‘SNL’ Thinks Robert Mueller’s Trump Investigation Is Going To End In Tears For Democrats

Saturday Night Live opened this week on Alex Moffat as The Bachelor host Chris Harrison, there to guide us into the show’s live finale, which he warns is hard to watch.

We then shift to Cecily Strong as Becca Kufrin, the new Bachelorette. With majestically driving music in the background, she speaks to the camera about how she feels like she can see the future so clearly, and how “I just wanna get to the point where this is all over and life goes back to normal.”

This sentence was a clue.

Because instead of Arie walking through the door to complicate her life, it was Special Counsel Robert Mueller (Kate McKinnon), who says, “Can I talk to you a little bit?” Awkward small talk follows as Mueller haltingly trying to deliver some bad news.

It sounds like break-up talk when he tells her, “I don’t think I can give you everything you want right now, and I think you sense that.” Her answer: “So, what, you don’t have a Trump on collusion?”

“I think I need to explore the possibility that I might have a stronger case with some other stuff,” Mueller tells her, saying, “I can’t commit to collusion right now.”

Now that the premise is revealed, the sketch gets weaker. Strong – not really as The Bachelor’s Becca, we now see, but as a stand-in for the typical SNL viewer – says, “Collusion is literally the only thing I’ve been looking forward to for the past year.”

The premise feels clever in creating an analogy between the frustration Becca must have felt during the recent ending of The Bachelor and that of liberals and Democrats waiting for the endless Mueller probe to bear fruit, but by the time it’s revealed, it feels strained. That, and the pauses that puncture the scene throughout – plus the fact that McKinnon’s Mueller is casting doubts on “collusion” based on nothing evident – makes this a cold open that seems to drag more and make sense less the longer it goes.  

Host Sterling K. Brown, from NBC’s hit This is Us – which he calls “the saddest thing you can watch on TV other than the news” – talks about his reputation for being sensitive, and promises he won’t get overwhelmed immediately before doing exactly that, choking up about his good fortune at getting to host SNL. It’s a cute bit and a mini tour de force of acting from Brown, who manages to throw in a few jokes through his tears about a This Is Us after-show called That Was Them, and a sequel about a black family who adopts a white child called, This Us?

Family Feud: Celebrity Edition is always a fun vehicle for celebrity impressions, and this Oscars Edition, pitting Oscar Winners against Oscar Losers, was no exception. On the winners side: McKinnon as Frances McDormand, who gives the women watching two words that will change the industry: “burlap dress”; Beck Bennett as Guillermo del Toro; Heidi Gardner with a uncanny Allison Janney; and Chris Redd as Get Out creator Jordan Peele with a fun meta joke as he says, “sketch comedy is great, but at some point you have to move on,” a statement that host Steve Harvey – played by Kenan Thompson, the longest tenured cast member in SNL history – takes to heart. “You do?” he timidly replies before snapping back into character.

On the Losers side, Brown plays Common, providing unwelcome raps that lead Harvey to call him “Dr. Martin Luther Seuss”; Melissa Villasenor as a very Bjorky Sally Hawkins from The Shape of Water; Moffat as a spooky Willem Dafoe; and Pete Davidson as Timothee Chalamet.  

Then comes a promo for NBC’s hit This Is Us, except instead of centering around a family, this show brings us the melodrama of the White House, with Brown as Ben Carson, Aidy Bryant as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Pete Davidson as Jared Kushner, and McKinnon as Kellyanne Conway, and it’s called This Is U.S. Critics call it, “Like This Is Us, but without the parts that feel good.” Brown gets Carson’s droppy dog quality just right, and the promo is guaranteed to hit a nerve or two.

Next, Brown and girlfriend Villasenor have dinner with her parents, played by Bennett and Bryant. They make idle dinner conversation about films, and when Bryant tells Brown that Coco was the greatest animated film she’s ever seen, Brown loses all sense of decorum, insisting, “It’s Shrek.” He becomes irrationally angry, insulting the parents, and claiming he’s being bullied. There are some laughs from Brown, who gives his all here, but this doesn’t land anywhere. Playing anger for laughs is fine, but a sketch still needs a direction or point, and this had none.

