Washington dreams again as Nate Bargatze hosts ‘SNL’
The comedian rescued the episode after its political cold open fell flat.
I loved having Nate Bargatze back this weekend. He scored the No. 2 spot on my rankings of Season 49 hosts, and he didn’t disappoint when he hosted the show for the second time. And, yes, he brought “Washington’s Dream” back too.
While Bargatze didn’t disappoint, the episode kicked off with the latest wave of celebrity cameos — and they’re already looking threadbare.
Turning SNL over to celebrity cameos was always a risky move. This was a lesson that Lorne Michaels should have learned after things soured with Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump, Jim Carrey as Joe Biden and the countless celebrity cameos that took over SNL during the 2016/2020 era.
Celebrity cameos are not a sustainable game. The celebrity cameos are bad. And yesterday’s cold open proved that.
After people were sucked in last weekend with those cameos from Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Jim Gaffigan and Dana Carvey, the bottom fell out of the celebrity cameo game this weekend. With the buzz of the season premiere gone, everything in the cold open either felt forced or fell flat.
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Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg as Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff had little to contribute. Dana Carvey as Joe Biden was unnecessary.
I’ve spent years now trying to convince everyone that SNL is better when it focuses on its actual cast instead of handing the reins over to celebrities. Hopefully Lorne Michaels realizes that the show has already hit a wall in the season’s second episode when it comes to these cameos and recalibrates before SNL winds up burning an entire season for this vanity project.
During Weekend Update, Michael Che and Colin Jost joked about Donald Trump and Elon Musk hosting the show’s Christmas episode …
We don’t often talk about SNL’s musical guests during Deep SNL Thoughts. But we need to talk about Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
You need to wear shoes if you’re on SNL. Martin not wearing shoes during both of his musical performances was a million times worse than Ashlee Simpson lip synching. You don’t have to be the bad guy, Chris Martin. Wear shoes. Everyone wears shoes.
COLD OPEN
VP Debate 2024
There was zero reason for Maya Rudolph or Andy Samberg or Dana Carvey to be on SNL this week. The political cold open was focused on the vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But Lorne Michaels wrote the check for his celebrity cameos, so he damn well needed to make sure they were in this episode.
The pairing of Bowen Yang’s Vance and Jim Gaffigan’s Walz is incredibly interesting as each one represents an opposite end of the portrayal spectrum.
SNL has committed so hard to the conceit of a famous person just saying what another famous person said for pretty much all of its political portrayals, but the show chose to have Yang create a character for Vance. I prefer the latter option — it’s what we saw Will Ferrell do with George W. Bush — but the very specific inconsistency here is strange. Especially when you get Vance and Walz in the same sketch.
It also turns out that we saw the entirety of Carvey’s Biden portrayal last episode. It’s a good impression — as long you don’t need him to do it a second time.
THE MONOLOGUE
When Nate Bargatze hosted SNL last season, he delivered one of the longer monologues we’ve ever seen. (Comedians tend to dominate this list thanks to them repurposing their standup routines as monologues.) Bargatze kept things shorter this time around, clocking in at less than eight minutes.
