Jean Smart hosted the Season 50 premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” which featured a political cold open with Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan, Andy Samberg and Dana Carvey.
In the 50th season premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” not much was made about it being 50 historic years, save for a few mentions in the monologue and at the top of “Weekend Update.” But that’s all right, the show will get a proper celebration in February with a three-hour special. For this first new episode with guest host Jean Smart (quite a legend herself), it felt as if the series had a lot to get to, and barely enough time with only 90 minutes to cover everything that happened over the summer, or even the last two weeks.
Moo Deng, Eric Adams, the Harris-Trump debate, the summer of Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson: the show had it all. And it had a game host in Smart, a recent Emmy-winner for “Hacks”, who is always great, but who wasn’t especially served with the kind of home-run sketches you’d expect someone of her stature to get for a big season opener.
Something about the pace of some of the sketches didn’t align with Smart’s crackerjack skill at one-liners (razor sharp in “Hacks”), like a scene about a romance writer who spiced up a math textbook for kids. Don’t put Smart on your show and then saddle her with reading long stretches of text from a book in front of her face. She wasn’t given a lot to do in the debut of a Charli XCX show called “The Talk Talk Show,” hosted by Bowen Yang (as XCX), where she employed a thick German accent to play a fashion icon. And in an end-of-episode closer about the “Real Housewives of Santa Fe,” the sketch was more about steaming fajitas than the featured housewives.
Much better was a spoof of a CNN documentary on “I Love Lucy,” in which Smart played a dramatic actress who took on the title role before Lucille Ball was cast (with Marcello Hernandez as Desi Arnaz), and a “$100,000 Pyramid” parody featuring Smart as Tonia Haddix (with a monkey puppet) from “Chimp Crazy.”
It was the kind of week where the regular sketches took a backseat to a very strong cold open and a “Weekend Update” with a whole summer’s worth of weird news to feast on. It was also a week with a new opening credits sequence and the introduction of three new cast members (but you didn’t see much of them in this episode), after the departures of Chloe Troast, Punkie Johnson and Molly Kearney.
