Saturday Night Live cold open: Robert De Niro returns as Robert Mueller

Going into tonight’s new episode, there were certainly a lot of possibilities for the Saturday Night Live cold open … especially when it comes to stories that the show could riff on. While we felt like the chances of an Alec Baldwin appearance as Donald Trump were fairly low, there was certainly a lot going on with the Mueller investigation and we know that there are plenty of people out there eager to get some more news on that front.

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Well, for this week’s cold open the series actually went in a slightly different direction, focusing on Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump at their home, after Eric was apparently having nightmares late at night. Donald Jr. did his best in order to reassure Eric, only to then realize that Robert De Niro’s version of Robert Mueller was standing outside of the bedroom. This, eventually, turned into a conversation between Eric and Mueller … which was amusing and perfectly strange.

The best line of it? When Mueller said that “winning president was the worst thing to happen” to Eric’s dad. This was a funny idea, but the reality is that it didn’t completely land. De Niro, for some reason, was just totally off with his comic timing and stumbling over some of his words. If the delivery isn’t there, any joke will fall flat.

Do we still like having De Niro as Mueller on the show? Sure, mostly because the comparisons between him and De Niro’s character in Meet the Parents are obvious but also ridiculously fun. The thing that does remain still a little bit of a mystery is how long you can stretch this bit out before we’ve seen it too many times. Then again, we guess that some of that depends heavily on however long the Muller investigation itself gets stretched out for, especially given that it’s already been going on for quite an extended period of time already. You would’ve almost thought that SNL would have run out of material for all things Muller at this point, but they’ve found a way to somehow keep it going.

So while we would say overall that this was a really fun episode conceptually, we’re not sure it lived up to much of our expectations for it otherwise.

Related News – Be sure to check out even more insight on tonight’s episode right now!

What did you think about this week’s Saturday Night Live cold open? Be sure to share some of your thoughts now in the attached comments. (Photo: NBC.)