Saturday Night Live review: Bill Hader highlights; The Californians return

This week’s new episode of Saturday Night Live was tremendously exciting from the moment that we first heard that Bill Hader was going to be appearing on it. We’re talking here about one of the best cast members ever coming up and hopefully bringing some beloved characters with him.

We’ll get to some of those potential characters later; for now, let’s kick things off with the monologue. After appearing as Anthony Scaramucci in the cold open (read more here) he came out to a huge ovation from the crowd. He came up with a creative way in which to reference his new show Barry and from then told a lot of meta-jokes about working on the show — including saying that he thought the commercial parodies were real. He also decided to make his monologue as short as possible to get into the sketches the rest of the night … including The Californians.

The Californians – The moment that you realized that Fred Armisen was on the show, it felt pretty obvious that we were going to be doing this. For the record, we’ve never liked the Californians, possibly because as a Californian we’ve had to endure people talking about traffic in real life. This was basically identical to every other version that existed in the past. If you liked it then, you probably like it now.

Kiss Me, I’m Irish – Do Irish people really date their cousins? SNL seems to love coming up with weird Irish stereotypes that we never knew existed. (It’s similar to when there were all of the dogs on the flight earlier this season during the Saoirse Ronan episode.) Not only did Hader’s character want to date his two cousins who were contestants on this mock dating show, but he’d already hooked up with at least one of them.

Related – Who is hosting the next episode?

Old man – At first, it just seemed as though this sketch is going to just be about Cecily Strong’s character being with a senior citizen. Then, it turned into a really ridiculous bit where Cecily’s character needed to have sex with him in front of everyone (with a blanket for privacy) in order to concede. Bill Hader broke so bad that the entire end of the sketch fell apart, but it was still pretty hilarious at the same time.

Jurassic Park screen time – Pete Davidson as Adam Sandler is pretty genius; meanwhile, so is Kate McKinnon as ’90s Ellen. This was just an excuse to see impressions of Jodie Foster, Sinbad, Al Pacino, OJ Simpson, and of course Hader’s brilliant Clint Eastwood.

Music – Check out our take on Arcade Fire.

Weekend Update – Kate is brilliant as Betsy DeVos and we could watch this impression virtually every second of the day. Then, you had Pete Davidson on an incredible (and incredibly edgy) monologue about Kevin Love talking about his panic attacks in relationship to some of his own.

Then, of course, we had Stefon — it’s one of the few SNL sketches that we could watch a million times over. This wasn’t the best Stefon outing but really, so much of the appeal at this point is stemming just from seeing Hader have a great time while the writers try to get him to break. Also, wasn’t it nice to get an actual cameo from John Mulaney, who’s written so many of these Stefon bits over the years alongside Hader, as his lawyer?

Alien abduction – This was short — and also weird. The whole premise here seemed to be that a couple spent so much time bickering that they didn’t even realize that there was an alien abduction happening behind them.

Canadian apologies – This was a CBC broadcast of the “Canadian Harvey Weinstein,” a guy who really didn’t do anything all that wrong but did feel the need to apologize for complimenting women on their clothes. The Arcade Fire cameo was fun as they all said “sorry” about a million times, but we have to say that at least in Toronto (where we lived for years), the Canadians-constantly-apologizing trope really isn’t true.

Office potty – This was one of the funnier Beck Bennett / Kyle Mooney pieces out there — even though the entire premise was about a lamp that you could poop in. It was really gross, but it somehow got increasingly funny as time went on.

Overall, how could you not love this show? It was crazy, funny, and everything we could’ve hoped for.

What do you think about this week’s Saturday Night Live episode with Bill Hader? Be sure to share some of your thoughts about it in the comments!

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