The one mercy was that when Wiig turned up as Gilly, it meant there wouldn’t be a full-fledged Gilly sketch later on.īut oh, there would be The Californians, that miracle of physics that somehow transforms 7 minutes of screen time into an entire leap year of suffering. The rest of the night was mostly retreads and worse, starting with a monologue that seemed designed to be as generic as an SNL monologue could possibly be, complete with musical number, backstage visit, Lorne Michaels cameo and celebrity appearances (Maya Rudolph and Jonah Hill). Here it was Wiig and Aidy Bryant as careless acupuncturists who had client Jason Sudeikis bleeding like a stuck pig, and while it was a one-note gag, the beats of the joke were nicely structured, especially the idea that Sudeikis had no idea what was going on (“Hey, I’m feeling a little light-headed!”). There was also an acupuncture sketch that hearkened back to the very beginnings of Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd as a Julia Child who stayed ebullient even as she couldn’t stop bleeding.
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Later, a Disney Channel parody that was basically The Ring for kids may not have been topical ( The Ring came out in 2002, and even Hollywood isn’t ripping it off anymore), but it was very well executed, with some good gags of Wiig, as water ghost mom, crawling out of the family TV and hunched under the covers. A Mothers Day commercial for 1-800-Flowers that paired her with Kate McKinnon as her passive-aggressive mom (on the flowers: “Maybe you should keep them, because your apartment is so sad”) had just the right touch, enough to make it clear that her mother was driving her crazy without being too cartoonishly nasty about it. Oddly enough, much of it came in the night’s pre-taped pieces. For all her great talent, Wiig had become, by the time she left a year ago, a symbol of everything franchise-heavy and headpoundingly overdone on SNL and tonight’s show was a reminder of both the good and the bad of her reign. Watching the parade of Kristen Wiig’s Greatest Hits that marked her return to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE as tonight’s host, you could be forgiven for wishing you missed her more.