Saturday Night Live Season 50 Premiere Limps Through Stale Bits And Wastes The Brilliant Jean Smart

“Saturday Night Live” certainly didn’t kick off their milestone 50th season with a bang. However, we shouldn’t really be surprised. Historically, the season premieres of “SNL” aren’t great episodes, mostly because the writers and cast members are a bit rusty after having the entire summer away from the show, and they often have to cycle through some tired material that is already stale by the time it makes it in front of cameras in Studio 8H. 

Unfortunately, that means “Hacks” star Jean Smart didn’t get their best material, and the result was a middling episode with the sketches ranging from average to embarrassing. It’s nothing to worry about, but for anyone who needed to be convinced that “SNL” still has the goods, this episode probably didn’t do the trick. But that’s also what makes “SNL” one of the most interesting comedy shows to watch. Anything can happen, and sometimes it’s great, but you can only be so mad if the show doesn’t have the goods every episode. It’s a miracle the show even makes it to air every single week. Still, I can’t help but wish Jean Smart got a better opportunity to shine after her Emmy win for “Hacks” a couple weeks ago.

Anyway, at the very least, “SNL” revealed some of the guest star roster that we’ll see rolled out intermittently as we delve further into election season. Maya Rudolph made her triumphant return as Vice President Kamala Harris, and she was joined by a couple other “SNL” alums in the form of Andy Samberg as Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff and the beloved Dana Carvey as President Joe Biden. But that’s not all, because “SNL” also debuted their vice presidential candidate picks too, with cast member Bowen Yang making a surprising but satisfying debut as JD Vance, and comedian Jim Gaffigan appearing as vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (one of our picks for the role). And of course, James Austin Johnson reprised his pitch perfect impression of Donald Trump. But did that sketch need to be 13 minutes long? Probably not.

Let’s dig into the highs — or at least the middles — and lows of Jean Smart’s hosting debut for the 50th season premiere of “Saturday Night Live.”

Spirit Halloween – For an episode that was mostly subpar, the single pre-recorded sketch came out on top, and it’s timed perfectly to the arrival of fall. As Spirit Halloween stores are popping up, we get this sentimental sketch that paints the season store’s arrival as a charitable arrival in struggling communities. Framed as a touching commercial, the likes of Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner, and Michael Longfellow talk about how Spirit Halloween stores appear for six weeks and hightail it out of there. They take an abandoned Auto Zone where a murder happened and turn it into a thriving Halloween store… where a murder happened. 

For me, it’s the dramatic framing of the commercial that makes the gag land much more firmly than it otherwise might have. Taking something like Spirit Halloween stores, with their goofy generic Halloween costume names for copyrighted characters and likenesses, as seriously as your average charitable cause just strikes the perfect chord. Shout-out to Mikey Day for being a great pervert too. 

I Love Lucy – If there’s one other sketch that came close to being great, it was this riff on “I Love Lucy.” As nonsensical as it is, this faux episode of CNN’s “History of the Sitcom” highlights the rarely seen footage of the original version of the classic sitcom, featuring Jean Smart as a more dramatic version of Lucy not played by Lucille Ball. The concept itself is really funny, and I wish they would have taken it a little further. Jean Smart’s scornful delivery of, “Are you gay?” to Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo (Marcello Hernandez) just goes to show you how superb Smart can be when you give her the right material. 

Textbook Writer – Leaning more into the middle, we’ve got this sketch where Jean Smart plays a romance novel writer who has tried her hand at writing a math textbook for schools. While this is a great way to use Jean Smart’s sultry voice, something was off with the timing of this one. There were several jokes that just didn’t land for one reason or another, like that t-shirt jab at the beginning arriving to the sound of silence. Furthermore, Smart was clearly having a bit of trouble with the lines. Though she never quite derailed the sketch, it made it hard to get into a good flow. 

Harris and Trump Rallies Cold Open – That brings us to the political cold open, which audiences were surely excited to see after a summer of election insanity across the board. From Joe Biden dropping out of the race to Tim Walz joining the Harris team, not to mention all of the nonsense coming out of the mouth of Trump, there was plenty to cover, and with a 13-minute sketch, “SNL” tried to grab a little of everything. 

The good news is that bringing Jim Gaffigan, Andy Samberg, and Dana Carvey into to the mix made things a lot of fun, and of course Maya Rudolph is a treasure. But the sketch simply went on for too long, and the jokes felt like they’d been sitting in a notebook for a couple months. There were some bright spots, like fitting an allusion to Diddy’s freak-offs into Trump’s ludicrous claim about dogs and cats being eaten by Haitian immigrants in Ohio. On top of that, Carvey’s meandering, rambling Joe Biden makes me wish that we had him around sooner. But I wish “SNL” would be a little more discerning and a little less self-indulgent when it comes to giving so much time to these political cold opens, even during election season. This is just something we’ll have to accept for the next month. 

Even though most of the episode was average, there were two sketches that felt like complete failures. One was packed full of worn out jokes about people and topics that had long since passed relevancy and timeliness, and the other was based entirely on a physical gag that just didn’t translate to any significant laughter. 

