COLD OPENING: The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer

PREMISE: George Santos (Bowen Yang) holds his final press conference,

• I’m not liking Sarah Sherman as Wolf Blitzer. It feels very in line with the casting of Kate McKinnon as every male Trump sycophant under the sun, even if Sarah has yet to cross that line into ‘smug and hammy’ that tainted Kate’s performance. This sort of casting just feels very cheap and played out.
• MASSIVE applause for Bowen’s George Santos. I’m just as tired as Bowen’s Santos as I am everything else he’s done this season, but he actually had some funny back-and-forth’s with the rest of the cast during the Q&A segment.
• The Candle in the Wind parody was absolutely awful. It killed any momentum, not to mention it felt very self-indulgent, which is a feeling many of Bowen’s pieces have been giving off lately. I didn’t laugh at a single line, and it was clear Bowen was doing this more to amuse himself than the audience. Bowen has become such an extremely unlikeable performer for me.

RATING: * ½ 

MONOLOGUE: Emma Stone Joins the Five-Timers Club

• Funny bit with Lorne being revealed as Emma’s husband that she might while working on the show.
• This is a wild crowd tonight; the applause for Tina Fey went on forever. She seemed very surprised by the welcome, too.
• Tina didn’t really have any funny lines during her part.
• Candace Bergen adds some life to this with a few funny lines, such as the one about a peephole in the ladies’ wing of the 5 Timers Club so can Martin Short can watch.
• This is dying a pretty fast death. Maybe the 5 Timers Club shtick should be retired; there hasn’t really been a particularly funny introduction sequence since Timberlake’s in 2013.

RATING: **

SKETCH: Question Quest

PREMISE: A game show contestant (Emma Stone) wins the host’s (Michael Longfellow) pet tortoise, much to her confusion.

• A lead role for Michael Longfellow? Is the sky falling?
• In all seriousness, great to see Michael FINALLY get a real lead role and he did a great job here. He had the same touch Bill Hader had whenever he played a game show host, where there seemed to be something sinister and dastardly lurking beneath the surface.
• The premise of Longfellow giving away his pet tortoise to Emma as a game show prize was funny, and this got better as it went along. This was a great use of the weird, off-kilter energy I desperately want to see more of from Longfellow.
• Punkie was hilarious in her supporting role as an overly confident but very dumb contestant. Her confusing ‘tortoise’ with ‘tortilla’ was especially amusing.

RATING: ****

MUSIC VIDEO: Fully Naked in New York

PREMISE: New Yorkers find freedom in public nudity.

• What a concept.
• ANOTHER Bowen musical piece? Not looking forward to this one.
• Some nice cinematography to this piece, and the song is a bit catchy, but nothing here is making me laugh except Sarah trying to catch rats.
• They’re really getting mileage out of Chloe Troast singing.

RATING: * ½ 

SKETCH: Tree Lighting Performance

PREMISE: Treece Henderson (Kenan Thompson) and his band (Bowen Yang, Emma Stone) perform at a tree lighting at a hotel.

• Oh dear God, is this Kenan as Treece Henderson?
• Yep, this is one of those Treece Henderson sketches.
• This honestly wasn’t so bad. I got some laughs from a couple of Kenan’s goofy lines, Emma’s lewd trumpet player character, and even Bowen with that raspy voice made me chuckle a few times.
• Kenan’s “What are you, a human dumbass?” was hilarious.
• As usual with these sketches, they go on too long and throw in one too many jokes that just don’t work. Kenan is forced to ham it up in an effort to keep the energy going and the whole sketch feels sloppy and underwritten as a result.

RATING: **

PLEASE DON’T DESTROY: AI

PREMISE: AI technology recreates missing Emma Stone footage using Punkie Johnson.

• This was a great rebound after last week’s very average PDD.
• Punkie continues to have a stealthy MVP season. She was hilarious as the AI version of Emma Stone, and her constant horniness towards Martin was great.
• This got even funnier with Marcelo as Ben and everyone else acting like Ben speaking Spanish was totally normal.
• Priceless delivery of ‘let’s do it’ from Martin, a great capper to this very funny PDD video.

