‘Saturday Night Live’ finale: Beck Bennett leads the crop of newcomers

This is the time of the year when all of us avid “Saturday Night Live” viewers start to get a little bit reflective on the season as a whole, and there is one question in particular we find ourselves asking: Who was the real standout of the new cast members?

This was a tough year just from the standpoint of volume alone in that you introduced us at the start of the show to Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, Mike O’Brien, John Milhiser, and Brooks Whelan. It takes a little bit of time to get to know five white guys by name. Some eventually did start to stand out a little over time, and that is where we’ve been led today to declare that Beck Bennett is the best newcomer of the season.

What Beck did over the course of this season was combine elements of a few “SNL” performers we really enjoy, whether it be the ability of Jason Sudeikis to play some of the standard “normal” people in a sketch or the silliness that tonight’s host Andy Samberg sometimes brought to the table. With Baby Boss, he created a recurring character in his first season, and also starred in many of the pre-tapes with Mooney over the season. Not only is he funny, but he showed this season that he’s capable of taking risks. When there was a weak sketch featuring him, we never felt he disappeared for a few weeks after that. He always came back with something different.

While it’s hard to say for certain who will be back among the new players, including Noel Wells and Sasheer Zamata, next year, Beck feels somewhat like a lock. The next thing that he needs to really work on is coming up with an iconic “Weekend Update” character. Sudeikis had The Devil, Taran Killam now has Jebidiah, and we really should have another one in Aidy Bryant’s Worst Lady on an Airplane. Beck needs one. He also needs some more celebrities to impersonate here and there.

We understand the complaints from time to time that “the show’s not funny anymore” and other nonsense, mostly because this is all junk that has been said so many times before at this point. The show is never as good as when you got into it for the first time, since you have nostalgia kicking in. There are many who hated the Will Ferrell era that others loved, and the same goes for when Samberg and Kristen Wiig were tearing it up on a weekly basis. We’ll always have our favorite seasons, but objectively we laughed quite a bit this year despite all the turnover, and we wanted to give a brief salute today to one of the reasons why before the episode airs.

So hats off to Beck, and we’ll be back later for a full review of tonight’s episode. (You can see that at the link here.) Also, sign up now to get some further TV updates via our CarterMatt Newsletter.

Photo: NBC