cast members. The same scenario probably goes for Samberg and Gaffigan, but it’s far too early to tell (remember the Jim Carey/Joe Biden thing?). For now, let’s file Rudolph’s performance under the cameo folder.

“If you have a $50 bill, we can give you 50 singles.”

Just one pre-recorded sketch hit the air tonight: a riff on Spirit Halloween’s vice grip on once-shuttered buildings in declining towns. “Times may be good on Wall Street, but on Main Street, communities are struggling,” Heidi Gardner says in a voiceover, before Jane Wickline makes her first on-screen appearance. The joke works initially, as it’s no secret that, once October hits, Spirit Halloween flagships confusingly pop up nationwide—but only for one month. “Since 1983, Spirit Halloween has been helping our struggling communities by setting up shop in every vacant building in the country for six weeks and then bouncing,” Gardner says to the camera while walking through the store, before nods to rash-inducing wigs, one-time-use fog machines and lawsuit-avoiding costumes of famous characters and people, like “Candy Slave” (Oompa Loompa) and “Blonde Singing Woman” (Taylor Swift), ensue.

A joke about Spirit Halloween “creating six-week jobs for some of America’s hardest-hit perverts” doesn’t land because Mikey Day possesses no charm whatsoever, and you can only hammer the “Hey, this is a weird annual thing, huh?” point home so many times before it starts sounding contrived. Thankfully, Michael Longfellow popped up at some point and delivered the best line of the skit: “Thanks to us, what used to be a condemned AutoZone where a murder happened is once again a thriving business… where a murder happened.”

“Ladies and gentleman, Foo FIGHT-uhs!”

Last night’s musical guest was Jelly Roll, who recently sang during the “In Memoriam” segment at the Emmys. His current ascent into the echelons of contemporary music is admirable, as he spent years in and out of prison, battled with addiction and, after missing the birth of his daughter because he was incarcerated, he took a step toward healing. It’s been a decade-long upswing for him, kicking his substance abuse, living in a van and, eventually, releasing music that flows through the margins of rap with elements of rock and country. His 2020 song “Save Me” went viral, and he’s had #1 singles on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock and Country Airplay charts since. Sold out arenas, a Hulu documentary and an appearance at a 2024 Senate hearing where he advocated for congress’ passing of the FEND Off bill later, and Jelly Roll made his SNL debut last night.

Jelly Roll’s music is charming enough, and his likability speaks volumes. The industry has thrown its support behind him, and he even earned a Best New Artist nomination at the Grammys earlier this year. His 10th studio album, Beautifully Broken, comes out on October 11th and he performed two tracks from it last night: “Winning Streak” and “Liar.” While his music isn’t for me, I couldn’t help but feel the sheer magnitude of Jelly Roll’s attitude by the end of his second performance. Throughout both songs, he was grinning from ear-to-ear while singing gut-wrenching, stirring lyrics about sobriety and gratitude. Despite his star-on-the-rise stature, his time on the SNL stage was anything but bombastic—just a guy happy to be in Studio 8H, delivering his songs to an audience ready to receive them.

Not Ready For Primetime Power Rankings

1. Bowen Yang
It should come as no surprise that Yang was the night’s top performer, as he ran laps around his castmates. Tackling J.D. Vance, Moo Dang and Charli xcx all in one night and doing it hiccup-free, if anyone is going to be the star of this show, my money’s on Bowen. His turn as the History of the Sitcom host was pleasant, too.

2. Devon Walker
In his first show as a repertory player, Walker took off running—even in limited air-time. His night began with a half-impressive impression of Michael Strahan on $100,000 Pyramid, but his best moment came in the Update segment when he took his turn as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was just indicted on federal bribery charges. The chemistry between Walker and Michael Che was good, and Walker brought a needed level of bombast to the always-cringe Adams. I let air out of my nose when he said “I spent every single day with the working people of this city: the dancers, the bottle girls, Fat Joe.”

3. James Austin Johnson
Honestly, you can slot anyone who made at least one appearance tonight in at #3 and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. We saw a lot of Chloe Fineman and Marcello Hernandez, but neither of them made any substantial moves. I’ll give this slot to JAJ, if only because his Trump impression hasn’t grown stale yet. Most of us had so much Alec Baldwin fatigue the last time Trump was in office; if he wins again in November, I don’t see us getting fed up with JAJ so quickly (though we certainly will at some point, because of the Trump of it all).

Goodnights

“I thought SNL stood for ‘Saturday Night Laughs.’ Then I watched the show and I thought, well, that can’t be right!” —Jean Smart

Next week, the lights shine down on Studio 8H once more, as Nate Bargatze returns to host for the second season in a row. Coldplay will take the stage and play songs from their forthcoming LP, Moon Music.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Jean Smart Can’t Cut Through the Noise of Too Many Guest Stars During the SNL 50 Premiere