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It is Saturday Night Live’s nature to be topical and scattered.
The show is always chasing the news of the day in order to find laughs in it, and its production schedule — each episode is thrown together over the course of a week — means that it will have as many misses as hits, even in its best seasons. Every so often, even in a bad season, an episode that’s far more good than bad will come together, like magic, but watching Saturday Night Live inherently means being very, very forgiving.
And yet I can’t quite find it in myself to forgive SNL in 2017. The show went through one of those periods where it became a cultural monolith, especially early in the year, when Donald Trump took office. Its ratings were huge. It was all people could talk about the morning after it aired. Even the president tweeted, grouchily, about how Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him pissed him off. (As Willa Paskin noted at Slate before the 2016 election, it’s certainly interesting that Trump seems to find Baldwin’s impersonation so irritating.)
But the more of SNL I watched this year, the more I felt like I was watching a different show than everybody else was. I was tempted to call it the worst show of 2017, but I’m not sure that’s what I mean. It’s certainly made with a certain degree of love and affection that marks it as the work of talented people.
No, what SNL was was the emptiest show of 2017, and the fact that it was so over-praised makes me worry we’ll learn nothing at all from this particular moment in pop cultural history. And there’s no better way to talk about that emptiness than to consider just how poorly SNL handles the current occupant of the White House, even as it clearly wants to say something daring.
Saturday Night Live still portrays Donald Trump as an aberration, to its detriment
I should probably preface this by saying that I’ve always found Saturday Night Live to be a little hard to take. That period in early adolescence when the thrill of staying up late to watch it promotes a lifelong affection, a period so many of my friends and colleagues remember with warmth and nostalgia; I just never went through it. It’s a cultural rite of passage among relatively affluent, mostly white Americans that I completely missed.
I should also preface this by saying that Saturday Night Live’s satire of political figures is almost always limited to a couple of very high-level, obvious things to mock. Occasionally, someone like Will Ferrell will elevate a very stereotypical portrayal of George W. Bush as a dummy to another level through sheer skill of performance, and every so often, the show will come up with a sketch that has something politically incisive to say. (I’m fond of this one, where Phil Hartman’s Ronald Reagan is a folksy naif for the cameras and essentially a James Bond villain when they’re not around.) But its quick-turnaround production cycle means its satire is usually only about an inch deep.
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That’s more easily forgivable in less tumultuous times. Hartman’s riff on Bill Clinton as a hamburger-loving ladies’ man was far from the most unique take on that president, but the ’90s were also an era when America’s status as a sole, economically comfortable superpower allowed SNL to indulge in its true strengths of coming up with memorable recurring characters and strange flights of fancy. It wasn’t that there were no major news stories in the ’90s; it was that there were fewer major news stories that SNL felt it necessary to comment on, which gave the show a lot of freedom.
None of this is really SNL’s fault. It probably would rather the president didn’t aim a number of Twitter barbs in its direction, or that its choice to have Melissa McCarthy portray Sean Spicer reportedly led to Trump’s flagging confidence in his press secretary. It might have mocked Hillary Clinton, too, but its staff was clearly full of Clinton voters, if its post-election treatment of her has been any indication. (If nothing else, Kate McKinnon’s riff on Clinton was a better-developed character than Baldwin’s riff on Trump.)
It still sticks in my craw, however, that SNL has spent a lot of the year being feted as brave and necessary television, when the heights of its satire amount to, “Trump is a weird, gross man, and his occupancy of the White House is weird and gross.” I don’t really disagree with any part of that assessment, but it treats Trump not as a dark portion of the American psyche that floated to the top, but rather as an aberration. And as the year wears on, and Trump’s proposals grow more and more damaging to more and more people, SNL’s Trump administration remains an over-obvious comedy horror show, where Steve Bannon is played by the Grim Reaper (ha ha ha?) and the series can never quite figure out how to handle the complicity of the Trump women.
SNL understands neither what makes Trump alluring nor what makes him dangerous. I don’t want to write off the value of poking a leader in the eye by portraying him as a buffoon, but there are no levels to Baldwin’s performance (or the show’s writing for said performance) beyond simpering man-baby. The series’ default assumption is that Trump is dangerous not because he represents a nativist, nationalist ideology that is destroying lives, while leaving thousands more in flux, but because he’s a goofy, incompetent boob who might accidentally get us into nuclear war.
Which, yes, but it’s a weirdly safe portrayal of Trump, one that seeks to soothe well-meaning, left-leaning folks that everything will just go back to normal if we can simply get rid of Trump, not suggest that what he represents is more dangerous to the future of the country than what he is. It ignores how much Trump is a figurehead for a whole rotten movement, a figurehead who barely knows what’s in the bills he purports to support. It fails to grasp that a big part of what makes Trump Trump is that shows like SNL underestimate him and his supporters.
Fortunately, TV has better Trumps
Were there SNL sketches I liked in 2017? Absolutely. But very few of them had anything to do with the show’s take on politics (where I liked McCarthy’s riff on Spicer and … that was about it). Its tone-deafness extended to its portrayal of things like the ongoing sexual misconduct scandals roiling Hollywood, which it mostly pointed to and said, “This exists.” I don’t expect SNL to have a take on everything happening in the world right now, but I expect its takes to have some teeth when they arrive. They almost never do.
Fortunately, other portions of late night were offering better takes on the mess that is the world. SNL alum Seth Meyers’s late-night show became, in real time, a funny look at how a fractious, diverse coalition of voices has risen up in opposition to Trump, and while Samantha Bee’s TBS program can sometimes have the myopic point of view of an official Democratic Party Twitter feed, I like the host’s blinding, constant rage.
For my money, though, the single best sketch about Trump in 2017 didn’t emerge anywhere near the late-night shows that we here in the media talk about endlessly. It was on Comedy Central’s The President Show, an inconsistent show “hosted” by Donald Trump (a pitch-perfect Anthony Atamanuik). Yes, The President Show is mostly about how much of a buffoon Trump is, but Atamanuik’s impression is miles better than Baldwin’s. He’s even nailed how Trump stands, like his center of balance is somewhere off over the horizon.
But what gives The President Show its teeth is that it has to spend so much time with Trump that it can’t help but delve into him in more psychologically satisfying ways. It might not be a weekly treatise on his policy failures, but it is more interested in him as an American phenomenon, the id of a country where the (mostly white, mostly male) people who have always been in power can’t quite escape their addiction to their power, or their belief that because they’ve always been in power, they’ve also always been in the right.
Which brings me back to that brilliant sketch. At the end of the series’ Christmas special, Trump and his cronies gather in the Oval Office, along with an assortment of other “characters” from the series (who include prominent Democrats, regular American citizens, and, for whatever reason, Bebe Neuwirth). Trump delivers a little monologue, and then Atamanuik begins to sing Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up,” the tune that unites the many disparate plot threads of the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia.
“Wise Up” plays in a moment of strange emotional catharsis in Magnolia, and after you get over the sheer oddity of The President Show using this song for a musical number performed by this president, the true black comedy genius and core tragedy of the whole show becomes clear. Trump isn’t an aberration; he’s a part of who we are as a country. And we won’t find a way to fix that until those of us too comfortable with our power (like, say, a certain sketch comedy show) accept that having that power makes us a part of the problem too, even if we don’t vote for Trump, even if we try to make him cultural anathema.
“It’s not what you thought when you first began it,” sings first Trump, then members of his Cabinet, then members of his country, then members of his planet. “You got what you want. Now you can hardly stand it, though by now you know, it’s not going to stop. It’s not going to stop. It’s not going to stop, ’til you wise up.”
