No, ‘SNL’ doesn’t need Maya Rudolph to play Kamala Harris

I bet you thought this edition of Popculturology would be all about Deadpool & Wolverine, huh?

Well, I did see the movie last night. It’s fantastic. If you’ve spent the past few decades watching these Marvel movies, it’s probably going to mean something to you. (Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was only a small taste of the multiverse.) There’s no way to discuss Deadpool & Wolverine on its first full day of release, though, that wouldn’t spoil the movie. And I don’t want to do that to you all. So go see it today or this weekend, and then let me know on Twitter what you thought.

I’ll also be back on Saturday night or Sunday morning with a special edition of Popculturology to bring you all the news from Marvel Studios’ slate of announcements at San Diego Comic-Con.

Are we ready for another round of SNL: Celebrity Cameo Edition?

As the world processed the news over the weekend that President Joe Biden would not run for election and Democrats coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as their new nominee, a predictable yet misguided sentiment began to seem through social media:

SNL has to bring Maya Rudolph back to play Kamala Harris.

Rudolph is no stranger to playing Harris. After occasionally portraying the then-California senator on SNL during the 2020 Democratic primary, Lorne Michaels brought Rudolph on board full-time alongside Jim Carrey as Joe Biden during the race against Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

It was a dark time for SNL.

Carrey’s take on Biden was historically bad, unhinged from any real version of Biden. Even worse, it was the culmination of Michaels and SNL’s obsession with celebrity cameos, led by Alec Baldwin as Trump, that put an entire generation of the show’s cast on the back burner and deprived them of major chances to break through. Here’s what I wrote in December 2022:

If you’ve followed me on Twitter over the past five to seven years, especially on Saturdays for about 90 minutes beginning at 11:35 p.m., you most likely know my thoughts on how SNL lost its way during the Trump years.

For parts of five seasons, SNL became a showcase for celebrities portraying political figures: Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller, Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh, Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, Ben Stiller as Michael Cohen, James Corden as Boris Johnson. And the most dominant of all these portrayals, Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump.

The show’s celebrity stunt-casting juiced SNL’s ratings, and turned the weekly cold open into a guessing game of which famous person would show up.

All of this at the expense of the actual cast of SNL.

Roles like these have long been some of SNL’s most-prized opportunities. Pairing the right cast member with the right political figure — especially a president — can make a career. Will Ferrell is a hall-of-fame SNL cast member thanks to the years he spent defining how the public viewed George W. Bush.

After Biden won the 2020 presidential election, SNL scuttled its entire roster of celebrity cameos with zero fanfare or recognition that Baldwin, Carrey and Rudolph were gone.

While SNL has struggled to settle on a cast member to play Biden (James Austin Johnson had a pretty decent take, but the show needed him as Trump), Harris has been a non-factor. Punkie Johnson has played the vice president once or twice. As Biden and Harris settled into their roles as president and vice president, Harris wasn’t a flashy role. It wasn’t a headline-grabbing role.