Five friends at a campfire encounter a Sasquatch in the next pre-filmed sketch, which finds Mikey Day being abused by Bigfoot as Brown talks him through the experience. Brown is supposed to be helping, but all the advice he gives simply makes Bigfoot want to abuse Day more, including making Day hold his penis while he urinates on Day’s hat, which he then makes him wear. If the last sketch tried to play anger for laughs and mostly failed, this did the same with humiliation and abuse.

Eric and Donald Trump Jr. (Moffat and Day) return to the Update desk so that Don Jr. can defend his father against the Stormy Daniels accusations, and Eric can attempt to resemble a human being by imitating his brother’s every gesture. Moffat continues to kill here, presenting the funniest moment of the episode to date as he keeps his eyes laser-focused on his brother’s hand gestures so he knows what to do with his own hands, and blurting out inconvenient truths like how their father calls the media “God damned Jews.” When Don gives his brother a pop-up book to keep him occupied, Eric reacts to the pop-up like it’s a dangerous animal about to attack him. While the danger of running these characters into the ground is evident, Moffat still makes me laugh with it every time.

Next, a pleasant, if confusing surprise, as former cast member Vanessa Bayer makes her first return to the show since leaving as her meteorologist character Dawn Lazarus, who talks in nonsense sentences due to nervousness. Bayer introduced Lazarus toward the end of her time on the show, and while it’s endearingly played as she discusses the recent Noreasters, there’s just not much to this.

Marvel Digital presents deleted scenes from Black Panther as Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, played here by Redd, finds himself among all his dead ancestors in the spiritual realm. He meets regal ancestors played by Brown and Leslie Jones, and the not-so-regal in the form of a barbecuing Thompson, who married into the family and tries to borrow money (well, vibranium) from T’Challa. Jones and Brown broke by mid-sketch. Given the middling laughs here, the breaking only helped.

The next sketch finds Brown as a doctor taking basic medical information from patient Bennett. When he asks about sexual activity, Bennett says he has it eight times a week, unprotected, with the same woman, and Brown loses his mind, switching back and forth between being impressed at the achievement and finding Bennett a fool for believing he has no feelings of love for the woman. The sketch becomes the “go to her” scene from a rom-com, as Brown convinces Bennett there may be something real there, and gives him the tuxedo and roses he needs to arrive in style. I enjoyed the hell out of this, including the camaraderie Bennett and Brown built quickly. The writing in this episode was as hit or miss as usual, but Brown was an excellent host, elevating the acting overall. This sketch is a perfect example of one that could have gone either way based on the script, but was nudged toward success by Brown’s strong performance.

Next, Brown plays an actor shooting a film. His co-star, Gardner, has decamped to her trailer, leaving the script supervisor, Strong in a bleached blond wig, to read lines for him for a dramatic close-up. The problem? Strong, through her Southern drawl, can’t say the many curse words in the script due to her religion, so she uses shortcuts like “fudge” instead of “fuck” and “MF’er” instead of “motherfucker.” Brown gives a game performance here, but the sketch feels like it’s just starting by the time it ends. It’s basically a one-joke sketch, but the joke wasn’t funny enough to justify the sketch.

Next comes a Kyle Mooney video, where his character, Chris Fitzpatrick, interviews real people on the street about which they like better, rock or rap. Fitzpatrick is clearly on the rock side, although he thinks good rock music only started in 2012. Of the people the interviews, the white people mostly preferred rock, and the black people preferred rap. What a shock. This felt like Mooney wanted to make a short film that said something clever about race, without actually having anything interesting to say about race.

The last sketch of the night finds Brown paying a final visit to a dying friend, played by Villasenor. She says she has something important to tell him, but it just turns out to be lyrics to a song by Nickelback. (As it happens, she was injured by falling into a mosh pit at a Nickelback concert.) Soon, she’s singing the band’s 2001 hit “How You Remind Me,” which turn out to be her last words – or so they think until she’s revived, and the sketch turns into Nickelback karaoke.

 
SNL returns next week with host Bill Hader and musical guest Arcade Fire.

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.

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