Saturday Night Live’s Season 50 Finale Reaches a Fun But Uneven Conclusion
Scarlett Johansson’s seventh time hosting SNL was a top-heavy program lacking enough big laughs. And, with several cast members’ fates up in the air heading into Season 51, the show warranted a more spectacular send-off.
Tonight’s finale episode of Saturday Night Live’s 50th season went out on an apt note, with the goodnights being cut off by a jarring ad for Suits LA—presumably because the show had already gone three minutes past 1 AM. It was a poetic ending, considering how the episode fizzled out quick after Weekend Update. If that weren’t such a typical format for SNL, I’d have believed that it was some thought-provoking parallel to the uncertainties surrounding the cast heading into Season 51. Turns out, it’s just bad planning. Same as it ever was.
But, yes, SNL 50 has concluded. 20 episodes later, and we can now look back on a season that brought the Lonely Island back to 30 Rockefeller, gave cast alums like Maya Rudolph, Dana Carvey, and Mike Myers one more victory lap, and, ultimately, was an underwhelming accomplishment despite the prestige. Five decades into this show and the suits still can’t figure out how to give a season its proper viking burial by mid-May. I’ve been hard on some of SNL’s greatest institutions this season, especially the cold opens and Update segments, but it’s because I love this show and have held it close for 20 years now. Season 50 won’t go down as one of the greats but, considering that we got such star-making episodes featuring Charli XCX, Lady Gaga, and Quinta Brunson, I had hoped that SNL’s big anniversary year would finish just a little more spectacularly.
Scarlett Johansson came to Studio 8H to host for a seventh time tonight, her first stint since 2019 (she’s appeared in a guest role four times this half-decade alone, usually for a 5-Timers bit). She’s a dependable anchor for any cast, never taking too many risks on-screen but usually pretty game for anything thrown her way. I mean, Michael Che likened her vagina to roast beef in December while she was laughing along with it backstage. She’s just a likable presence—one of the best “straight woman” hosts still willing to come back every few years. In fact, no woman has hosted SNL more than Johansson, a title she now holds all alone after passing Tina Fey with tonight’s appearance. When ScarJo is at the helm, Saturday Night Live still feels like a major stop in an actor’s career.
ScarJo famously has one of the highest-rated SNL episodes in Paste history, thanks to a record-book performance in 2017. It’s too bad that tonight’s run couldn’t capture that same magic. In fact, this may have been her worst episode yet. It wasn’t all bad, just top-heavy and weirdly sequenced post-Update. I didn’t love “Local News Stories,” but I think the show had a good rhythm once they did a Please Don’t Destroy film, “Couples at the Bar,” and “Bowen’s Still Straight” all in a row before musical guest Bad Bunny’s first song. And Update was great, clocking in at about 15 minutes.
But the show’s second-half was an eye-sore, hitting us with mixed-bag sketches that never quite hit their strides. Rarely does the musical guest perform their second song with less than 10 minutes left in the episode, but that was a telling sign that this finale was going to conclude awkwardly. And yet, even without too many gut-busting laughs or a big, swinging sketch before the 10-to-1, the episode still mustered enough satisfying moments to leave me optimistic for Season 51. But, with the futures of cast members Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner, Kenan Thompson, Michael Che, and Colin Jost still up in the air heading into the summer, perhaps the ride off into the sunset could have been smoother. But, hey, golden jubilees are overrated anyways. There’s always a new year waiting to greet you. So, how was the last night of Season 50? Well, as a wise cue card says…
“Live from New York…”
Leave it to SNL to wait until the season finale to deliver its best cold open of the year. Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) is in the Middle East visiting Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (Emil Wakim), the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. But don’t be deceived, Wakim’s presence in this sketch is simply for the sake of putting another body on stage next to JAJ’s. Tonight’s cold open is a continuation of many of the show’s recent cold opens, in which JAJ monologues for five minutes. Trump has been eating meals while sitting on the floor, dipping his fingers straight into “various goops and spreads” that he hides under the rug before retreating to a “mobile McDonald’s.” He loves everything Saudi Arabia has to offer, whether it’s oil, money, or “end of list,” and is enjoying the “pre-bribe” of a “palace in the sky” plane gifted to him by Qatar. “Newark!” he shouts, rejecting the people’s desires for him to travel in an American plane.
