Saturday Night Live
Michael Keaton and Billie Eilish
October 19, 2024
Michael Keaton is 73 years old, only a year or two younger than my own parents but that’s neither here nor there except to say that he’s one of our acting treasures and I’m glad he’s having a moment with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and he looks great for his age and that he was not the thing that dragged down this episode.
What I am saying is that SNL has run for four weeks in a row, which, at least in recent years, is not the norm (it’s usually 3 episodes on, 1 off); and maybe the writing staff needed a break. (I’m guessing the idea was to be off the week before Halloween so that they could be on both the week before and after Election Day.)
ANYWAY. Michael Keaton, who has hosted in 1982; 1992; 2015; and now in 2024, wasn’t the problem: he was nimble and funny and game. The problem lay more in the writing and the concepts of the sketches that fell short. Hopefully, everyone gets a nice week off and comes back refreshed ahead of the MOST TERRIFYING ELECTION SEASON OF OUR LIVES.
No pressure.
Well, well, well, look who’s back: Alec Baldwin has returned to assist with a cold open, but not as Trump for a refreshing change. Instead, he plays Bret Baier of Fox News for his contentious interview with Kamala Harris, in which Baier talked over the Vice President, interrupted her, and played misleading clips. Honestly, the sketch is barely a spoof of how the actual interview played out; Baier was basically this aggressive, and playing to an audience of one.
The sketch is fine (if overly long), and I think Stephen Colbert managed to get to the heart of this exchange in a much pithier fashion.
Grade: B+
Michael Keaton’s monologue is essentially an excuse for Andy Samberg and Mikey Day to dress up as Beetlejuice. That’s it. That’s the entire “joke.”
Grade: B-
Shop TV is back, and they are selling Halloween Zombie Eye cookies this time. Except … the cookies … they look very much like a different body part, one that requires Shop TV producer, Odell, to put up a TV-MA warning on the screen.
As always, the sketch is juvenile and stupid and pretty funny.
Grade: A
The Please Don’t Destroy boys are back for the first time this season, and they are going skydiving with a crew that is giving off bad vibes and worse luck. It’s not their funniest sketch, but it is a nice return.
Grade: A-
An interracial couple in 1955 try to convince their parents that they should be together, but the white parents aren’t convinced until their son sings a song he wrote for his Black girlfriend: the noxious 2009 Train song, “Hey, Soul Sister.” The song, which is so bad the Village Voice described it as “an orgy where bad ideas trade STDs, and the most syphilitic brain-fart stumbled in drunk from a Smash Mouth show … From Smash Mouth, Train picked up an earworm that burrowed into society’s asshole, laid 4.7 million iTunes eggs, and gave birth to a grey cloud of banality that covers the Earth” and that Mother Jones said is “so white, Sarah Palin just named it her running mate for 2012,” is unsurprisingly a huge hit with the white parents but causes the Black family to rescind their blessing.
I mean, it truly is a terrible song. (Points deducted for the writers having no idea how to end this.)
Grade: B-
I’m not sure why it took SNL so long to revive this TikTok bit, in which you watch someone scroll through their feed, pausing here to watch a guy taste test a disgusting-looking burger, or watch a 23-year-old trad wife mother of 10 make paper from scratch, or Houston’s former rapping weatherman do the worm while warning about a catastrophic event.
Maybe they forgot about it until they went back and rewatched this week’s musical guest, Billie Eilish’s very good 2021 episode, and were reminded that this is a very versatile and funny format for a bit? Whatever it is, more TikTok bits, please: they allow for pretty much everyone from the cast to participate and offer enough variety that the sketch doesn’t go stale at the three-minute mark.
Grade: A
Thanks to a completely insane week politically — a Trump dance party just being the start of it — “Weekend Update” has plenty of material to work with, and they don’t disappoint. Even the non-political bits are pretty funny this week.
Grade: A+
New cast member Emil Wakim comes to the “Weekend Update” desk for the first time to discuss his ethnicity as a Lebanese Christian, and how Arabs are just “Spicy Greeks.” He’s charming, and manages to deflect a poorly received joke onto Colin Jost, an important “Weekend Update” skill for any young’n to develop.
Grade: B+
Sarah Sherman returns to the desk to talk about the recent return of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and to torture Colin Jost with details about her underwear.
Grade: A-
It’s like Cash Cab, but instead of being a real game show, Uber passengers are subjected to their driver’s conspiracy theories and the prize is an opened bottle of hot water.
Grade: B-
So here, Michael Meyers’ choreography for a new Halloween movie is drafted by a gay choreographer. It’s exactly as flamboyant as you expect it to be.
I don’t know if this is it, guys. If this had been on the show 25 years ago, no one would have blinked twice. “Come on, it’s the 90’s” — Michael Che’s new catchphrase. But even 10, 15 years ago, it would have been flagged as pretty homophobic, and I’m not sure shoving Bowen in the bit at the end saves it. Maybe I’m being too sensitive.
Grade: C+
A young couple’s parents are meeting for dinner for the first time when the Dad strikes up a conversation with the waitress about a former flame of his, which leads to her reminiscing about an ex. And that’s it. It doesn’t go anywhere else. I can only assume this is based on some real-life experience of one of the writers where they were at the table during an awkward exchange between a customer and a server? Maybe? But it’s not translating here at all.
Grade: C
Cut for Time:
Here, Michael Longfellow and Marcello Hernandez explain they tried to go as doctors for Halloween, but were mistaken for something else entirely. They then offer other Halloween costumes that might have two interpretations and genuinely, guys, this one made me laugh out loud. Shame it was cut.
Saturday Night Live airs at 10:30/11:30 p.m. Saturdays on NBC and streams on Peacock.
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