Tag: saturday night live

Saturday Night Live
Dakota Johnson & Turnstile
October 3, 2026

Look. Dakota Johnson is not for everyone. She has a very laconic, even terse delivery, and she’s not exactly known as a comic actor. She’s not wacky. And despite that, to their credit, Saturday Night Live managed to find a couple of places where her very wry personality worked well in this episode.

But for the most part, the episode was a disappointment for a couple of reasons. First, as noted, Dakota Johnson can be funny when the writing is in her wheelhouse (see this great “Please Don’t Destroy” bit from the last time she hosted): namely, when Johnson is being mean and dismissive. When they ask her to do an impersonation or play a character (I’m thinking specifically about the Game of Thrones spoof in this episode), she’s just not up to the task; she lacks goofiness.

But the disappointment in the episode doesn’t land entirely at Johnson’s feet — the writing just wasn’t there this week. The episode felt like a hodgepodge of sketches that any host could have been plugged into, bits that they didn’t have to worry a serious actor would mess up. But the sketches were also just weak, especially in the back half of the episode. Listen, it wasn’t as bad as last week, and Turnstile was a great musical act, but it is an episode no one is going to remember two months from now.

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