Saturday Night Live's new season continued its weak streak with comedian Shane Gillis returning as host for a third time. The episode, which featured a surprise F-bomb from Gillis, lacked any real notable big moments, according to the review.
Cold open with Hegseth and RFK Jr
The show opened onboard the USS Lincoln, where secretary of war Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost) welcomed the crew back to San Diego after a record 322 days at sea. He briefed them on recent events, including a promised live-streamed execution in December and the new logo for the department of war featuring “an American eagle with a Nazi vibe”.
Hegseth then turned things over to RFK Jr (James Austin Johnson), who used the occasion to officially rename cold and flu season “cold and flu and listeria and measles and trench brain season”. He thanked the crew for being unwitting test subjects for the thousands of pounds of meat recalled over the past months.
The cold open was slight but had an appropriately mean streak, with Johnson's RFK Jr caricature praised for capturing the vocal spasms.
Gillis's monologue and sketches
Gillis, who was fired from SNL in 2019 after clips of him making racist and homophobic jokes surfaced, delivered a stand-up routine touching on his attempts at losing weight, being bullied by his sisters, and his receding hairline. The audience was with him for the most part, though the material was a watered-down version of his normal act.
In a sketch based on Dr Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, Gillis stumbled over his lines and dropped a live F-bomb within the first few seconds. The rest of the sketch struggled until Mikey Day ad-libbed a line about it, leaving viewers to wonder if there would be repercussions.
Other sketches included a cop talk show, a sappy country ballad about a father of the bride, a pitch for the first-ever canvas shoe, and a dark blue-collar comedy about an HVAC service. The chess tournament sketch, featuring Gillis and Grace Reiter as divorced parents, was criticized as a lazy excuse to laugh at “dumb rednecks”.
Weekend Update and guest appearances
Weekend Update opened with the news that Trump had failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize, with Jost quipping: “It’s truly like if I thought I might win an Oscar for Tom & Jerry.” Kevin O’Leary (Johnson) pitched a datacenter in Utah, and a mother whose babysitter canceled (Ashley Padilla) appeared with her troublesome daughter Coco (Grace Reiter).
In a hospital sketch, Reiter played an ailing old woman whose son is visited by visions of Jelly Roll (Ben Marshall), Cool Jesus (Dismukes), a sexy single (Rosalía), and his mother, who passes away during his mental fugue.
Three episodes in, the season continues its weak streak, with Gillis acquitting himself better than the last two hosts but failing to break the pattern. The review suggests that despite the potential heat from his F-bomb, Gillis is probably only a couple of years away from being inducted into the Five Timers Club.
