Saturday Night Live cold open: Laura Ingraham meets Marcia Fudge

Tonight, we had an innate curiosity surrounding the Saturday Night Live cold open for one good reason: This was the last one for a while! With that, anything was possible, including a return from Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump. There were a number of different ways that the series could have chosen to move things forward, whether it be by being super-topical or by taking a little more of a risk from a standard political opening.

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So did the series really take a risk? Well … not so much, and you can’t be that shocked. Instead, we had Kate McKinnon doing Laura Ingraham again. This time around, she opened the show by talking a little bit about voter fraud and some of the different headlines that are out there about that. The “feel facts” segment felt a lot like the corrections at the end of the old Fox & Friends segment. The Judge Jeanine part of this felt a lot like a repeat of what we had on the show recently, which basically made all of this feel even more forgettable.

With that being said, we do think that the sponsor part of the program is still really funny, as Ingraham reads off the few people willing to support the show.

There were two other guests who appeared on the show — we had Mark Zuckerberg talking about Facebook and Russia; beyond just that, we also had Leslie Jones appearing as Marcia Fudge. The Fudge bit was a little bit more successful, especially as she started to lob lighthearted jabs at Nancy Pelosi. Yet, this was a weird, somewhat-weak opening to the show. We really do wonder, in the end here, if this was a replacement for something else that fell through. After all, it really was so close to what we just saw on SNL not that long ago. Why the repeat when you didn’t need to do one? This is our theory and, at least for now, we’re sticking to that.

As we look towards the December episodes of SNL, we hope that the writers try to find something to do that is not just reliant on Fox News. We understand that it’s easy to skewer some of their shows, but there are a number of other original ideas out there. We understand doing political cold opens is necessary from a headline perspective, but there are certainly other options that could be considered and really should be.

Related News – Be sure to check out more thoughts regarding this episode of SNL as a whole

What did you think about the SNL cold open this week, and do you think it was the right choice writing-wise? Be sure to share in the comments! (Photo: NBC.)