SNL Open Thread: Octavia Spencer Hosts One Weird-Ass Episode
Saturday Night Live is back from break with an episode that had some interesting ideas but felt creaky and undercooked overall. There’s good and bad news here. The whole thing wasn’t very funny, but it ended with a couple sketches too bizarre to totally dismiss. That’s the nicest way I can think of to say this episode wasn’t very good.
Things started off strong with a Jeff Sessions sketch that dug a little deeper than just relying on the surface similarity between McKinnon’s Sessions and Forrest Gump. The chocolates joke was good, and the Kellyanne has no-legs bit was great (a news item McKinnon would reference a couple times later in the show). The Octavia Spencer ending, however, wasn’t so awesome.
Which is sadly appropriate. Spencer was game and tried her best (it turns out she’s pretty good at impressions), but she had a rough time reading cue cards and her monologue was literally two jokes: one about how many nurses she’s played and another conflating this year’s three big black movies into one less-confusing-for-white-people picture.
A lot of the normally slam dunk stuff also felt lackluster, though I’m seeing a lot of positive responses online. Maybe I’m a jerk, but I thought the whole Guy in Bar thing was a lazy barebones execution of an idea done way better years ago by Amy Schumer. Likewise, the TBD Republican Savior ad never developed beyond one very simple joke.
It wasn’t all bad, though. The big impression sketch was blatantly set up, but holy shit they got a lot of impressions in there, a surprising number of which were of present and past SNL players. It's been a while since we had one of these, and I wish the show could find more things for Melissa Villaseñor to do. She’s great but hardly ever shows up.
And then things got weird toward the end, starting with a real WTF sketch in which Beck Bennett tries to get his job back through the magic of chocolate and then an admirably dumb bit where Octavia Spencer actually owns Spencer’s Gifts and needs new novelty ideas from her staff. Neither were actually funny, but both felt like we got to watch stuff that had been cut after dress and then frantically reassembled at the last minute.
The only sketch that really won me over was the “Young Blood” short, which did a great job turning the sage chess player trope on its head. The rest of this episode was either okay or just bad. Hopefully things turn around in time for Scarlett Johansson’s episode next week.
