Saturday Night Live review: James Franco has high highs, low lows in strange show

Tonight’s Saturday Night Live was hosted by James Franco, and almost right out of the gate we got a sense that this was going to be a star-studded affair!

Following the strange / awkward cold open featuring Kenan Thompson as Santa (complete with some kids who struggled to read the cue cards), we then moved into a monologue which was mostly just an excuse to throw some cameos in there by Seth Rogen, a super-slim Jonah Hill, and Steve Martin being his version of the angry old guys from the Muppets. There were a few laughs in here, but nothing altogether memorable beyond “hey, look at all the famous people.”

Now, let’s move forward and deal with the most controversial sketch of the episode before moving onto other highlights as they come on.

Sexual Harassment – Well, this one is going to be controversial. What we saw here was one guy in Doug (Mikey Day) apologizing for apparent sexual harassment and getting raked over the coals; meanwhile, another guy in Charlie (played by Kenan) was explicitly harassing people and, because he had a lot of charisma and was old, getting away with stuff.

We like to think that the message here is “sexual harassment is still sexual harassment, no matter who it’s from.” We know that this will spark some debate, but we don’t think SNL is saying in any form here that the stuff Charlie is saying is okay. As a matter of fact, it’s almost trying to illustrate why it’s taken so long for some horrific allegations to be made public — sometimes monsters use everything from their power to even their age or charisma to get what they want.

We’re not telling anyone what to think about this sketch, but our feeling is that SNL wanted to get the message across that harassment is harassment no matter who it comes from, and they chose humor to make that message. Sometimes, bait-and-switch is the only way for some people to listen to the important message at hand.

Gift wrap – This was the prefect transition from a sensitive subject to something just dumb. Franco played a gift-wrap specialist who basically cut himself wrapping presents and eventually became a bloody mess. This made zero logical sense and was absolutely hilarious as a result of it.

The Scrooge sketch – Let’s transition again from something strange to something else strange — a modern-day take on Scrooge where he realizes that everyone at his holiday party hates him … yet, it never really went anywhere after that. It wasn’t topical or interesting enough, and it ended with such a lowest-common-denominator ending (a wardrobe malfunction) that we’re going to try to never think about it again.

Spelling Bee – This was a reminder that Franco really shines in live sketches and SNL should just implement more of them when he is on the show. In this sketch he played a man running a spelling bee who couldn’t stop relating the words to his own life when he gave definitions or used them in a sentence. At around the second or third word we thought we’d seen enough of this shtick, but then we got to the final word: “Little Pig Boy.” This was so disturbing and oh so funny from start to finish.

Weekend Update – As much as we like Cecily Strong as Cathy Anne and as much as we think some of the R. Kelly and Trump / Israel jokes were on point, this Weekend Update will probably be best remembered by Michael Che channeling a combination of Eddie Murphy and White Chicks for his pre-taped piece about going undercover as a white woman named Gretchen, complete with going to brunch and discussing feminism. It was pretty dumb since so many people went along with it, but it was funny enough that we prefer this to seeing the thousandth appearing of some correspondent who just comes out and does the same thing every week.

Lasagna vs. pizza – Categorize this as one of those sketches that only worked because of the host — Franco sold the heck out of an attorney who felt the need to prove that “za” was an abbreviation for lasagna rather than pizza. Somehow, someway, he fired that out.

Christmas charity – We’ll admit that SNL got us a little choked up at one point with this story of how Cecily was ready to step up to help a homeless person in need … before eventually realizing that this person was actually James Franco and she’d wasted a ton of money on him and he was just preparing for a movie and didn’t want to turn down free things.

Mandy – This was a weird way to close the show, given that it mostly just seemed to exist for the purpose of A) plugging James’ movie The Disaster Artist for the second time tonight (too many plugs) and also because of the Dave Franco cameo at the end. Everything else was middling at best.

CarterMatt Verdict

This episode of SNL had high highs (gift wrap, spelling bee) but also some low lows. James Franco did the best that he could with material that was not altogether willing to support him.

What did you think about this weekend’s Saturday Night Live episode? Be sure to sound off in the comments below!

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