And, we’re back! Last night, season 38 of Saturday Night Live premiered with a pretty solid episode featuring host Seth MacFarlane and musical guest Frank Ocean. As you might have heard, this season is seeing a few major changes: Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg are gone (and Jason Sudeikis is on his way out), Aidy Bryant, Tim Robinson, and Cecily Strong have joined as featured players, and they’re finally letting Jay Pharaoh play Obama. And he’s good at it! Based on that fact alone, we have to say that we’re psyched for the next few months. We’ll have to see how the cast changes shake out over the weeks to come, but for now, click through to watch the sketches from last night that we loved, and the ones that made us cringe, and let us know if you agree with our assessments in the comments!
The Best:
Lids
We know this sketch has a short shelf life, but it always charms us when SNL does this kind of topical crowd-pleasing throwaway. Plus, much like the video the sketch parodied, we knew it was stupid, but we just kept on smiling. And isn’t that what SNL is all about?
Introduction to Puppetry
Bill Hader, man. Bill Hader. That’s all we can say.
Wooden Spoons
We’re not sure what it says about this episode that we chose a 45-second sketch as one of our favorites (well no, we know exactly what it says), but even though this sketch was basically there to use MacFarlane’s voices one last time and make fun of the letter ‘R’, we totally dug it. Can’t go wrong with Amish jokes.
The Worst:
Sex After 50
Wait. So after an entire summer to think up new sketches, the producers lead off with this tired, lame reboot of one of Armisen’s least funny characters? We can’t understand this.
Drill Sergeant
Okay, okay, so it wasn’t all that bad, but the stuttering premise is just so tired. This was a completely forgettable, predictable and boring sketch, and we just expect more, please.
First Date
We’re just not sure how this premise even got to this stage. Okay, we’ll have a couple, and they’ll start every sentence with “Look at me, I’m like” and then… And then nothing. We were glad to see a girl get more than one line in a row though.