$100,000 Pyramid – When this first began, I was actually interested in seeing “SNL” tackle their reliable combination of game shows and celebrity impressions, especially since it veered away from their usual “Family Feud” approach. But as soon as I saw Chloe Fineman as the viral “Hawk Tua” girl, who stopped being funny the same week that she took the internet by storm, my eyes rolled into the back of my head and never came back. Well, maybe that’s not fair. Even though sneaking more timely political satire into this sketch in the form of controversial North Carolina Governor Mark Robinson felt like “SNL” was trying too hard to hit on headlines, Kenan Thompson was great in the role, and Marcello Hernandez’s impression of Bad Bunny is fantastic. It’s just a shame the other half of the sketch was embarrassingly bad. A “Chimp Crazy” parody? Not even that good chimp puppet could make this work. 

Real Housewives of Santa Fe – If you’re basing a sketch on any of the trashy antics of whatever “Real Housewives” show is airing on Bravo this month, that’s not a great start. However, that framework was merely a trojan horse for a different gag entirely. Unfortunately, it was one that didn’t pay off at all. The gag is Andrew Dismukes as a restaurant server who arrives at the table, in the middle of the housewives bickering, as he holds a couple of trays of smoking hot fajitas. It’s a physical comedy bit that has Dismukes struggling to hold on to the steaming plates, dropping the tray and skillets onto the table and making a mess. But unlike similar bits, such as Ego Nwodim’s Lisa from Temecula in Pedro Pascal’s February 2023 epsiode, the physical element didn’t bring any big laughs. If anything, it felt like not enough of a mess was made, and it just felt awkward. Even for a sketch that only last under four minutes, it felt like it went on forever. 

Though not quite as bad as the above bits, Bowen Yang’s Charli xcx talk show also felt like a dud, mostly because of hackneyed bits based on old material.

Weekend Update is the one place that can get away with summer catch-up a little bit easier than the rest of the sketch comedy series. Colin Jost even addresses how often people talk about “SNL” missing out on so much material over the summer. But as Jost and Michael Che prove, there’s still plenty of material to mine for punchlines, and they can touch upon summer news without feeling too late. That one jab at Democrats knowing how to get rid of a presidential candidate was brutal but hilarious. Furthermore, Che wasted no time shifting into edgy material, and I loved his response to groans for a certain joke with, “It’s the ’90s, baby!”

The first half of Jost and Che’s Weekend Update is above, and you can see the second half of Che and Jost’s headline jokes over here.

Meanwhile, I wanted to give a shout out to Bowen Yang’s best bit of the night, a much more timely reference that landed much more firmly than the Charli xcx talk show that came later in the night. At the desk, Yang suited up as adorably baby hippo Moo Deng, who has been charming the internet with his wet and wild silliness, biting water streams from hoses and chomping at his trainer’s legs. Yang plays Moo Deng as a stressed out star who just wants to do his job and be left alone. Obviously, the best part is Yang biting curiously at a hose being sprayed at him from off-camera, which eventually makes its way over to Jost. Here’s a good example of how to do a messy, physical comedy bit right. 

Right out of the gate, “SNL” released a pair of sketches that ended up being cut for time. It’s a shame they didn’t make it into the show, because both of them are better than several of the sketches that made it to air, especially an Andrew Dismukes pre-tape special.

A Father’s Promise – This is exactly the kind of Andrew Dismukes sketch that I love. Using the familiar set-up of a kid who just wants their hard-working father to make it to his baseball game, we get a fantastic bit of escalation as Dismukes (playing the father) reveals that he got fired, invested a lot of the family’s money into a real life “Mario Kart” idea, and may need to dig into savings and sell some of his wife’s jewelry to get by. It doesn’t matter than Dismukes still looks like a young man, even with grayed hair and a fake mustache, because the way he plays it is just so funny. The interaction between Dismukes and the umpire and one of the parents adds to the jokes, and it even has a satisfying ending. I’m assuming this didn’t make the cut because Lorne Michaels opted to have more live sketches rather than having two pre-tapes. But when it comes to timing, this was just four seconds shorter than the awful “Real Housewives” sketch, so a poor decision was made. 

Blonde Dragon People – Finally, while not quite as funny as Andrew Dismukes’ sketch, this “House of the Dragon” riff was solid. Though it digs into criticisms of the show that have stretched back to the original run of “Game of Thrones,” there are still some amusing bits. The sudden turn into Andy Samberg and musical guest Jelly Roll turning up as Legolas and Samwise Gamgee was a fun addition, not to mention lampooning the ever changing names of HBO’s streaming app. Again, it would have been nice to have this one in the episode, but since it lasted a little too long at just over six minutes, it probably didn’t easily fit. Yet another reason to cut down the cold open, I think.

While this was a rough start for the 50th season of “SNL,” there’s always promise on the horizon. Nate Bargatze will return to host the show for a second time on October 5. Be sure to stay tuned for our recap and review, and you can get even more about “SNL” from “The Ten to One Podcast,” available wherever you get your podcasts.