Whoops, Pete Hegseth added Mikey Madison to his group chat too

This episode should have been stronger. Fresh off her Oscar win for Best Actress, this was going to be Mikey Madison’s next big moment. SNL wasted little time booking her as the host that would kick off what looked like a strong run of episodes. (Madison will be followed by Jack Black and Jon Hamm, both of them notching their fourth hosting gigs.)

I’ve said this before, but sometimes an episode of SNL is just an average episode of SNL. This was the case for Madison.

When the show put her in a sketch, she was good. But she didn’t get many opportunities. SNL mostly put Madison in supporting roles during her episode, having her play second fiddle to Marcello Hernandez or Andrew Dismukes. (I think there were even one or two pretaped sketches that didn’t feature her at all.)

This episode had an unusually high number of repeat sketches. We got Hernandez’s acting school teacher, the bit where two characters have a serious talk while there’s bedlam behind them and Bowen Yang’s midwife character again. (We even got a Please Don’t Destroy sketch centered around a Nickelodeon show.) I don’t have a problem with recurring sketches — they’re part of the bedrock that SNL is built on — but this many in a single episode feels like a crutch.

It’s hard to be a breakthrough SNL host when you never get a shot at having a moment.(At least Madison didn’t dash off stage during goodnights like musical guest Morgan Wallen …)

COLD OPEN

Group Chat Cold Open

I’ve come to expect SNL to lead off an episode with James Austin Johnson as Donald Trump and Mike Myers as Elon Musk. The show shook things up a tiny bit this episode, instead giving us its spin on the Signal chat scandal.

We got a new portrayal of a member of Trump’s Cabinet, with Andrew Dismukes’ Pete Hegseth joining Bowen Yang’s JD Vance and Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio … but the premise here didn’t quite track. The high school girls were openly texting in the thread with Hegseth?

• “Could you imagine if that actually happened?” Again, the premise is off here. This cold open would’ve been funnier if it was just a single teenage girl who wound up on a chat between Hegseth and his buddies.
• Early arrival: It’s rare to see an episode’s host in the cold open, but Madison was in this one for some reason.

THE MONOLOGUE

Sometimes an SNL monologue has a clear mission. A song. A tour. A question-and-answer session with the audience. Other times, the host bounces around. In Madison’s case, we got a montage of her “relaxed” movie characters (two different ones got lit on fire!), jokes about being a horse girl when she was a kid and then a visual joke where a jacked dude did the stunt work of pole dancing instead of Madison.