Saturday Night Live cold open: Robert De Niro’s Mueller Report

This week’s Saturday Night Live is the first one after a hiatus the past few weeks, and that tends to mean one thing for the writers: A treasure trove of material. Even with all of the headlines, though, one still stands out as the most striking: The Mueller Report. It’s just hard in order to determine an alternate route in which the show would want to take. It’s one of the biggest stories of the year so far and for the longest time, we saw the show openly trying to milk as much comedy out of this as humanly possible — and for good reason, given that it went on for so long and they were able to bring on Robert De Niro to play him.

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So what did Lorne Michaels and the writers decide on for tonight? Well, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that De Niro was back as Mueller to read off the full report — and also Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump. How the show structured this was fairly interesting, mostly in that we saw De Niro’s Mueller reading the report alongside Aidy Bryant’s William Barr summarizing it and then Trump tweeting about it. We saw things get progressively more and more ridiculous, including Trump at one point tweeting that Sean Hannity had read the full report and also singing the opening lyrics to Smash Mouth’s “Rock Star.”

Just in case anyone really needed to see it again, we also got a small appearance in here from Kate McKinnon as Rudy Giuliani.

Our final verdict

This was a pretty funny opening to the show, but we also gotta admit that we’re happy that SNL can move forward to some other things. We’ve just seen so much Mueller comedy over the past few years and we’re just not sure that there is anything else that can really be said about it that hasn’t been uttered somewhere else.

The message of the cold open was clear — that the President and Barr’s presentation of the report to the public is incomplete, especially when there are other active investigations into the President still open. That’s something that has been echoed throughout the news media. We do think we’ll see more laughter about some of this in due time, but more than likely, the writers will be shifting from Mueller onto some other things. (We expect plenty of other political cold opens, especially with the Democratic race heating up.)

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