Saturday Night Live Season-Finale Recap: Jake Gyllenhaal Does Too Much

Photo: Rosalind O'Connor/NBC

Last year's Saturday Night Live season finale was not intended to be the finale. After the team put out a resoundingly mid Ana de Armas-hosted episode in April, they hoped to follow it up with three more shows in May, culminating with Jennifer Coolidge's decades-belated hosting debut. Instead, the WGA strike scuttled that last trio of episodes, leaving an undercooked sequel to "Lisa From Temecula" as a summary statement on season 48 as a whole.

Season 49, unfortunately, has no such excuse for going out on an off-pitch note.

The fault appears to lie equally with the writers and versatile third-time host Jake Gyllenhaal. Some actors can't handle leading an SNL sketch; others can, but only in reactive straight parts, not big, wacky characters. Gyllenhaal can do both in his sleep. The problem is that, ever since his role in 2019's John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch, he seems all too aware that his penchant for high-voltage eccentricity lends itself to sketch comedy. When he next hosted SNL in 2022, that overconfidence was etched on his face the entire time.

This episode finds the actor somehow operating at an even higher register. Gyllenhaal plays big, wacky, scenery-chewing characters in pretty much every sketch. A live-action Fred from Scooby Doo is possibly his least animated role of the night. The rest of the time, he comes across just as sweaty from exertion as the cyclist he plays in one memorably inscrutable sketch. At a certain point, viewers can only cease being impressed and start being exhausted and maybe concerned.

It's unclear whether this center-stage intensity was the star's idea or a symptom of cast burnout. Did Gyllenhaal demand every last opportunity to show off his omnidirectional chops, or was the cast relieved for the chance to stand back and let him cook? Either way, this season's finale plays like it was made by people mentally scrolling through their summer-hiatus itinerary.

Here are the highlights:

Gyllenhaal's gray-haired patriarch is distracted during a private meeting with his daughter's boyfriend (Andrew Dismukes), who is seeking permission to propose. Apparently, this kitchen-set tête-à-tête is the rare moment he can safely devour cookies in his own home — unbeknownst to his wife (Heidi Gardner) — and he's not going to let his daughter's future matrimony get in the way. It's the night's first and best moment in which Gyllenhaal fervently commits to the bit, drenching this dad in manic desperation. Both the character and the premise feel beamed in from the I Think You Should Leave universe, but rather than ripping off Tim Robinson, they're simply riding the same wavelength, a tacit acknowledgment of that show's outsize impact.

The last time Gyllenhaal hosted, one of his sketches took place on a cabaret night. This one looks at first like a riff on the musical Cabaret before going in an entirely different direction. It's set in the Tick-Tack Club — not to be confused with Cabaret's Kit Kat Club — where a crooner host (the Broadway-burnished Gyllenhaal) has flown in "beautiful girls" from around the world. After a brief interlude with some sparkly, cinched-up showgirls, the host sends in the real meat of the show: his beautiful boys. Now, the easy joke would be to lean entirely on the switcheroo of an all-male revue. Instead, this beefcake-free lineup is stocked with disconcertingly wholesome undesirables, each as bland as a glass of room-temperature milk. Most wear ancient, high-waisted khakis, and all of them sport drab hairstyles imbued with grade-school photo-day presentability. The unsettling little routine peaks with an overhead shot of the boys on their backs, legs kicking up in the air, like a baby-man version of a Busby Berkeley musical. At that point, most viewers will likely agree with audience surrogate Kenan Thompson when he says, "I'm into it now."

Temu and Shein have had it coming for a while. Their ethically dubious, built not-to-last, refreshingly affordable wares have long been as popular as they are scrutinized. This fake ad for composite brand Xiemu nails the forced-feeling, upbeat presentation of modern fast fashion on social media. The cast's discomfort slowly builds as an unseen announcer offers more and more unforced admissions about the company's shadier aspects. In the end, though, the joke is on us all. As the sketch makes quite clear, despite all the public forced-labor allegations and the products' notoriously poor quality, people keep buying.

There's a lot to recommend in this week's Update. Though Ego Nwodim telegraphed in advance that she would not be portraying Jasmine Crockett in a sketch about the U.S. rep's viral clash with Marjorie Taylor Greene, that moment still got its due here. Elsewhere, Thompson and Update regular Marcello Hernández played representatives from the two distinct broods of cicadas that will be gracing humanity with their emergence this summer. The two invest their pesky insect characters with scientifically accurate horniness, which they can barely contain. The main course, though, is another edition of Colin Jost and Michael Che's semi-annual Joke Swap, which is a bit more of a mixed bag than usual. Jost forcing Che to call out "the biggest bitch of them all: Kendrick Lamar," begging the rapper to drag him into diss-track posterity, is among the most successful bits in recent Update history. The use of a puppet caricature of a rabbi toward the end, however, seemed to serve no purpose other than empty provocation.

Over the past few years, weirdos on the streets of New York have been randomly punching out some of our best guys. What starts off as a press conference about this strange scourge quickly morphs into a necessary taxonomy of the broader character-actor landscape. Of course, Gyllenhaal can't resist infusing his police-chief character with cartoonish, I'm-walkin'-here Brooklynese, which is about as additive to this sketch as that rabbi puppet.

• Listen closely in the Trump trial cold open, and you'll hear some rare, faint boos from the crowd as Gardner's Kristi Noem cameo exits the scene. Whether they are aimed at Noem herself or the decision to shoehorn this bit in two weeks later, the boos are not unfounded.

• Musical guest Sabrina Carpenter squeezes a lot of SNL-centric patter in the outro of her song "Nonsense."

• RIP to former host and comedy legend Dabney Coleman, who passed away this week at 92 and who is honored toward the end of the episode with a bumper.

• In his third time hosting, Gyllenhaal completed a trilogy of torch songs in his monologues. First, it was "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" from Dreamgirls; then came Céline Dion's "It's All Coming Back to Me Now." This time, the star sang Boyz II Men's mournful "End of the Road" as a tribute to the sunset of season 49. It came after a bit of riffing about how the concept of a "season 49" of any show sounds like a mere footnote to the inevitably amazing 50th season. Let's all meet back here four or five months after this lackluster finale to determine whether that ends up being the case.