Saturday Night Live: Justin Timberlake steals ho-hum episode from Dakota Johnson

Saturday Night Live opens with CBS’s coverage of the AFC Championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens. The mood of the half-time crew is dour–after today, they have nothing worth living for, since real football is over (the Superbowl is for “commercials, and Usher, and people who never watch football asking how much a touchdown is worth”) and “there’s no other live TV that’s even remotely watchable”.

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The conversation turns to how culturally adrift American men are at the moment – not only is football coming to an end, so is the TV tentpole Blue Bloods, while dad-favorite Yellowstone (“our Barbie”) was once again snubbed by the Emmys. This leads the crew to sing a rendition of Wiz Khalifa See You Again.

The end of football season sending men into an existential crisis is a premise with a lot of promise, but unfortunately, the show doesn’t do anything with it. As has been the case with a number of sketches over this and the past several seasons, they’d rather wrap things up with a cheap and unfunny musical number than try to come up with any actual clever or earned conclusion.

Dakota Johnson returns to host. The actor reflects on her last appearance on the show, during the 40th anniversary episode, for which she was seated in front of Donald Trump and next to “the person who would go on to become the most powerful person in America”, Taylor Swift. She’s interrupted by the night’s musical guest – and her Social Network co-star – Justin Timberlake, who mistakenly thinks he’s hosting, as well as Jimmy Fallon in his Barry Gibb costume.

A dinner reunion between members of the Mason family goes awry when their high-strung waitresses get everything wrong, including their names (calling them “the Manson family”), their orders, and eventually, the basics of English. Sarah Sherman brings the right kind of manic energy to proceedings, but Johnson seems flustered and stilted. As with the cold open, this one comes to an all-too abrupt end.

Next, a young man enjoying some time with his parents and grandmother discovers a box of home movies. The family settles in to watch and reminisce, until they get to one tape marked ‘Big Announcement,’ which the dad says is a recording of the day he found out he was going to be a father. What he doesn’t mention is that said discovery comes during a paternity-test episode of a trashy Maury-like talk show. A clever idea, even if it never really rises above that initial reveal.

As hinted at during the monologue, Timberlake and Fallon reunite as Beegees members Barry and Robin Gibb for a new edition of the Barry Gibb Talk Show. Their guests are political correspondent Elie Mystal (Kenan Thompson), political pest Andrew Yang (Bowen Yang), and political activist Joanne Carducci (Johnson). The coked-up, psychotic Barry berates and threatens his guests – he tells Mystal that he looks like “if Don King ate another Don King,” and threatens to deglove Yang’s corpse and “use his ribcage as a trap” – while the spacey Robin harmonizes on cue but otherwise has nothing to add. While both Fallon and Timberlake have seen their public stock fall (for good reason) over the past decade, it’s undeniable how good their chemistry is. Fallon is particularly excellent as the unhinged Gibb. This is the funniest he’s been since his cameos on 30 Rock.

A new Please Don’t Destroy sees the boys pitch some ideas to Johnson, who throws them off-balance by immediately admitting that their videos are “really … not for me”. Things escalate from there, with her referring to them the “Lonelier Island,” and them hurling potshots at her acting: “What’s [Madame Webb’s] superpower? Is it whispering in monotone?” The barbs keep flying, with both parties taking digs at each other’s recent flops (including the truly terrible Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain). The do declare a “nepo-truce” once the subject of their famous parents comes up (save for Ben Marshall, the only non-nepo baby of the bunch). The acknowledgment of John Higgins and Martin Herlihy’s parental connections is long-overdue, but props to all involved, including and especially Johnson, for the surprisingly sharp bits of self-deprecation. This is the best PDD has been for a while.

Johnson is then joined by Heidi Gardner and Chloe Fineman as a trio of shallow blonde trendsetters. They’re still rocking their “big, dumb hats” from last season, but their latest fad is “big, dumb cups”. What starts off as a solid takedown of the Stanley cup cult and their shoddy, led-filled obsession, but eventually it turns into a excuse for some by-the-numbers prop comedy.

Following Timberlake’s performance of Sanctified, featuring Tobe Nwigwe, it’s time for Weekend Update. The first guest is a guy named Ethan (Yang), ostensibly there to break down the recently announced Oscar nominations. He immediately dismisses that notion in favor of his own personal awards show. The nominees are all films that somehow relate to his personal experience – Bradley Cooper’s closeted gay man marrying a woman in Maestro, Paul Giamatti having a lazy eye in The Holdovers, the CGI Flounder in the live-action Little Mermaid reminding him of an ex-boyfriend. A serial liar and egomaniac, Ethan is just a slightly goofier version of Yang’s George Santos impression.

Later, Michael Che brings on tarot card reader Jan Janby (Gardner) to reveal what 2024 has in store. Asked to predict the election and the Super Bowl, she instead reads disaster in Che’s future: his upcoming comedy special will bomb, his OnlyFans addiction will drain all his money, and Colin Jost will run a successful catfish scam on him. It’s usually Jost who comes in for the ribbing on Update, so having a character take the piss out of Che instead makes for a nice change of pace.

A women’s book group discussion gets off track after one member reveals that she’s about to go on Shark Tank. Her big sales pitch is a black T-shirt that reads: “Don’t ask if I’m okay. I’m okay. But if everyone starts asking if I’m okay, I might start crying.” Her friends don’t get it at first, but after she gets everyone to ask if another member if she’s okay, which causes the woman to break down and reveal her troubled homelife, they realize the genius behind her idea. Shark Tank panel members Barbara Corcoran and Mark Cuban appear as themselves. There’s quite a bit of awkward, dead air in the buildup to this payoff.

Then, Johnson’s harried traveler attempts to retrieve her lost luggage from Thompson and Devon Walker’s strange father-and-son baggage clerks, who forces her to confirm the embarrassing contents in front of her new boyfriend. Said contents include a personal diary, diarrhea medication, and … that’s it. This feels like a sketch of a sketch, and it makes for a real flat note to go out on – at least until Dave Chappelle shows up, sans explanation, for the closing curtain call.

Johnson seemed oddly out of sync with the rest of the cast for the live sketches, although she acquitted herself better in the pre-filmed segments, while five-time vet Timberlake and the returning Fallon stole the spotlight. Their sketch, along with a return to form for Please Don’t Destroy, kept this episode from fully sinking.