Bad Bunny is the perfect host to introduce SNL’s new look after all of the offseason turnover.
Photo: Will Heath/NBC
The last time musician Bad Bunny hosted Saturday Night Live, he was dressed as Shrek, requesting Please Don’t Destroy to write a Shrek sketch for him. That was two years ago, and as a funny and charismatic performer, it makes sense that he crushed. For the premiere of season 51, he’s hosting for a second time, consistent as ever, even if the show’s gone through big changes during the hiatus. For one thing, no more Please Don’t Destroy on the show (though they’ll still perform as a sketch group), with Ben Marshall bumped to featured player, Martin Herlihy as writer, and John Higgins gone to a hopefully less grueling workplace. A chunk of last season’s cast is gone, including heavy hitters Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim. Based on this first episode, it seems like Marcello Hernandez, Sarah Sherman, and Chloe Fineman are poised to fill the gap left by Heidi and Ego’s departure. (Hopefully, so will Bowen Yang in future episodes.) The four new featured players, in addition to Marshall, include TikTok favorite Veronika Slowikowska, Dropout’s Jeremy Culhane, Kill Tony’s Kam Patterson, and stand-up comedian Tommy Brennan.
Less talked about but genuinely thrilling are the new writers: Jack Bensinger, Maddie Wiener, Rachel Pegram, Jo Sunday, and Claire McFadden are so, so funny. Bensinger’s absurdity, Wiener’s cutting joke writing, and McFadden’s sketches have been making me laugh since they were all in Chicago nearly a decade ago. Sunday’s Brooklyn alt whimsy is captivating, and Pegram is equally gifted as a performer and writer. I don’t know the two Lampoon hires, but you know what? Sure. If the show molds to their younger, alt-ier sensibilities, rather than the other way around, this season could be really, really good.
Even with the recent changes to the show, Bad Bunny is a constant. With Doja Cat as musical guest, he wasn’t doing double duty this time, and he also has more acting experience under his belt now. He was in Happy Gilmore 2 this summer alongside Marcello Hernandez, and you see that chemistry when the two are onscreen here, too. The premiere’s best moments were when Bad Bunny and Marcello Hernandez worked together as a dynamic team, as evidenced in the standout sketches of the night, including ChatGPTío and Parent-Teacher Conferences. I wish we had seen them in a Sabado Gigante sketch.
As for the premiere overall, it felt on par with the average SNL episode, which was up and down. The cold open featured a too-convincing Colin Jost as Pete Hegseth, parodying his anti-DEI speech-slash-Ted-Talk to soldiers, with James Austin Johnson’s Trump coming on soon after to recap his summer. The Jeopardy sketch felt one-note, and the Inventing Spanish sketch, which occupied the same universe as Nate Bargatze’s Washington’s Dream series, didn’t reach the level of silliness that it could have (even if it did have many sharp lines). The El Chavo de Ocho sketch didn’t quite hit if you weren’t already familiar with the original.
When the writing wasn’t its sharpest, Bad Bunny’s performance still carried through every sketch. Being a good comedic actor takes him far, but he’s also so intentional about playing each character with such an earnest conviction. You’re laughing, but you also really want his characters to win. At the core, his characters are all sweeties. And to make the audience believe that even a creepy aspiring sperm donor is a sweetie? That’s a gift. With how frequently he’s been at 30 Rock for a newcomer, perhaps we’ll see him come in as a more regular drop-in?
