Saturday Night Live opens with scattershot sketch about the Super Bowl
Saturday Night Live opens with a scattershot sketch about the Super Bowl. On CBS’s pre-game show, host James Brown (Kenan Thompson) – “no, not that one”–and panel emphasize how diverse Sunday’s program will be.
In the spirit of the NFL’s recent outreach to children via Nickelodeon, the game will also air on Bravo, where it’s being advertised as Old Hag versus Young Slut. The commercials will also attempt to appeal to all sides of America: a Cheeze-It ad invokes the Civil Rights and Black Live Matter movements, while one for Papa John’s Pizza promises “No child sex trafficking in the basement.”
After brief interviews with dueling coaches/doppelgangers Andy Reid and Bruce Arians – Aidy Bryant cleverly plays both – the panel gives their predictions for what other hairbrained ads we’ll see, a list that includes “wet ass Pepsi”, “the Kia hamsters do a murder suicide”, and “the green M&M goes full nude”.
The show probably would have done a better job sending up the Super Bowl if last week’s host, John Krasinski, were around to play Tom Brady, but what can you do?
Actor Daniel Levy hosts for the first time. The Schitt’s Creek star leads viewers on a backstage tour of the studio to show off how serious the show is taking Covid precautions. Along with overzealous safety officers and bleach sprinklers, he runs into his father (and Schitt’s Creek co-star), Eugene Levy, who’s enjoying his son’s big night from within a giant plastic quarantine box. No offense to Levy the younger, but you have to wonder how he ended up hosting SNL when his father, a beloved comedic actor of several decades and former cast member of SCTV, has never had the honor.
At the newly reopened Universal Studios tram tour, Levy’s nervous,
over-caffeinated tour guide-in-training immediately goes off script, laying into wildly inappropriate fan theories (Back to the Future is actually about grooming and molestation) and personal details about his sex life (Wayne Knight, aka “Newman from Seinfeld”, is his sexual “softener”). Ego Nwodim gets the laugh line of the night when she interjects that her softener is “Mr. Bean – goofy dudes don’t get it slick for me.”
An ad for Zwillow plays like a phone-sex commercial, selling late-thirty-somethings on the idea that “the pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other people’s houses”.
Then, a Covid friend pod justify getting together for the Super Bowl by recounting how safe they’ve been this past year, breaking quarantine only to shop for food and essentials, take part in wrestling clubs, have “raw dog sex with strangers at the park”, and fly all over the world for business meetings. The sketch contains some good lines, but it’s dragged down by a tacked-on coda featuring Kate McKinnon as Dr Fauci and Bowen Yang as PSY (SNL really has its finger on the pulse, huh?).
For Black History Month, the BET talk show Lifting Our Voices dedicates an episode to white allies, welcoming guests such as a well-meaning, but reckless, math teacher (says her former student, “I mean, she trying … but maybe too much”); a self-aggrandizing protester, who interrupts his friend to announce that “white people need to listen”; and a clueless husband in a mixed-race marriage, who his wife describes as “a very kind man with a lot of money … I mean, he’s rich, like from birth”. Kyle Mooney is very good as the dopey, pony-tailed wife guy.
Singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers is the night’s musical guest. Dressed in skeleton singlets, she and her band perform the song Kyoto.
On Weekend Update, Colin Jost welcomes an uber-woke couple who want to cancel small children for unknowingly problematic behavior. As it goes on, it becomes clear this is the show’s response to charges of transphobia following last week’s segment. It totally fails as a rebuttal, avoiding any mention of the actual controversy or criticism in favor of taking broad (and therefore blunted) swipes at cancel culture as a whole.
Update’s second guests are young YouTube stars Twins, The New Trend, who react to famous songs while listening to them for the first time. Michael Che plays them a number of “classics” – the Friends theme, Baby Shark Dance, the Meow Mix commercial jingle, the alphabet nursery rhyme – and is dismayed to learn the duo is unfamiliar with them, even though that’s the whole point.
Next up is a musical number set in a Broadway sports bar, in which the cast performs a supposedly famous “football song” called Hot Damn. Save for Thompson as a skeptical patron, everyone seems way more focused on getting their blocking right than making sure the jokes land. This is followed by another meandering, airless sketch, this time about passive aggressive wedding guests.
Bridgers returns to the stage to perform I Know the End. She goes full-on rock star, shredding during the song’s doomy back half before partaking in some proper axe smashing.
The last sketch celebrates the 10th anniversary of the It Gets Better campaign, with several of the show’s LGBTQ members (Levy, McKinnon, Yang, Punkie Johnson) discussing how life did get better for them, at least until regular, everyday stuff – mean friends, taxes, divorce, and one sinister iguana – turned up to make it periodically worse. The iguana stuff gets some good laughs, but the rest of it, not so much.
This is emblematic of the episode as a whole, with everything being either one-note or all over the place. Nothing was terrible, but nothing, aside from Bridgers excellent second performance, really worked either.