Hosting “Saturday Night Live” right after winning an Academy Award can seem like a victory lap, but it’s also a way for a performer to show a TV audience that they’re much more than one iconic role.
Unfortunately Oscar winner Mikey Madison, fresh off her best actress win for “Anora,” didn’t get much opportunity to do so in her first time guest hosting “SNL.” Instead of leaning into her talents, as it did successfully a few weeks ago for Lady Gaga, the episode plopped Madison into a series of sketches where she was mostly playing a supporting role for cast members in warmed-over repeats of past sketches.
Instead of helping the host create new, memorable characters, Madison played a variation of an acting class character Charli XCX did in November with Marcello Hernández, a high school student in the cold open, the comedy-writer partner of a criminal who’s dying, someone trying to get out of jury duty, and an OB/GYN who keeps running into Barry, a midwife (Bowen Yang). It wasn’t until near the end of the show, in a game-show sketch called, “So Like … What Are We,” that Madison got to lead a sketch. It wasn’t one of the best pieces of the night, but it at least showed off Madison’s comedy chops that fans of Pamela Adlon’s FX show “Better Things” have known about for years.
It was a shame and a missed opportunity that an Oscar winner was relegated to supporting parts, which she played well, in mostly male-led sketches (the exception being the jury duty sketch with Ego Nwodim as judge). Even a Please Don’t Destroy video about Madison pining to do a prestige TV show about Spongebob Squarepants, with Madison made up as Squidward, was a recycled idea from when Bad Bunny appeared as Shrek.
Let’s hope she’s invited back and the show steps up with better, fresher material for her.
Musical guest Morgan Wallen performed “I’m The Problem” and “I’m A Little Crazy.”
The week’s cold open featured a furiously texting Defense Secretary Pete Hesgeth (Andrew Dismukes) unknowingly engaging with a group of high school girls in a group chat, a reference to the Signal chat scandal. As each participant read their texts aloud as they typed, Hesgeth threw in a mix of war plans, gifs and eggplant emojis. Vice President J.D. Vance (Yang) soon joined the chat from Greenland, where he was doing “mysterious and important work.” “Nobody knows why I’m here, especially me,” Vance complained. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (Hernández) tried to get information from the girls in order to get them deported by ICE, but not before the Atlantic’s Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg (Mikey Day) joined in. “Hesgeth, you have got to lose my number,” he said.
For her short monologue, Mikey Madison said she’s exhausted from her busy month and plans to sleep in April. She showed clips of characters she’s played in “Scream” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” who were both violently set on fire. “That’s range,” she joked. Madison shared that she was a home-schooled horse girl (“A nerd but with long hair”), revealed her twin brother in the audience, and said she’d demonstrate the pole-dancing skills she developed for “Anora.” A clumsy cut and a muscular body double made it clear the joke was on the audience: Madison wasn’t actually the one pole dancing.
Best sketch of the night: A line is forming even for this recap
A pre-taped musical number featured New Yorkers engaging in the city’s biggest craze: “Wait in a big, dumb line.” Lines for bagels that went viral, lines for gummy bears from a pop-up store, lines for viral matcha or cronuts. Sample lyric: “Line, line, line, line, what’s it for, must be divine.” Unfortunately, the long waits don’t always yield great rewards: the items are usually just fine or mid, like mediocre pizza, which they realize just as Joe Jonas shows up to sing about the joys of line-standing. It’s a great video to watch … while standing in line.
Also good: What if New York’s crazy design was on purpose?
It didn’t feature Mikey Madison at all, but one of the week’s highlights was an animated short featuring Michael Longfellow and Yang as two explorers in 1620 sketching out their plan for New York City. The streets are a mess at the bottom, the sections called “Square” are all triangles and the tunnels with trains (which haven’t been invented yet) don’t correlate to the weird streets at all. Sure, it’s reminiscent of the Nate Bargatze sketches in which he plays George Washington, but the goofy animation, with its pausing close-ups, gives it some extra zip.
‘Weekend Update’ winner: Wake up at 4:30 a.m., start chugging Saratoga water
Joann of Joann Fabrics (Ashley Padilla) lamented the bankruptcy of her company, but it was Devon Walker’s timely and on-point take down of influencer Ashton Hall’s viral morning routine video that wins the week on “Update.” Walker shared with Michael Che his own set of routine videos, which all take place from the “SNL” office where he lives. “I sacrificed my apartment. Some people call it eviction, I call it being locked in,” he said.
