Critics are panning “Saturday Night Live” for what they described as its “remarkably weak” return to the airwaves following a six-week hiatus that encompassed a chaotic news cycle.
Viewers who tuned into the long-running NBC sketch comedy show noticed that Saturday’s episode largely avoided mocking President Biden after spending the past four years ridiculing former President Donald Trump, played by Alec Baldwin.
Los Angeles Times TV critic Lorraine Ali pulled no punches with a review headlined, “Maybe Trump did kill satire: ‘SNL’ kicks off Biden era in remarkably weak form.”
Ali opened her review with the question: “What will late-night comedy do without Trump?” Judging by the late night mainstay’s first episode since the 45th president left office, Ali answered, “the future looks … uninspired.”
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“After a monthlong break, the show struggled to find its footing and seemed woefully outpaced by a world that’s changed drastically since the venerable sketch comedy, now in its 46th season, was last on the air in December,” Ali wrote. “Despite all the grist — an astounding U.S. Capitol insurrection, Kim and Kanye’s split, Bernie Sanders’ inauguration mittens meme, QAnon idiots in fur, vaccine roll-out blunders, GameStop goofballs gaming Wall Street — host John Krasinski and the cast were given little to nothing to work with by ‘SNL’s’ writers.”
She added, “If Trump has had one victory in the last month, it may be that ‘SNL’ suddenly seems lost without him. The big orange beacon of ridicule has left the building, and where’s the joy in poking fun at Biden … or Vice President Kamala Harris … when all there is to work with so far is an aggressively normal inauguration and civil daily news briefings … ‘SNL’ will have to widen its scope again, because wringing humor out of the White House is never going to be as easy as it has been the last four years.”
The Atlantic staff writer David Sims was just as critical, calling the return of “SNL” following a busy six weeks “the equivalent of a giant shrug,” positing that the show “doesn’t have the energy” to tackle current events head-on and knocking the “limp political humor.”
“The show is clearly entering a transitional period toward a sillier, less overtly political approach, with this strange season serving as an awkward bridge,” Sims wrote.
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Vanity Fair contributor Karen Valby led her review by writing, ” I don’t remember Donald Trump’s name being spoken once on last night’s SNL. Which is awesome—except that so much still sucks,”
Valby went on to suggest that part of the problem was host John Krasinski, writing that show apparently “didn’t know what to do with an apple pie of a guy who’s built like a Biff.”