Oh, to have been in the SNL writers’ group chat after news broke of the White House’s national security team’s now infamous Signal leak. The epic blunder of idiotic proportions had all the makings of a cold open wet dream. First time host Mikey Madison slid into the top of the show as the Queen Bee in in her high school group chat with Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman. They did not appreciate Andrew Dismukes‘ Pete Hegseth busting in uninvited with news that the Yemen raid was a go. Bowen Yang‘s J.D. Vance next popped into the chat, reporting in his ridiculous puffer jacket from Greenland, followed by Marcello Hernandez‘s Marco Rubio. Madison was so outta there. “I got to go, Matt’s here to pick me up,” she texted the group. “Wait, [Matt] Gaetz?” replied Hegseth. “Actually, yeah,” she responded. But here’s the rub of all this back and forth. Watching people text, however furiously, gets old quick. Despite the ripe material, the open never really took off. Even the group “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” was garbled and out of synch.
Madison, fresh off Anora‘s Oscar domination, deserves a nap. In her monologue, she promised she was dedicating April to sleep. For those new to her ouevre, she gave us a clip show of some of finest work in movies like Scream and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. “Those were two different characters that were lit on fire and that’s range,” she bragged. Turns out Madison has a surprise red-headed beefcake twin brother and that her first love was her childhood horse named Thumbelina. Her story about dressing up in a couples costume one Halloween with her horse was her most endearing moment of the night. Yes to her joke about her former life as a horse girl preparing her to ride a Russian twink in Anora. No to the gag of her musclebound altar ego doing a pole dance.
Madison was innocuous company throughout the show. She was in most of the sketches, but with the personality of a background player. This may have been a problem with the material she was given, or the fault of nerves. But you just couldn’t tell if she was having any fun, which is always a sign of a host out of their depth. And so it was up to Hernandez, SNL‘s rising hottie, to breathe life into the Acting Teacher sketch. Begging his students to commit to their commercial auditions, he sneezed his own glasses off at one point. He high-kicked. He bellowed. He nearly broke twice, including when he called Madison “my slippery little beaver.”
The show had the feel of folks who still weren’t ready to come back from their last two weeks off. A lot of the sketches felt like the results of 2am spaghetti thrown against the wall. The jury duty sketch seemed to go on forever, less a fully conceived idea than an opportunity to cram as many cast members as possible onto screen. But it did give Sarah Sherman a chance to rock a Bisexuals for Mass Incarceration t-shirt. And Dismukes got to cosplay Ryan Reynolds‘ idea of Justin Baldoni rocking an insincerely sensitive man bun. Chloe Fineman apparently decided that now was as good a time as any to trot out her Parkey Posey impersonation. “Piiiiperrr, nooo! Tsunami! Lorazepam!” And Hernandez kicked it up a notch when he cartwheeled across the stage in Benson Boone‘s revealing silver jumpsuit and started caterwauling “Beautiful Things.”
