Saturday Night Live cold open: Fox & Friends, Hope Hicks, & Donald Trump

For the past two weeks, we have written our Saturday Night Live cold open pieces with the expectation that Alec Baldwin would return as Donald Trump. We are, after all, in a position where there is almost constantly something happening in the world of the President. With that, we haven’t been short on material in the slightest.

Yet, time and time again, we’ve seen the sketch show go in some different directions, including last week when Will Ferrell busted out his old impression of George W. Bush. Did Baldwin actually return this week?

As it turns out, not at first! Instead, we shifted over to Fox & Friends, a sketch that the series has done a number of the times in the past. The biggest thing that is different about it now is that Fox & Friends is actually influential. SNL can’t just write it off as an outlier; instead, they shaped the show into a group of Trump super-fans doing everything they can to impress the President. We also had some guests, including Hope Hicks (Cecily Strong) doing a good impression of Gossip Girl.

Eventually, Baldwin did turn up as Trump, sitting from his bed and also tweeting while eating an Egg McMuffin. What we liked about this was that this was a really different take from the President, at least in that we haven’t seen a direct spoof of Trump watching Fox News from his bedroom. Also, it was good that we hadn’t seen Trump in a while. This made the entire cold open feel a little bit fresher.

Here’s our overall take

Most of the impressions just didn’t work. When it comes to Hope Hicks, the biggest problem there is that we don’t actually know what to make fun of. How many SNL viewers are even aware of Donald Trump?

Also, we missed Bobby Moynihan in this sketch. He just brought so much silliness! One other thing: Where were the corrections at the end of the sketch? One of the best parts about the Fox & Friends sketches in the past was that you could pause them on your DVR and look at all of the ridiculous mistakes that the morning show supposedly made. It was all writing but one of the most clever things that SNL did with this sketch.

Related – Check out our review for the remainder of this week’s new SNL episode

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