Everything you need to know from ‘SNL’ hosted by Keke Palmer, including the cold open last night.
After two Saturdays off for the Thanksgiving break, the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live returned to 30 Rock for the first of three new episodes to round out 2022. They came back with an added sense of purpose, thanks to their special guest host manifesting success and then some! They took plenty of big swings, and while a few missed, they also hit plenty of homers.
The biggest miss of the night came early, as the cold open felt as lackluster as the Republican campaigns for the U.S. Senate themselves. Geez. When Kenan Thompson’s Herschel Walker couldn’t identify GOP Sens. John Cornyn (Mikey Day) and Marsha Blackburn (Cecily Strong), most of America watching along was wondering, too. Not even James Austin Johnson’s Mitch McConnell could breathe enough life into this premise, of trying to rally Walker in a last-gasp pep talk before the Georgia runoff election. They could’ve just had Kenan read Herschel’s very real stump speech about werewolves and vampires and called it a sketch. Somehow, they chose to put in more effort for less of a result instead. Kind of like the actual campaign? So that’s kinda funny, but not in the way they intended.
A star is born, and soon, too shall a star’s unborn child!
Keke Palmer made a gleeful pregnancy reveal during her monologue, and demonstrated throughout the episode that she has the chops to run the late-night gauntlet with the best of them at SNL. As she said in her monologue, she’d dreamed of performing on this show since she was a child actor, and wondered if she’d be a Maya Rudolph, Eddie Murphy or Kristen Wiig type. Wonder no more. Being herself proved more than enough.
The 1984 soap opera sketch relied a bit on tone and a lot on the sight gag of employing obvious stunt doubles for the catfight between Cecily’s and Keke’s characters, with the delicate staging and camera cuts back and forth between the real cast members and the fakes. Who were the doubles? Might it have been even funnier if the stunt doubles were cast members, too, who felt all the actual pain? Oh well. It still felt slightly playful the way they played it.
The show has enjoyed good fortune during the holidays with themed group-effort music videos, and “Cuffing Season” was no exception, as Cecily, Keke, Ego Nwodim and even Punkie Johnson expressed their desire for some big old boys to keep them warm through the winter.
Then came a live PSA by the “United Tingz of Aubrey,” in which Ego, Punkie and Keke were joined by Sarah Sherman, Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner and a bevy of female extras, all with sob stories about encountering Drake only to wind up being used as references in his songs. Ego almost broke midway through, but Keke got the best of it, playing herself so she could claim that “In My Feelings” ruined her life because she’s Keke, “just not that KiKi!”
At employee training for the Hello Kitty store in NYC includes fun facts from Cecily and Molly Kearney which don’t sound fun at all to trainees played by Bowen and Keke.