RATING: ****

SKETCH: What’s in the Kiln?

PREMISE: Hosts (Chloe Feinman, Heidi Gardner) and a guest (Emma Stone) discuss pottery.

• Some good character work and chemistry between Heidi and Chloe here, but the writing was nothing. I couldn’t find a single comedic moment or hook throughout this entire sketch. It was literally just talking.
• I guess the joke was how bad the pottery looked? If so, it didn’t make me laugh.

RATING: *

WEEKEND UPDATE WITH MICHAEL CHE & COLIN JOST

• Best Jokes: WNBA
• A pretty dreadful Update for Jost and Che. Barely any one of the jokes made me so much as chuckle, and the ones that I forgot about within seconds. It is so beyond time for Jost and Che to hand over the Update desk to fresher hands.
• Longfellow’s Old Fashioned Cigarette commentary gave him more much needed airtime tonight. He had several funny lines here and got to showcase his usual brand of dark, patience testing comedy. I especially liked his aside to the camera telling kids ‘cigarettes make you skinny and popular.”

RATING: **

SKETCH: Make Your Own Kind of Music

PREMISE: Mama Cass (Chloe Troast) and her producer (Emma Stone) discuss the potential uses for her hit song “Make Your Own Kind of Music.”

• Chloe does a very good impression of Mama Cass, and I’m glad her singing is becoming a weekly occurence. 
• This sketch was absolutely pointless, despite Emma’s uber-comitted performance. It encapsulated the sort of TikTok-inspired writing that often taints sketches of this nature, and on top of that the central joke (incongrously happy songs soundtracking violent or depressing movie trailers) just wasn’t that funny.
• Emma at least totally committed to her character, which was at least somewhat amusing.

RATING: * 1/2 

SKETCH: Posters

PREMISE: Posters (Stone, Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson, Mikey Day) try to help student (Marcelo Hernandez) with physics.

• The return of these? Okay, then.
• Marcelo is an overall much better performer, but I kind of missed Pete in these. Pete just does the whole ‘vapid doofus’ routine a bit more convincingly.
• The jokes about Mikey’s David Beckham not looking as attractive as he usually does got played out real quick, and is a joke that has been used with Mikey one too many times.
• How many times throughout his tenure has Kenan used the word ‘dookie’?
• I absolutely hate the voice Emma uses for this character. I get that it’s an accurate take on this type of obnoxious TikTok-based model, but it still grates on me and further hinders any enjoyment I can get out of this sketch.
• Yea, this was weak. Once again, nothing here made me laugh and it just became a chore too sit through after awhile.  

RATING: *

COMMERCIAL: Diet Coke by Olay

PREMISE: Olay uses a skin care ingredient women have been proven to love.

• It feels rare these days for the last sketch of the night to be a pre-tape.
• Also when was the last time the host wasn’t in the last sketch?
• This was a pretty funny fake ad, particularly the voiceover by JAJ, which had several great lines such as ” ingredients scientifically proven to be…Diet Coke” and “just soda stuff.”
• The cultish turn at the end was pretty amusing.

RATING: ***

EPISODE MVP: As good as Emma Stone is, I gotta give it to Michael Longfellow. Dude’s had a rough go at it this season with bland straight man roles and generally literal air time. Tonight, we saw the sinister, edgy side of Longfellow fans have been clamoring for all season, and he delivered in both his spotlight pieces.

BOTTOM LINE: Oof. SNL really whiffed with this one. It’s fitting that PDD and Longfellow had the night’s strongest pieces, since their style goes most directly against the tiresome crowdpleasing antics of the show’s ‘stars.’ We got a self-indulgent Bowen piece, SNL masturbating to itself with another Five Timers’ routine, and an absolute trash heap of an Update (minus Longfellow). Emma Stone’s previous episodes aren’t classics by any means, but you could always count on a couple of very strong, conceptual pieces that added style and variety to the show (Christmas Candle, Wells for Boys, The Actress). Tonight had nothing like that and largely wasted the always game actress in an episode ostensibly celebrating her.