SNL Recap: Timothée Chalamet is an Ideal Ambassador for SNL’s Future

Saturday Night Live had one job in the thuddingly familiar first week of Trump’s second term: to not be the same Saturday Night Live of Trump’s first term. They crushed it.

Not that 2017-era SNL was so bad. It gave viewers elite bits like Melissa McCarthy playing Sean Spicer — a name that now feels so distant, it might as well be from the bible — and plenty of other scathing impressions that did not involve Alec Baldwin. The problem was that SNL, during that time, took on a thin surface layer of importance, which proved to be comedic kryptonite. Nobody had ever been through a holy shit, Donald Trump is the fucking president-type situation before, so people were ready to believe anything about how to get out of it. Many seemed to think that perhaps SNL would create a satire so irrefutably trenchant that it broke through to Trump supporters and united the country against him. (How adorable were liberals in 2017?) Whether that “clapter”-prone importance was cheered on in-house or the product of Trump predictably raging at SNL on Twitter, it ascribed too much power to a comedy show. A lot of episodes sank under the weight of a star-packed topical cold open and other sketches that haven’t aged well.

Cut to this week, as America exited the presidential vestibule between Biden and Trump, and SNL had to establish its tone for Trump 2: The Squeakquel. In its first moments, that tone looked dire. The cold open begins with the cast as Founding Fathers, only to reveal none other than hashtag-resistance icon Lin-Manuel Miranda among them as Alexander Hamilton. As the studio audience roared, many home viewers might have reasonably considered futzing with their remotes until NBC repaired its apparent 2017 time-warp glitch.

Of course, it was all an elaborate fake-out.

Much as the first episode after November’s election started out overly earnest before its mid-cold open rug-pull, this one barely let Miranda cough out one syllable before James Austin Johnson’s Trump commandeered the sketch, dragging it into a hilarious new direction. It was a risky move. Surely, some of the staff knew that context-free screenshots of a Hamiltonian Miranda on SNL would be pinging around Bluesky right away, accusing the show of living down to the very expectation it was subverting. The risk paid off, though. It’s unclear what SNL will end up being in the second Trump era, but at least now we have an idea of what it won’t be.

Welcoming us into this new era is an ideal ambassador for the show’s future: a Gen Z star who already has a strong track record as a host. Timothée Chalamet plays silly characters with sincerity, gusto, and a winning looseness. He always looks like he’s having a blast on the show, and the cast seems to mirror that feeling. Although he went into this week’s third outing as host with two recurring bits under his belt, Chalamet or the writers opted not to bring back either. (Wisely, in this recapper’s opinion.) Much like the show as a whole under Trump (again), it’s a new SNL era for Chalamet.

When Chalamet was announced as host and musical guest, it seemed like a tacky vanity play. Maybe he went a bit too method as Young Dylan in A Complete Unknown and came out the other side thinking he should start releasing new folk songs — the musical equivalent of Austin Butler’s postpartum Elvis-itis. Even worse, Chamalet could’ve been debuting songs as his rap alter ego Timmy Tim, the exact wrong reaction to not embarrassing himself in his last SNL’s monologue rap. Instead, he would just be performing some Dylan songs — a respectful, if still vain, victory lap for A Complete Unknown’s eight Oscar nominations.

“I’m so grateful Saturday Night Live is still doing weird stuff like this, 50 years in,” he says during the monologue.

Considering that this line comes ahead of a show with an incest sketch and one where the cast is zoomorphized, the same could be said of the whole episode.

Here are the highlights:

Founding Fathers Cold Open

SNL debuted this fourth wall-obliterating cold open format in season 48’s Easter episode. Rather than focus on any one ridiculous or nightmarish thing Trump may do in any given week, it turns Johnson’s Trump into a postmodern roast comic — bluntly assessing himself, his opposition, and even SNL from a distance. Though the show used this approach a few more times after its debut, they’ve let it rest long enough that this revival felt fresh. The fact that this exhausting week had so much material for the character to chew on certainly helped, too. Although there were many searing topical jokes, the sketch also squeezed every drop it could out of Trump talking about how Miranda looked like he was about to die of not being allowed to rap — at which point, of course, Miranda looked like he might die of not being allowed to laugh.

Medcast

Incredibly, this week saw not one but two sketches involving fake podcasts. While the one about the dystopian possibility of using those AI-generated fake podcasts to teach in schools, the Medcast sketch had a bolder POV. In it, One Medical has digested the post-election insight of how susceptible men are to a certain kind of podcast — and used it to trick them into coming in for routine visits. The idea of doctors posing as podcasters to make men more suggestable is already a winner, but the language the doctors employ to complete the ruse ratchets up the comedy. (“Any blood in them thangs?” one doctor asks about a patient’s stool.)

New Barista Training

Those cutesy puns on coffee shop signage don’t make for a natural bridge to Chalamet channeling a Def Jam comic, but it turns out they make a delightful one. Heidi Garner’s simmering irritation with Ashley Padilla’s character adds a welcome extra dimension.

Weekend Update: Giselle, a concerned businesswoman on Trump’s Executive Orders

Much like the cold open, here comes another swerve. When Ego Nwodim first appears at the Update desk, ready to speak up about Trumpian chaos, it seems like things are about to get preachy. Instead, Nwodim’s character urgently warns any Black women who may be watching about imminent price increases in fake hair. (“We about to be in a pickle,” she says. “A bald-headed pickle.”) Beyond Nwodim’s reliably crisp delivery, her playful antagonism of Michael Che here recalls the ongoing Update dynamic between Sarah Sherman and Colin Jost.

Dog Run

Although the official title of this sketch on YouTube is “Dog Run,” I much prefer the title that appears onscreen: “If a Bunch of Dumb Little Dogs Talked and Acted Like People.” In any case, the physical comedy here is broad enough to resonate even with viewers who have never been to a dog park, but all the little esoteric details are designed to hit harder with dog owners.

Cut For Time

• Between the bungee sketch and the twisted, incestual Valentine’s Day ad, Michael Longfellow made his biggest non-Update splash in a while.

• It’s a bummer how little the Please Don’t Destroy guys have been onscreen this season so far. Maybe they’re regrouping?

• Plenty of trenchant topical jokes on Weekend Update, and yet the one that got me was Colin Jost screaming “No!” to the newly discovered longevity benefits of breakfast oatmeal.

• I would love to know how Andrew Dismukes’s dad feels about the comic using a Dad-puppet to do fake-therapeutic comedy for millions of viewers.

• Some weeks call for a five-minute fart joke, and this was one of them.

• I agree with that animated God sketch: the solar system does, indeed, slap.

• On a personal note, this is my last episode as your regular recapper, and I just want to say that I apologize for undergrading this season’s Ariana Grande episode. If I could go back in time, I would obviously pay a visit to baby Hitler, but then correcting the Ari SNL recap would be my second or third stop.