Emmy Episodes: Saturday Night Live

It’s always my policy to watch every Emmy-nominated episode each year, which leads me to sample a handful of shows that I don’t tune in to on a regular basis. For the sixth year in a row, I’m making a special effort to spotlight each of those installments to offer my perspective on shows that I don’t review each week.

Saturday Night Live: Season 46, Episode 6 “Host: Dave Chappelle” (B)

Four years ago, when Trump was actually elected as president, Dave Chappelle hosted this show and won an Emmy for the gig. What I noticed about his opening monologue here was that it was incredibly long and he was basically left to his own devices, smoking on stage and unleashing a number of harsh truths about how America works that others would surely have avoided. As the second installment of the show that I’ve watched from its forty-sixth season, I would say it was an improvement over Bill Burr’s similarly political but far less nuanced and effective hosting job in episode two, though I don’t think most of Chappelle’s bits were all that funny. He could easily win again just for that extended monologue, and for bringing a dramatic bent to a typically unserious show. This is also Kenan Thompson’s submission, which is puzzling to me since the actor, who is also nominated for performance in the sitcom “Kenan” this year, has very little to do over the course of the episode. Responding to the brothers’ harrowing tale of bodily injury during the video game retrospective and playing Uncle Ben aren’t substantial uses of his talent, and this definitely pales in comparison to his submission from last year. Watching Kate McKinnon as Rudy Giuliani was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the rundown of how mail-in ballots needed to be carefully vetted if they had a return address on Mars and if they were in fact tortillas, as well as the repeated references to the Four Seasons mishap.