Saturday Night Live cold open: Bowen Yang’s George Santos back

Tonight’s new episode of Saturday Night Live was the first one for the calendar year — so what did the cold open bring us?

Well, it felt inevitable that the show was going to be doing something to reference the upcoming inauguration, even if there may not be an appetite for too many political sketches out there right now. They tried to circumvent a lot of expectations by kicking it off with a long MSNBC segment, one that was mostly about trying to avoid potential distractions that come out of President-Elect Trump’s mouth. However, that eventually shifted over to James Austin Johnson making a brief appearance.

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If there was at least one good moment in all of this, it was the opportunity that presented itself for us to see the return of Bowen Yang as George Santos. Even though this impression no longer has some incredible element of surprise, we do still consider it fun and at this point, we will take whatever we can get from an otherwise-dry cold open that did not really bring a ton to the table.

The reality here is that when it comes to Trump parodies, the well is as dry as humanly possible. What all can be done at this point? This introduces a really interesting question in terms of how the show is going to handle the next several years when there is so much political fatigue. We wouldn’t be surprised if down the line, there are some more cold opens that are not about politics. However, at the same time these to tend to generate a lot of headlines.

For now, we just tend to think that there’s a chance for a good show after the fact — or, at the very least, we hope.

What did you think about the Saturday Night Live cold open that we got this week? with “MSNBC”?

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