‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer, Alec Baldwin, and Kristen Stewart highlights (videos)

Tonight, we assumed that “Saturday Night Live” would open with a political Cold Open, mostly because it’s hard to even fathom just what else the show would want to do at this point in 2017. There’s SO much material there, even if there is no Alec Baldwin to play Donald Trump. Given that he’s hosting the show next week, it felt like it was a gimme to assume that you wouldn’t be seeing him tonight … right?

Well … color us wrong! Baldwin appeared during the Cold Open tonight, and it was every bit as ridiculous as you would have expected. Once again, we saw the return of Steve Bannon, which to the show is a combination of the Grim Reaper and a Sith Lord from “Star Wars.” The problem with this characterization is that it’s hard to understand exactly what he’s saying in the costume.

The idea of this sketch was basically Trump calling up various world leaders and then freaking out on them. This enabled the show to mock the Bowling Green Massacre, Frederick Douglass, and also the infamous Wall. Also, we got a rather nice cameo from Kate McKinnon’s Angela Merkel, who tends to be on “Weekend Update” only the majority of the time. Surprisingly, it was Kenan Thompson as the leader of Zimbabwe who completely killed us. This was GENIUS.

We’ll be updating this article throughout the night — be sure to refresh often for some other updates!

Kristen Stewart monologue – We gotta give a lot of credit to Stewart for bringing up Trump’s various comments about her from the past several years, even though so many of them were about her past relationship with Robert Pattinson. That’s not something that she talks about too much these days. After this, she went into a bit about being “too cool” and that perception.

Oh, and Kristen also dropped the f-bomb at the end of the monologue, which is SURE to make NBC upset … but we kind of loved it for spontaneity’s sake.

Immigration test – This is something that you had to know was coming, mostly because this was a huge part of the headlines over the past few weeks. It is a hard thing to work about, but as someone who’s known people who have gone through this, we do think that this is a great example of how ridiculous and detailed the process already is … dare we say “extreme”?

School Stories – This was funny in terms of the writing, but the timing of it never quite felt right as we saw Stewart routinely share some strange stories when it comes to her time in college. All of the kudos in the world to her for wearing that wig with the reverse mohawk, since that was one of the reasons we found ourselves laughing in an otherwise ho-hum sketch.

Totinos – This was ridiculous. Also, amazing. Every year the show manages to do something more when it comes to Vanessa Bayer and her “hungry guys” in these pre-taped commercials. This time, she felt in love with Stewart’s character, and eventually became the star of some sort of French indie film. This was completely ridiculous, but we didn’t care in the slightest.

Sean Spicer – This was GENIUS. We don’t know who convinced Melissa McCarthy to come out as Trump’s Press Secretary, but this was inspired beyond measure and she completely killed it as she completely went after every single person in the room. This may be one of the greatest live sketches of the past several years. Seriously. It was so funny, so physical, and so ridiculous. We hope McCarthy hosts again just to do this again.

Alessia Cara – Head over here to read our take on her performance!

“Weekend Update” – The best part of the first segment was seeing Michael Che. The next best part of it was Kenan as Big Papi David Ortiz, which is incredibly stupid but for some reason we love it anyway. Then, Colin Jost almost ended the show early. Pretty chaotic “Weekend Update” all around.

“Celebrity Family Feud” – This was when we were convinced that the show was trying to kill us with joy. We love Kenan’s Steve Harvey, and to make things better, this Falcons fans vs. Patriots fans edition brought us McKinnon’s Justin Bieber, Stewart as Gisele, and hilariously Leslie Jones as some impersonation of Samuel L. Jackson. It was terrible, but that is in part what made it so great.

Meet Cute – This was a nice change of pace, since it featured Stewart as Claire, a woman Steve (Pete Davidson) was convinced was the woman of his dreams. He met her in a coffee shop and booked a date with her, but didn’t remember to agree on anything or learn her last name. The rest of the sketch unfolded from here leading to him eventually finding her, and not remembering to ask for her room number.

Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – After such a relevant and crazy show, why in the world are we ending with a sketch about THIS? There were a couple of lines that were funny, but this was a sketch that we really didn’t need and it, coupled with the one right after the monologue, were the weakest parts of the night.

Overall – This wasn’t the most consistent episode of the show, and there were many mistakes and screw-ups throughout. They didn’t even rely on the host that much! Yet, the cold open, Sean Spicer, and “Celebrity Family Feud” were all so amazing this is still in contention for one of the best shows of the season. Grade: A.

Let us know what you think about this episode of “SNL” in the comments! Meanwhile, you can head over to the link here to get some other news on the show. (Photo: NBC.)