Teyana Taylor and Saturday Night Live don't quite sync up

What’s Happening

Okay so Teyana Taylor brought plenty of energy to Saturday Night Live, and the show seemed happy to hide behind it.

C+ Teyana Taylor and Saturday Night Live don’t quite sync up Taylor brought broad sketch-comedy energy; the show coasted behind it rather than refining it Jesse Hassenger — By Jesse Hassenger | | 3:12am Photo: Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC TV Reviews Saturday Night Live Copy to clipboard × Copy Link Copy Link — Facebook X Reddit Bluesky Email — 0 Let’s start toward the end. The last live sketch of Saturday Night Live ’s Teyana Taylor-hosted episode was a low-key two-on-two political sketch, with Taylor anchoring a PBS news analysis show, flanked , while commentator guests played and Chloe Fineman tried to make milquetoast points of vaguely centrist outrage about the ICE situation in Minneapolis and other Trump-era horrors. (it feels like chaos)

Taylor and Thompson responded with skeptical nonverbal murmurs, double-underlining their unspoken disagreement with the notion that this kind of law-enforcement terror is unprecedented, and flustering the other two into defensiveness.

The Details

Fair-enough premise, and something I might have argued in another week should have been the political cold open rather than another Trump sketch. On a day when the news was dominated murder in Minneapolis, though, the sketch itself managed to feel as mealy-mouthed as the white characters’ reactions.

After all, what better way for the show to speak its bold truth about an uncomfortable current event than… mumbling something about America’s legacy of violence while sneaking out the back of the episode? Just for the sketch itself, SNL has already gone to the well of having Black people beg to differ when white centrists get upset how “this isn’t who we are.

Why This Matters

” It’s obviously a barbed, potentially funny point, but reheating it via a pretty wan discontented-murmuring game, and then throwing in some stuff about white pundits not understanding why people go to church all feels pretty soft, even kind of wobbly-centrist itself, especially when deferring the top of the show to more Trump nonsense.

The entertainment world moves fast, and this is a prime example.