For those who had grown used to the Saturday Night Live opening credits over the last few years, the introductory video sure felt choppy when the show’s 51st season debuted on Oct. 4. Perhaps a new intro will be shot in the coming weeks, but the premiere repurposed last season’s with the departing members edited out.
Heidi Gardner’s glam scene was gone, Michael Longfellow wasn’t chastised for feeding an NYPD horse, Ego Nwodim wasn’t flossing atop the double-decker tourist bus Sarah Sherman drives into Times Square, Devon Walker had drifted away with his balloons and Emil Wakim was gone, too.
The five new cast members — Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Ben Marshall (of SNL’s Please Don’t Destroy filmmaking trio), Kam Patterson and Veronika Slowikowska — are all featured players, and so they were all sandwiched towards the end of the credits with Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline.
With the exception of Patterson and, to a lesser extent, Slowikowska the featured hires weren’t featured much, but, after so much speculation whether Lorne Michaels would retire after season 50, the new school year needed to start strong. And that meant relying on the show’s Murderers’ Row of Michael Che, Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Marcello Hernandez, James Austin Johnson, Colin Jost, Sherman, Keenan Thompson and Bowen Yang,
Landing Bad Bunny in the afterglow of his hugely successful Puerto Rico residency, the announcement that he would headline next year’s Super Bowl halftime show — and the racist backlash that followed — was a timely move. And Bad Bunny closing his monologue in Spanish (without English subtitles) was a deft message to his haters that his art transcends language and culture barriers — and that they’d better catch up. Certainly, SNL has come a long way from the ‘70s — when Garrett Morris, a Black actor, used to play Dominican Met Chico Escuela, whose English was limited to “Beisbol been berry, berry good to me.”
As for the sketches, it’s a new season, and the SNL comedy accelerator is still revving up. Here’s one critic’s ranking, from worst to best.
