Saturday Night Live: Kate McKinnon returns for a subpar episode

The former cast member makes her debut as a host for a cameo-packed yet disappointingly unfunny episode which only perks up during Weekend Update

The go-home holiday episode of Saturday Night Live kicks off with a Christmas awards show, which hands out awards in categories such as Most Disappointing Gift Given to a 10-Year-Old Boy, Most Unwelcome, Uninvited Guest, Best Performance: Confident Incorrect Lyrics. Painfully dull and painfully unfunny, this cold open bodes ill for the rest of the episode.

Former cast member Kate McKinnon is “back at [her] old job”, this time as host. She finds it difficult to be herself, as she’s used to playing “freak next to hot person” (with ample photographic evidence at hand) during the opening monologue.

She gets some help in the form of old friends Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig, and the three join together for a rendition of I’ll Be Home for Christmas. Like the cold open, it’s low on energy and laughs.

A team of reporters from the north pole break the news of a devastating killer whale attack that’s left a number of Santa’s elves dead. McKinnon’s Scottish elf and survivor disrupts the broadcast to demand Santa answer for the negligence that led to the tragedy. It’s all very corny and annoying.

Pongo is “the world’s first perfect pet”, a totally smooth synthetic creature with no holes. It doesn’t make noise and it can’t die (“Pongo is neither dead or alive … he just is”). It’s not long before Pongo’s unnerving behavior drives the family’s mother to madness. A nice little bit of Sarah Sherman horror-comedy, although it never goes as dark as should.

Wiig, Rudolph and McKinnon team up again, with Bowen Yang in tow, to play Swedish supergroup Abba. Their new Christmas album features a number of Yuletide classics filtered through their pop rock/disco stylings, which they perform while standing uncomfortably close to one another.

Then, a small family Christmas gathering, McKinnon’s neurotic matriarch apologizes to her grown daughters while they open her every present (“pieces of trash from the dumbest woman alive”). James Austin Johnson’s doofus father, meanwhile, gifts the girls’ boyfriends with inappropriate books on how to pick up women and a hat that reads: FML. McKinnon’s increasingly extreme self-put downs are funny, but the sketch suffers from a noticeable lack of focus.

Tampon Farm is a song from McKinnon’s Melissa Etheridge-like folk singer about a woman-run agrarian utopia that produces cotton used to make tampons. If for some reason you find the simple image of tampons funny, this one will have you rolling.

Barbie director Greta Gerwig pops in to help McKinnon introduce musical guest Billie Eilish, who performs What Was I Made For from that film’s soundtrack.

On Weekend Update, Michael Che brings on the sole guest, Veronda, AKA Rich Aunt with No Kids (Ego Nwodim) to offer advice on holiday stress. She’s about the worst person to tackle that subject, as her carefree, kid-free life has her living Christmas up in style. She doesn’t even like being called ‘auntie’: “Ya’ll need to call me Veronda. Just because my sister got knocked up don’t mean my named changed.” Nwodim consistently does the best character work on Update, so her return to the desk is welcome and overdue.

It being the Christmas show, it’s time for the yearly joke-swap. Che and Colin Jost make one another blind-read jokes written by the other, with Che always giving Jost racist material. This year he’s upped the ante by inviting poet, author and activist Dr Hattie Davis (last on SNL 46 years ago) to sit in on the deeply inappropriate fun (which includes a joke about Coretta Scott King, with whom Dr Davis marched). These two are never better or funnier than during this annual tradition, and Dr Davis’s presence puts this year’s edition over the top.

At an office gift swap party, a beloved co-worker (Kenan Thompson) suffering from sickle cell anemia is surprised with enrollment into a breakthrough medical procedure that can cure the disease, only to have him swap it out for a tacky boogie woogie Santa figure. It’s a solid, if predictable, set-up and payoff.

Following Eilish’s second performance – a rendition of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – we get a new edition of Cinema Classics. Eternally unhappily married host Reese D’What (Thompson) introduces a clip from the Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St Louis, in which director Vincent Minnelli evoked real tears from McKinnon’s child actor by telling her her dog had died just before calling action. The Cinema Classics sketches usually make for episode high spots, but this one is ruined by McKinnon’s awful mugging.

The episode then wraps up with a commercial for cat store Whiskers R We. McKinnon’s old cat lady is joined by her nerdy intern (Eilish), who, as they come to discover, is actually her long-lost daughter. The set-up is just an excuse o bring out a bunch of adorable cats (and one gerbil).

Weekend Update aside, this was a roundly bad episode, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given how insufferable McKinnon had become by the time she left the show only a couple of seasons back. Still, it’s too bad that the guests couldn’t elevate things. It’s also surprising – and speaks to how lazy SNL can be – that they chose not to do any Barbie sketch whatsoever, even though they had one of the film’s stars, its director, and a performer from the soundtrack together at the same time. Way to whiff what should have been an easy home run.

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