Saturday Night Live: Lizzo fails to add juice to a dated and dire episode | Saturday

It being Easter weekend, Saturday Night Live opens with a message from the Easter Bunny (Bowen Yang). Almost immediately, the “freakiest” holiday character turns things over to a random assortment of public figures.

Dr Anthony Fauci (Kate McKinnon) compares Covid cases to Jesus (“They’ve risen again!”), while Marjorie Taylor Greene (Cecily Strong) worries that “between the pastels and the jellybeans, this holiday has gotten a little too LGBQRST for me”. New York City mayor Eric Adams (Chris Redd), boasts about catching the Brooklyn subway shooter, even though “it took 30 hours and the suspect turned himself in”, while Elon Musk (Mikey Day), attempts to buy the holiday. Britney Spears (Chloe Fineman) does a lot of twirling and Jared Leto (Kyle Mooney), begs people not to review his terrible new movie Morbius.

Finally, former president Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) interrupts the proceedings to ramble about Reese’s Eggs (“I like Reese, I’m very good friends with Reese…”), Cap’n Crunch (“He was very rude to me at Count Chocula’s 500th birthday”) and Little Caesar’s (“I told him to say, ‘Pizza! Pizza!’ He used to say it once and I said we should be saying it twice!”)

Austin’s Trump and Redd’s Adams aside, these are among the worst, most obnoxious, and straight up laziest impressions in the cast’s repertory. The writing sinks to match them on several fronts, from the hypocrisy of lampooning (however lightly) Musk less than a year after the show gave its entire platform over to him, to the softening of Taylor Greene by portraying her as a harmless kook, to the attempt to have it both ways by pointing out how useless New York’s law enforcement while simultaneously parroting their “rising crime” talking point.

Tonight’s episode sees Lizzo pulling double duty as host and music guest. The singer-songwriter promises to “break the record for the amount of times bitch is said on live TV”, before discussing her recent Ted talk on the history of twerking (“I’m like if Einstein could make that ass clap”), batting down rumors about her love life (“They think I’m collecting members of One Direction like Infinity Stones”) and encouraging the audience to love themselves in order to manifest their dreams. That last bit is truly groan inducing – this is supposed to be a comedy show, not an Affirmational Instagram post – but Lizzo shows a good flair for comic delivery. She also seems serious about her earlier promise, with the Bitch Count numbering eight by monologue’s end.

Guess That is a game show where contestants have to answer rapid fire trivia questions. Things start off normal enough, until Lizzo’s contestant botches a question and hijacks the show, refusing to admit she was wrong, accusing the host of gaslighting her and attempting to overthrow him as “Mayor of Game Town”. This last gambit wins the support of her fellow contestant.

It’s a welcome spin on the usual game show narrative and promising start to the episode proper, but things take an immediate nosedive for the next sketch, the latest in the irredeemably awful Tik Tok scrolls. Rather than come up with anything original, the show simply recreates – read: steals—the latest viral videos from the social media platform. Everyone involved in this should be ashamed to call themselves comedians.

Somehow, this is followed by an even worse sketch. We flashback to Interscope Records Studios in the spring of 2008, where the Black Eyed Peas are recording songs for their latest album. Their producers help them brainstorm lyrics for several singles, including the ridiculously simplistic Boom Boom Pow, the extremely random party anthem Tonight, and the highly problematic Let’s Get Retarded, which would later be changed to Let’s Get It Started.

The problems with this sketch are numerous: from the lack of narrative cohesion (the producers are worried about the song’s baffling lyrics one second, then ecstatic about them the next), to Lizzo’s constant breaking, to the cowardly attempt to have it both ways by centering jokes around Let’s Get Retarded offensiveness without actually saying the offending lyrics (thereby putting the onus fully on the audience). Beyond any of this, this sketch speaks to how utterly stuck in the past the show is. It’s not that SNL should refrain from joking about older pop culture – one of its greatest sketches was centered around a 24-year-old Blue Oyster Cult track after all – but this brings nothing original or fresh to the table. It merely falls back on obvious observations and tired impressions 14 years past their sell-by date.

It appears the writer’s minds were stuck in the mid aughts, because the next sketch finds a couple’s (Lizzo, Day) first date interrupted by a community of the dancing old geezers “from the Six Flags commercials”, a piece of pop cultural ephemera that first appeared in 2004.

This is followed by a new Please…