I love this version of JAJ’s Trump, the version that tells the audience to shut up when he’s trying to segue into his next bit. The bit in question is a play on the UAE capital city Abu Dhabi. “Abu-dhabi-do, like the late, great Fred Flintstone,” he quips. The riff on the womanless “boys trip” to the Middle East was a great moment too. “Hi, boys! Boys again!” will be in my vocabulary all summer. But the best part of the cold open comes when JAJ wanders into the audience and breaks the fourth wall. He says that everyone will have to wait until the fall to see him again, but that the real version of him is omnipresent and inescapable, stalking your dreams like “the late, great Freddy Krueger.” It’s a touching moment not bogged down by a needless cameo (those will come, don’t worry). Just JAJ sitting with “the pretty people.” “Look at her, wow!” he yelps upon sitting next to a blonde woman. “7s or more sit on the floor, 6s and below to the bleachers you go.” We’ll see him again in a few months, if we still have a democracy. “It’s a coin flip!”
Perhaps it’s not sexy to pick a host’s monologue as the “best sketch of the night,” but Johansson’s opening remarks were too sweet to ignore. Like Martin Short’s monologue in December, Johansson seized an opportunity to sing about SNL, performing a special Season 50 song (to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”) with the accompaniment of the whole cast sans Colin Jost and Michael Che. Chloe Fineman supports a singing monologue, while Heidi Gardner laments that she prefers the Q&As—so Johansson combines the two, leading to an exchange with a foxy Kenan Thompson asking about dinosaurs.
The joke about Sarah Sherman getting fired hit the hardest, because I audibly yelled “No!” at my TV despite there being no confirmation that Sherman will be exiting the show before Season 51. You know I am a big champion of Sarah’s work, so losing her this soon into her SNL career would be horrible news for me specifically. But luckily, all signs point to it being a joke (I hope). It was nice hearing the cast pay tribute to a season with so many ups and downs, and Johansson is one of the few hosts whose presence in Studio 8H would warrant such a singalong. “The 50th season is through. It lasted forever, we did it together, and we got to spend it with you.” I love remembering just how romantic Saturday Night Live can be.
“Yipee! Jerry Rubin died last week.”
No one knows whether or not Colin Jost and Michael Che will be returning to the Update desk for Season 51. But, if tonight was their last go, they went out on a high note. It’s a shame that Che’s joke about the Mandela effect got few reactions. That was a major highlight for me. Otherwise, the guys punched up at familiar suspects: Trump, RFJ Jr. and his brain worm, Joe Biden, New Jersey’s train fiasco. An Amazon delivery driver took a shit on someone’s porch. “But that’s what I ordered,” Jost quips. Dick’s Sporting Goods is purchasing Foot Locker for a few billion dollars. Their new stores are going to be named “Dick Fockers.” A study suggests that “tired people could have suffered a ministroke.” “Which makes sense,” Che concludes, “because I always get sleepy after a stroke.”
Ego Nwodim brought her already beloved Miss Eggy character back to Update just a month after getting the crowd to yell “Men ain’t shit!” on live television. The shtick is the same—a Def Jam Comedy-style monologue, this time about airplane food (even though, as Jost points out, she’s supposed to be talking about airplane safety). Most recurring characters would have been better as one-offs, but Nwodim is challenging that recent trend. Miss Eggy is a deliriously funny Update addition, and I hope that we get more of her in Season 51. Jost playing along with Nwodim’s call-and-response bit was great too. She asks him about what to do when there’s turbulence, saying “Take a benadryl and…” “Shut your gay ass up,” he bursts, and the crowd goes nuts.
