[ad_1]
Yesaturday Night Live begins with CBS’ coverage of the AFC Championship Game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens. The halftime team’s mood is grim: after today, they have nothing worth living for, since real football is over (the Superbowl is for “the commercials, and Usher, and the people who never watch football and ask how much a touchdown is worth. ) and “there is no other live television that can be viewed even remotely.”
The conversation turns to how culturally adrift American men are right now: Not only is football coming to an end, so is the TV series Blue Bloods, while the parent-favorite Yellowstone (“our Barbie”), was once again snubbed by the Emmys. This leads the team to sing a rendition of Wiz Khalifa See You Again.
The end of the football season that sends the men into an existential crisis is a very promising premise, but unfortunately, the show does nothing about it. As has been the case with a number of sketches during this and the last few seasons, they’d rather end with a cheap, unfunny musical number than try to reach a truly clever or earned conclusion.
Dakota Johnson returns to host. The actress reflects on her last appearance on the show, during the 40th anniversary episode, in which she was seated across from Donald Trump and next to “the person who would become the most powerful person in America,” Taylor Swift. She is interrupted by the night’s musical guest, and her Social Network co-star Justin Timberlake, who mistakenly thinks he is the host, as well as Jimmy Fallon in his Barry Gibb costume.
A reunion dinner between members of the Mason family goes awry when their nervous waitresses get everything wrong, including their names (calling them “the Manson Family”), their orders, and, finally, the basics of English. Sarah Sherman brings the right kind of manic energy to the proceedings, but Johnson seems nervous and forced. As with the cold open, this one comes to an end too abruptly.
Next, a young man enjoying time with his parents and grandmother discovers a box of home movies. The family settles in to watch and remember, until they come to a tape marked ‘Big Announcement’, which the father claims is a recording of the day he found out he was going to be a father. What he doesn’t mention is that said discovery occurs during a paternity test episode of a sleazy Maury-style talk show. A clever idea, even if it never gets past that initial reveal.
As hinted at during the monologue, Timberlake and Fallon reunite as Beegees members Barry and Robin Gibb for a new edition of the Barry Gibb Talk Show. Their guests are political correspondent Elie Mystal (Kenan Thompson), political heavyweight Andrew Yang (Bowen Yang) and political activist Joanne Carducci (Johnson). The psychotic, drugged Barry berates and threatens his guests: he tells Mystal that it looks like “Don King ate another Don King” and threatens to take the gloves off Yang’s corpse and “use her ribcage as a trap,” while which the spacey Robin harmonizes at just the right moment but otherwise has nothing to add. While both Fallon and Timberlake have seen their public stocks drop (for good reason) over the last decade, it’s undeniable how good their chemistry is. Fallon is particularly excellent as the unhinged Gibb. This is the funniest he’s been since his cameos on 30 Rock.
On a new Please Don’t Destroy, the boys pitch some ideas to Johnson, who throws them off balance by immediately admitting that their videos are “really…not for me.” Things escalate from there, when she refers to them as the “Lonely Island” and they throw criticism at her performance: “What is (Madame Webb’s) superpower? Are you whispering in a monotone tone? The spikes continue to fly, and both sides investigate the other’s recent failures (including the truly terrible Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain). They declare a “nepo truce” once the topic of their famous parents comes up (except for Ben Marshall, the only non-nepo baby in the group). Recognition of John Higgins and Martin Herlihy’s parental connections is long overdue, but kudos to everyone involved, including and especially Johnson, for the surprisingly sharp bits of self-deprecation. This is the best PDD there has been in a long time.
Johnson is then joined by Heidi Gardner and Chloe Fineman as a trio of trend-setting shallow blondes. They’re still sporting their “big, dumb hats” from last season, but their latest trend is “big, dumb hats.” What starts out as a solid takedown of the Stanley Cup cult and its sleazy, LED-filled obsession, but eventually turns into an excuse for a by-the-numbers prop comedy.
After Timberlake’s performance of Sanctified, featuring Tobe Nwigwe, it’s time for the weekend update. The first guest is a guy named Ethan (Yang), apparently there to discuss the recently announced Oscar nominations. He immediately dismisses that idea in favor of his own personal awards show. All of the nominees are films that in some way relate to your personal experience: Bradley Cooper’s closeted gay man marrying a woman in Maestro, Paul Giamatti having a lazy eye in The Holdovers, Flounder CGI in The Little Mermaid live-action. Reminds her of an ex-boyfriend. Ethan, a serial liar and egomaniac, is just a slightly dumber version of Yang’s George Santos imitation.
Later, Michael Che invites tarot card reader Jan Janby (Gardner) to reveal what 2024 holds for him. When asked to predict the election and the Super Bowl, he instead reads a disaster in Che’s future: Her next comedy special will flop, her OnlyFans addiction will drain all her money, and Colin Jost will pull off a successful catfish scam. It’s usually Jost who makes fun of the Update, so having a character make fun of Che is a nice change of pace.
A discussion in a women’s reading group goes off track after a member reveals that she is about to go on Shark Tank. Her big selling point is a black T-shirt that says: “Don’t ask if I’m okay. I’m fine. But if everyone starts asking me if I’m okay, I might start crying.” Her friends don’t understand it at first, but after she makes everyone ask another member if she’s okay, causing the woman to break down and reveal her troubled home life, they realize the genius. behind the idea of it. Shark Tank panel members Barbara Corcoran and Mark Cuban appear as themselves. There is some awkward dead air in the build-up to this reward.
Johnson’s harried traveler then tries to retrieve her lost luggage from the strange father-and-son luggage clerks Thompson and Devon Walker, who force her to confirm the embarrassing contents in front of her new boyfriend. Said contents include a personal diary, diarrhea medications and… that’s it. This feels like a sketch of a sketch, and it’s a real flat note to go out on, at least until Dave Chappelle shows up, without explanation, for the final curtain call.
Johnson seemed strangely out of sync with the rest of the cast in the live sketches, although he acquitted himself better in the pre-filmed segments, while five-time vet Timberlake and a returning Fallon stole the show. The sketch of him, along with Please Do n’t Destroy’s return to form, kept this episode from completely sinking.