With Ariana Grande back as Saturday Night Live host and longtime cast member Bowen Yang leaving, it was pretty obvious that the NBC late-night show was going to be pretty Wicked, literally and figuratively, tonight. What was less evident was where the Lorne Michaels was going to go with its tone-setting cold open.
“Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho — yes we added a fourth Ho,” declared James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump in a Christmas address to the nation. Moving faster, the fictional POTUS went after Santa Claus less than week before the Big Night: “We have to be vigilant this Christmas as Americans, as you know, Arctic immigrants are coming in through our chimneys and stealing our milk and cookies … we’ll be looking into that.”
Leaning into POTUS’ satire-rich oddball and way too loud December 17 address to the nation that was leaked as the start of a war against Venezuela to convince the networks to broadcast it, the beginning of tonight’s show was a grab bag of far from greatest hits — like Trump’s actual 15-minute speech of earlier this week.
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Still, like so many SNL cold opens of recent years, the show could have relied on the tried and true and taken a page or two out of the just released portions of the DOJ files on Jeffrey Epstein — which is what they did, as you can see here:
“Why are you putting your name on so many buildings? We had to take it off so many files.”
“I almost forgot I’ve been inventing my own Hunger Games,” SNL Trump went on to say. “That’s right, the White House will be hosting the Patriot Games for high school athletes to compete. Because I thought, What’s the best way to distract from the Epstein files? I know, invite a bunch of teenagers to my house?”
With that, the very last show for the suddenly departing Yang, tonight’s SNL had a lot to draw on for its cold open out of this week.
Clearly there is nothing funny or fun at all about the recent horror and tragedies of the fatal shootings at Brown University and the killing of Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner. However, more of a war on patience for even some MAGA-heads, Trump’s December 17 remarks found him barreling and barreling through the teleprompter with fiats of everything’s-great, Joe-Biden-ruined-everything and I’m-amazing speech was pretty good satire on its own, even without tonight’s weak sauce SNL treatment.
In the past seven days, as noted in tonight’s cold open with a slur against gay men, there was also the adding of the former Apprentice host’s name to the Kennedy Center, though the legality of the addition is in doubt. Then there was that Vanity Fair profile of Trump’s inner circle of the not really best and the brightest where Chief of Staff Susie Wiles bluntly slagged everyone including her boss or went deep with a Black Op that fell flat. Former Secret Service agent and podcaster Dan Bongino’s long anticipated exit as the FBI’s deputy director, set to take effect in January, does kind of write itself too when it comes to cold opens.
Nowhere near as good as the open for the Melissa McCarthy-hosted December 6 show (more Colin Jost as Pete Hegseth, please Lorne), tonight’s cold open had the feel of being crashed together and missing the moment — much like Trump’s recent much hyped and underwhelming speech.
Still, tonight was not just MVP Yang’s last show, but the last show of a rockin’ 2025 for SNL.
Taking a couple of weeks off for Christmas and New Year’s, the NBC late-nighter will return in January.
Staying with tonight, this was Grande’s fifth SNL stint. This is the Golden Globe nominee’s third time as host, as well as two musical guest appearances.
With that, it was going to take a real heavy hitter as musical guest to not be overshadowed by the four-octave range Grande tonight. If you want to believe (see what I did there clubgoers), Cher was exactly the legendary prize fighter the situation called for – I mean, it’s Cher. While oddly never a host, the Oscar winner has been a musical guest once before in 1987 and made cameos in the Lorneverse in 1992 and on the primetime 50th anniversary special in February.
Coming off a room-temperature cold open tonight, SNL could choose to go for a cold closer.
Though they haven’t done it since 2017, the show has on several occasions over the decades put on skates and taken to the ice rink in front of Rockefeller Center to end the pre-Christmas show.
That would be a sharp and grand farewell for Yang, and well deserved.