And, as is tradition every season finale, Jost and Che swap jokes with each other. This premise always goes well, because it’s the one time we actually see the Update guys push boundaries—even though it’s often just with each other. If Jost and Che are gone after tonight, then we can all be thankful that we got one more round of Che making Jost say racist things on live television. What’s great is ScarJo came out to receive an apology from Che for his remarks about her vagina on the last joke swap segment. In a sweet conclusion, Che delivers a sweet sentiment about his longtime co-host. And, true to Che’s usual sabotage, Jost has to apply lipstick and blurt out one last message: “Lorne, I’ll do anything to run this show!”
“Who’s the barber here?”
They ran the original “Bowen’s Straight” in Season 49 when Sydney Sweeney hosted, but I prefer this re-upped version. Johansson has a crush on Yang, but it’s not meant to be: He’s gay and she’s married to Jost. Or maybe Bowen isn’t gay? The women in the cast tell ScarJo that he’s straight, and he’s seen kissing a returning Gina Gershon. ScarJo and Bowen flirt in the elevator—she calls him “Mr. Moo Deng” and he tells her that Jost is his “SNL brother.” “I would never do anything to hurt him, I would fuck his wife.” The unlikely couple then has sex in the show’s control room. It’s a very funny sketch to watch unfold, considering that Bowen recently admitted he’s “dabbling in bisexuality” on Las Culturistas, which gets a shoutout when Gardner walks out of his bedroom wearing a shirt with the podcast’s name on it. The best cameo comes at the end, when Bowen hops into a car with Emily Ratajkowski. The whole “Bowen Yang is a straight man” bit never fails to hook me in. I just love watching him cosplay as a heterosexual guy with bad impulse control. When he thanks ScarJo for “inventing A.I.” in Her, I’m locked in.
“In a word? Chaos.”
I hoped for at least two sketches featuring Bad Bunny tonight, and the quota was met before midnight. “Couples at the Bar” was an especially perfect outlet for him, thanks to his tremendous chemistry with Hernandez and effortless charm. One couple (Hernandez, Ego Nwodim) let a one-night stand turn into an actual relationship, and Nwodim is ready to abandon her expiring lease and move in with Hernandez. Another couple (Johansson, Bunny) picks a fight with them over their table. It’s a by-the-numbers setup for a good payoff: Hernandez and Bunny getting vulnerable with each other about their failing relationships. The catch is that they say everything in Spanish, and their girlfriends are none the wiser. Nwodim claims she can speak Spanish too, because she worked at Chipotle, and ScarJo unleashes a whole lot of gibberish about asparagus and “Giant Saturday.” I think JAJ and Andrew Dismukes are also a tremendous anchor in this sketch, as they play a couple of locals watching the drama unfold. “Damn! They’re really going at it over there,” Dismukes says. “Yeah, I feel like I’m watching a telenovela,” JAJ replies. Dismukes yearns for a “slap and kiss,” the ultimate example of the blurred line between “passion and violence” in Latin American culture. “Crazy women have the best cat” may be the line of the night.
“You are weak like H.R. Pickens!”
The unfortunate truth about tonight’s episode is that there are about four sketches that could be deemed “the worst of the night.” “Local News Stories” was a dim start to the show, as news anchors (Thompson, Ashley Padilla, Wakim) try to brighten their stories with puns (even though they weren’t really puns) but Denise (Johansson) from the evening news can’t help but pair bubbly wordplay with grim announcements—like a predatory teacher in Ohio, murder-suicides, deported babies, and a cannibal on the run. By now, I’m soured on the news show template that SNL falls back on far too often. It’s not that these sketches are inherently bad, but that they never stray enough from the formula to make the material shocking or novel. It’s a shame that sketches like “Local News Stories” almost always get the #1 slot after the monologue.
But “Intimacy Coordinators” might go down as the worst sketch of Season 50. A male director (Mikey Day) and his non-binary assistant director (Sherman) are filming a lesbian love story and bring two intimacy coordinators (Johansson, Thompson) on set. The coordinators can’t fathom a sex scene featuring two women, and that’s the extent of the joke, culminating in Thompson’s character opting to “study” more about the physical logistics of this sexual phenomenon by watching porn. I can’t think of many sketches from this season that failed to get off the ground as miserably as this one. What an awful, uninspired premise with nothing exciting to say.
