Saturday Night Live opens with a sketch about the Super Bowl. In CBS’s pre-game program, host James Brown (Kenan Thompson) – “no, not that” – and the panel emphasize how diverse Sunday’s program will be.
In the spirit of the NFL’s recent reach to children via Nickelodeon, the game will also air on Bravo, where it is being advertised as Old Hag versus Young Slut. The commercials will also try to attract all sides of America: an announcement by Cheeze-It invokes the Civil Rights and Black Live Matter movements, while one by Pope John’s Pizza promises “No child sex in the basement”.
After brief interviews with dueling coaches / doppelgangers Andy Reid and Bruce Arians – Aidy Bryant plays the two skillfully – the panel gives its predictions for the other hairy ads we will see, a list that includes “Pepsi asshole”, “Kia hamsters do a murder suicidal ”, and“ the green M&M is totally naked ”.
The show probably would have done a better job sending the Super Bowl if last week’s host John Krasinski was around to play Tom Brady, but what can you do?
Actor Daniel Levy is the presenter for the first time. The Schitt’s Creek star takes viewers on a behind-the-scenes tour of the studio to show how serious the show is taking Covid’s precautions. Along with overzealous security officers and bleach sprinklers, he meets his father (and Schitt’s Creek co-star), Eugene Levy, who is enjoying his son’s big night from inside a giant plastic quarantine box. Not to offend Levy, the youngest, but you must wonder how he ended up introducing SNL when his father, a comedic actor loved for several decades and a former SCTV cast member, never had the honor.
On the recently reopened Universal Studios trolley tour, Levy’s nervous and overcaffeinated tour guide immediately leaves the script, launching into totally inappropriate fan theories (Back to the Future is actually about enticement and sexual abuse) and personal details about his sex life (Wayne Knight, also known as “Newman from Seinfeld”, is his sexual “softener”). Ego Nwodim starts laughing at night when she says her fabric softener is “Mr. Bean – goofy guys don’t understand that for me. “
A Zwillow ad works like a phone sex ad, selling people in their early thirties with the idea that “the pleasure you once had from sex now comes from looking at other people’s homes.”
Then, a group of friends from Covid justified the meeting for the Super Bowl, telling how safe they were last year, interrupting the quarantine just to buy food and essential items, to participate in wrestling clubs, to have “raw dog sex with strangers in the park, ”and fly around the world for business meetings. The sketch contains some good lines, but is dragged down by a coda nailed with Kate McKinnon as Dr. Fauci and Bowen Yang as PSY (SNL really has his finger on his wrist, huh?).
For Black History Month, the BET Lifting Our Voices talk show dedicates an episode to white allies, welcoming guests as a well-meaning but reckless math teacher (says her former student: “I mean, she is trying … but maybe too much ”); a protester who is magnified, who interrupts his friend to announce that “whites need to hear”; and a clueless husband in a mixed-race marriage, which his wife describes as “a very kind man with a lot of money … I mean, he’s rich, kind from birth”. Kyle Mooney is very good as the stupid face of the wife with the ponytail.
Singer and songwriter Phoebe Bridgers is the musical guest of the night. Dressed in skeleton t-shirts, she and her band sing the song Kyoto.
In the weekend update, Colin Jost welcomes a super-awake couple who want to cancel their young children for inadvertently problematic behavior. As it progresses, it becomes clear that this is the program’s response to the transphobia charges after last week’s segment. It totally fails as a refutation, avoiding any mention of the real or critical controversy in favor of making broad (and therefore blunt) blows on the culture of cancellation as a whole.
Update’s second guests are young YouTube Twins stars, The New Trend, who react to famous songs while listening to them for the first time. Michael Che plays for them a series of “classics” – the theme Friends, Baby Shark Dance, the commercial jingle of Meow Mix, the children’s rhyme of the alphabet – and is dismayed to learn that the duo is not familiar with them, although this is the main point.
The next is a musical number set in a Broadway sports bar, in which the cast performs a supposedly famous “football song” called Hot Damn. Except for Thompson as a skeptical patron, everyone seems more focused on hitting the block than on making sure the jokes arrive. This is followed by another winding and breathless sketch, this time about passive and aggressive wedding guests.
Bridgers returns to the stage to play I Know the End. She becomes a complete rock star, shredding during the song’s doomy in half before participating in any appropriate ax strokes.
The final draft celebrates the 10th anniversary of the It Gets Better campaign, with several LGBTQ members on the show (Levy, McKinnon, Yang, Punkie Johnson) discussing how life has improved for them, at least even normal everyday things – bad friends, taxes, divorce and a sinister iguana – appeared to make things worse periodically. The iguana thing has a good laugh, but the rest, not so much.
This is emblematic of the episode as a whole, with everything being of a note or all over the place. Nothing was terrible, but nothing, other than Bridgers’ excellent second performance, really worked, too.