Saturday Night Live - Season 44, Episode 04: Jonah Hill/Maggie Rogers
Trailer
On Saturday night, a new season, a late-night comedy show featuring several short plays, simulations of television commercials, and a live band. There is a new team of award-winning celebrities performing comics and popular music stars. It is a new display of a wide range of music and graphics that seem to be the most famous and have won the admiration of many.
All captured perfectly here, this still felt recycled from older efforts right down to the terrible-review pull quotes superimposed on the ad. All in all, a bit too similar to many of SNL's efforts along these lines to generate big laughs.
There was a certain elegance to the way SNL kept weaving themes through its political material tonight, with jokes about Trump's "caravan of scary brown people" terror tactics, and the importance of voting on Tuesday reinforcing each other throughout.
Fantastic premise. I may have snort-laughed at Aidy Bryant's pratfalls, which means it's either really funny or it's really late and I'm delirious from all the bad local political ads.
The writers couldn't resist taking a friendly Fox News-ified dig at their absent Trump, calling him a "disgraced former actor-seen here molesting a young boy scout," before flashing an image of him and Adam Sandler in classic SNL sketch "Canteen Boy."
Even though a sense of deflation could be felt for the show's back half, Hill's confidence as host, along with a string of sharp political sketches and welcome cameos, combined to make this by far the strongest episode of the season.
While most of the cast was pretty evenly represented throughout the night, Aidy Bryant stood out to me thanks to her performance in the political musical and the HuckaPM medicine advertisement.
There is much to like about this week's Saturday Night Live, much to learn if you happen to be a future guest host or musical guest (or Executive Producer).
Aidy Bryant's Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not a great character, but the concept here - that the White House press secretary would need a sleeping pill so strong that she violently passes out - was rather brilliant.