Saturday Night Live cold open gives you January 6, Liz Cheney

Entering this week’s Saturday Night Live cold open, we had a sense of general uncertainty about what it could be. Sometimes, there are episodes where it is pretty clear far in advance. This was not one of those weeks.

We can’t say we’re all that surprised that they went with a January 6 Committee hearing, mostly because the show loves politics. We understand why the writers would want to do this, but the truth is that without Kate McKinnon or Aidy Bryant, they don’t have any of the heavy hitters anymore. They have to find some more memorable impressions, and we do think that Heidi Gardner attempted one with a version of Liz Cheney. We best thing we had in here was Chloe Fineman doing a pretty decent Nancy Pelosi. There were a lot of events from the past few days that the show could draw from with at least most of these people.

Of course, it was inevitable that the show found a way to incorporate James Austin Johnson’s version of Donald Trump. The only real surprise in here was the joke they made about Mike Pence being targeted at the Capitol. In general, SNL will probably tone it down somewhat on the Trump moving forward, just because there is an inevitable fatigue at this point after so many years of the Alec Baldwin character.

Were there a few laughs in here? Sure, but this is one of those cold opens that really reminds you of how much we’re in a transition year. We do think that these cold opens will get stronger as the season moves on and this current cast starts to mesh a little bit more. We are still at that point where there are a lot of people who we can’t completely recognize in some of the sketches yet.

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What did you think about this week’s Saturday Night Live cold open?

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