Esther Zuckerman

The moment that Shane Gillis walked onto Saturday Night Live’s stage last night for his second hosting gig, he seemed to know the audience was not on his side.
Gillis arrived with history. In 2019, he was hired as a featured cast member but promptly fired after it came to light that he had used racist and homophobic slurs in his podcast. Instead of becoming a footnote in SNL history, Gillis transformed into a successful stand-up with a Netflix deal and a Bud Light ad campaign.

Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance.

When Saturday Night Live announced that Timothée Chalamet would be both the host and musical guest on this week’s episode, the reaction was largely: huh?
What would Chalamet, a skilled actor not usually known as a musical artist, perform? Would he revive his high-school rap alias Lil Timmy Tim? Reprise his role as Willy Wonka? Or would he just sing Bob Dylan songs, considering he has been on a long promotional tour for his turn as the folk artist in the biopic A Complete Unknown?

If you weren’t aware that Martin Short was hosting Saturday Night Live last night, you might have had a difficult time figuring that out. It’s not that Short wasn’t in sketches—he was, using his natural flair for showmanship as he sang about getting medicated for the holidays. It’s just that a lot of other celebrities were also there. Lots and lots of them: Melissa McCarthy, Tom Hanks, Kristen Wiig, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Rudd.

Since the June release of her critically acclaimed album Brat, Charli XCX has been making appearances exuding its titular ethos. Though the concept of “brat” has always been a little indefinable, all you’ve needed to do to understand it has been to look at XCX—her messy, chic black hair; pursed lips; and huge sunglasses all embody the je ne sais quoi of someone who has been out all night partying.

Michael Keaton is a movie star who has the air of just a regular dude.
That much was evident during his Saturday Night Live monologue last night, where he played the straight man to Mikey Day and Andy Samberg. The comedians were dressed as Beetlejuice, the beloved bio-exorcist character that Keaton reprised in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice earlier this year.

Ariana Grande is, notably, a good singer; she has a four-octave range that she uses for R&B ballads, pop bangers, and musical-theater showstoppers. But her stint hosting Saturday Night Live last night also proved that Grande is good at being a bad singer. In one of the episode’s first sketches, she played a bridesmaid performing a parody of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.

When Maya Rudolph returned to her old stomping grounds to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, the cast members Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman popped in during her monologue to declare her “mother”—and not only because she has four children. They also meant it in the slang sense of the word, which was derived from queer ballroom culture.

The Saturday Night Live cold open is usually a place for the series to do its most topical, often political, material. But an awkward sense of obligation hung over last night’s sketch, about campus protests surrounding the conflict in Gaza. The activism at colleges across the U.S. has been dominating the news, especially as the university and police responses have led to arrests.

Before Ryan Gosling played Ken in Barbie, he had a varied career. He was the romantic heart of The Notebook, the moody center of Drive, the slapstick king of The Nice Guys. But now it seems like he might always live in the shadow of a tanned, bleach-blond doll whose job is “beach.”
See, for example, Gosling’s Saturday Night Live monologue, in which he proudly announced that he was there to promote his new movie, The Fall Guy, and explained that he and Ken have broken up.

Often when a former cast member returns to host Saturday Night Live, they trot out their greatest hits. And, sure, when Kristen Wiig took the stage for the fifth time last night, she did return to one of her favorite characters: cranky Aunt Linda, who never seems to understand the point of the movie she’s reviewing (unless that movie is Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie). But Wiig largely did new material, proving how unmatched she is at breathing life into kooky, unexpected characters.

When Senator Katie Britt of Alabama gave the Republican response to the State of the Union address last Thursday, she introduced herself to America with a bizarre, dramatic speech. Set in a stark kitchen, and veering between folksy and distressed, it was ripe for parody. Naturally, Saturday Night Live would tackle it. But unexpectedly, it did so with the actor Scarlett Johansson—a much more familiar face to many Americans—who handled Britt’s odd performance brilliantly.

Sydney Sweeney seems to enjoy making jokes about how big her breasts are. She once announced that her grandparents declared that she had the “best tits in Hollywood.” And she alluded to her bra size in her Saturday Night Live monologue this weekend, in which she described how she presented her parents with a “backup plan” if her initial attempt to break into acting failed. A PowerPoint slide flashed on the screen that read: Plan B: Show Boobs. It got a knowing laugh.

Last night, audiences who tuned into Saturday Night Live to see The Bear star and Emmy winner Ayo Edebiri host for the first time were greeted with an awkward surprise: The sight of the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, trying her best to seem at ease opposite a fake Donald Trump. Haley popped up in the cold open, playing herself as a “concerned South Carolina voter” attending a CNN town hall with James Austin Johnson’s Trump. “Why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?” she asked.

Once upon a time, having Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live would have been a thrilling thing. In the mid-2000s, the pop star emerged as one of the show’s favorite recurring hosts, the kind of mega-famous celeb who seemed like he would be down for anything, such as dressing up in a giant mascot costume or putting his, ahem, dick in a box.
But the tide has turned on Timberlake. He arrived on SNL this weekend as a musical guest with an air of desperation.

If you know two things about the Saltburn and Priscilla star Jacob Elordi, you’re probably aware that he’s very tall (Google says 6 feet 5 inches) and very handsome in a classical way (sharp cheekbones, strong chin). If you were seeking more information, you didn’t get it from his hosting gig on last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live.

When this week’s Saturday Night Live host, Adam Driver, explained in his opening monologue that he had a “very deep and personal relationship with Santa,” it was pretty obvious that whatever was to follow wasn’t going to be your typical holiday cheer.The Oscar-nominated actor sat down at a piano, demonstrated that he really could play it, and then started barking his wish list to the jolly man in the North Pole.

Saturday Night Live loves to put a politician in front of a piano. Most famously, Kate McKinnon, playing Hillary Clinton, sat down in front of the keys and earnestly belted Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” following Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. It felt like a moment of contrition for the program that had invited Trump on as host during his campaign, to much criticism.

When a Saturday Night Live parody song begins, there’s usually a moment of anticipation where you wonder what the punch line is going to be. That was the case last night as a group of female cast members began a ballad about their aloof spouses, one wondering, “Is he dreaming of another woman he wants more than me?”Then the sketch cut to what the men were thinking. What was on their mind: The Roman empire, of course.

When Saturday Night Live announced that Timothée Chalamet would be hosting on November 11, it looked like an act of optimism. Up until then, the show had dodged the Screen Actors Guild–strike rules against promotion this season by bringing on either hosts with nothing to sell (the alum Pete Davidson) or artists whose work didn’t fall under the contract in question (the musician Bad Bunny and the comedian Nate Bargatze).But Chalamet was different.

The announcement that the stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze would be hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend was met in some corners with a bit of confusion. When SNL goes the stand-up route for a host, it usually plucks an alum (John Mulaney, for instance) or a household name (Dave Chappelle, for example) to do the job.

When the Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny took the stage for his Saturday Night Live monologue yesterday, he announced that he was going to tackle the job on his own terms. “People are wondering if I can host the show, because English is not my first language,” he said. “I don’t know if they know, but I do whatever I want.” And then the host and musical guest, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, proceeded to speak in Spanish.