Here are the highlights:
Bad Bunny solidifies why he’s the perfect first host to start the season with his monologue, where he’s so funny, charismatic, and at ease on that stage. (The week’s promo about him being supremely comfortable at SNL wasn’t a joke, and good.) During the monologue, he gave us a rundown of his Puerto Rico residency, making fun of himself with a clip of his “complicated choreography” and Jon Hamm (or Juan Jamón) allegedly in attendance. (And you know he was in the SNL audience too, bucket hat and all.) Bad Bunny joked about the MAGA backlash, saying that Fox News was excited about him hosting the Super Bowl, followed by clips of Fox News talking heads cut together to say, “Bad Bunny is my favorite musician, and he should be our next president.” He switches to Spanish towards the end, and ends by reminding us that if we didn’t understand, we have four months to learn. Hosts tend to have more room to be political (at least for the standards of this show), and it was refreshing to see Bad Bunny so seamlessly stand in his own element, both defiant and unbothered by the bad-faith conservative talking points à la Fox News. I hope that having him on as an inherently political guest isn’t a quid pro quo for potentially having, like, Tony Hinchcliffe on later.
A lesbian couple (Sarah Sherman and Chloe Fineman) asks their good friend (Mikey Day) to be a sperm donor, but he has to think about it. But it’s not a problem; there’s another restaurant patron named Elviro (Bad Bunny), a weird guy with a bowl cut who’s extremely eager to be a father. Kenan Thompson is also randomly there as a restaurant patron who wants free semen. The logic doesn’t quite work for me, but I appreciate the silliness. The whole sketch is worth it for the camera pan to see Bad Bunny comically exaggerate his intro line: “Uuuuuuuuuh … I will do it!”
A strong, simple premise that answers the question: what if ChatGPT were your Latino uncle? Well, its tagline would be, “Call your abuela. She’s missing you and she has nothing to do.” Marcello Hernandez leads this digital short as the titular tío, assisted by Bad Bunny in a costume that’s kind of Walter Goggins coded. I love them together, and I hope Bad Bunny will appear more frequently during the season. SNL is fun when it’s culturally specific, which, based on how white the cast has gotten, feels like something to savor when it does happen. An added bonus is that we get a glimpse of four of the five new featured players in this one.
When a group of friends is at brunch, catching up about recent media they’ve liked, Thomas (Bad Bunny) gets really defensive about loving KPop Demon Hunter, which is technically a movie for children. When the rest of the group moves on from the conversation, Thomas is still pissed off; he sits sideways, poised and cross-armed, his internal monologue both indignant at his peers and also bopping to the movie’s songs in his head. To be funny while playing a character who’s sweet and endearing (even when calling his friends idiots) is a skill, and Bad Bunny has it. I also love that this sketch felt like it had three acts, with Bowen coming in as a demon, before an actual Huntr/x performance. Bonus points for Sarah Sherman’s dowdy character, who accidentally got on the Epstein list.
Easily the best sketch of the night. When a school principal (Ashley Padilla) and a teacher (Andrew Dismukes) reprimand a student (Hernandez) for disturbing drawings of him attacking the principal, the student’s father (Bad Bunny) comes in, and Padilla’s principal, immediately smitten, changes course to hitting on the student’s father. It’s delightful to see her switch to what her character believes is a full-blown rom-com heroine, only to elicit no reaction from Bad Bunny and frustration from the student’s teacher, who’s actually in love with her. After Bad Bunny’s character tells her to call him by his first name, she marvels, “Have you ever let anyone call you that before?” Bad Bunny simply says, “Yes.” When Padilla calls his late wife a bitch before realizing she died and then doing a hard pivot to “Then the bitch is I,” was my favorite line read of the episode.
• Doja Cat … that woman is a performer performer. I’m surprised she wasn’t in any sketches.
• In the end credits, I loved seeing Bowen dancing with the Huntr/X girls. Because I’ve finally aged into SNL’s demographic, I can’t tell the extent to which they’re a real band or just in the movie, but I thought it was cute!
• I did miss having a Please Don’t Destroy sketch.
• Slime coming out of Sarah Sherman’s mouth In the KPop Demon Hunters sketch … I do love when that girl gets to go back to her body horror roots.
• Pre-emptively looking forward to more Veronika Slowikowska and Jeremy Culhane this season. I don’t know a lot about either of them, other than that they have fanbases from TikTok and Dropout, respectively. Seeing their fans buzz with excitement feels really tender.
• Benicio del Toro cameo? Is everyone just free?
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