“If you have a $50 bill, we can give you 50 singles.”
Please Don’t Destroy were sorely underused this season, only appearing in a handful of episodes and arriving with varied results (their best effort was the cut-for-time film they shot with Charli XCX, sadly). ScarJo shows up and picks up on the bad vibe immediately, hoping to remedy it with a first-class flight. Cue the Lonely Island-style rap parody and I’m convinced that this is going to be another less-than-stellar outing for the guys—until it’s revealed that their luxury flight is landing in Newark, a 30-minute drive from LaGuardia. The Jersey airport is going through a rough patch, “losing” planes during landings and generally smelling less than desirable, so ScarJo and the guys prepare for their imminent death. But Bad Bunny shows up as the air traffic control operator and figures out how to help the plane land by singing the instructions. ScarJo’s flow needs some work, but her admitting that she’d wanted the Avengers movies to make more money was a nice touch.
“It’s always something.”
“Mike Myers Elevator Ride” is fun enough, if only because we get a recreation of Myers’ infamous inclusion in Kanye West’s viral anti-George W. Bush rant at a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. The tension has only escalated in the 20 years since, now that Ye has pledged his allegiance to neo-Nazism. No one wants to have a bad elevator ride, and perhaps no ride could be worse than one shared with Ye mid-crashout. Kenan is really good here as Ye, even though the material writes itself at this point. After returning to SNL to play Elon Musk, I’d say this was a much better send-off for Myers. Whether or not it’s a send-off for Kenan is another story entirely. We’ve been questioning when he’ll finally exit the show for at least a decade now.
The “TV Press Junket” sketch had some fun moments! A YouTube channel interviews the cast of a buzzy teen romance called Summer Lake, and Danny (Hernandez) gets all of the easy questions while his co-stars have their privacy invaded and are asked about race, birth control, and sexism. It’s all quite funny—one of those semi-ensemble bits where everyone involved is on their A-game. It won’t be a sketch that most people remember from Season 50, but it was sweet seeing it escalate. I like it when the SNL writers can keep me on my toes.
“Your very precious lunch hour…”
I had to watch “Victorian Ladies at Lunch” twice before its bizarreness finally clicked. Four British women (Johansson, Gardner, Chloe Fineman, and Sherman) sit at a table and eat disgusting, spoiled, and taboo foods like jellied eel, bowls of cow blood, and hot dogs made from poodles. Watching the women stuff their faces with the disgusting foods, which included the camera locked in on Fineman while she spit cow blood back into her bowl, was a gas. Once three hours pass, Gardner laments that she “went #2 through #7” before getting her clothes off. This one has Sarah Squirm written all over it—a fun and gross way to close out Season 50.
Not Ready For Primetime Power Rankings, Year-End Edition
1. Ego Nwodim No cast member had a year as consistently good as Ego Nwodim. She stood out in every sketch she was in, and she even introduced us to our new favorite character: Miss Eggy. Nwodim is the type of SNL star whose contributions are overlooked in the moment, but 20 years from now we’ll be regarding her as not only one of the greatest women in the show’s history, but as one of the all-time greatest cast members, period.
2. James Austin Johnson While the cold opens were, at times, unbearably bad, there’s no denying that JAJ is the bedrock of this cast. His weekly turns as President Trump will go down as some of the best political material this show has ever produced, if only because his impression of Donald is the best presidential spoof since Carvey’s Bush Sr. I was harsh on JAJ and the cold opens all season long, but it was a gesture of love. By the season’s end, it seemed like he’d found his stride. Those last three or four cold opens were dynamite.
3. Heidi Gardner Heidi Gardner is the lead every cast needs, a great character comedian who can go subtle or give 100% to the most absurd idea you can think of. There are speculations that Gardner’s time on the show is coming to an end. If that’s true, then I tip my cap to a bonafide legend. Thanks for making me crack up so damn much these last eight years.
That’s a wrap on Season 50. We’ll be back with more recaps in the fall when Season 51 gets going. Thanks for sticking with me all year. Maybe we’ll do this dance together again in September. And that’s the way it is! Goodnight.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
