The defining image of Saturday Night Live Season 51 is James Austin Johnson as Donald Trump, standing at yet another press conference podium. Johnson played Trump in roughly 14 of the season’s 20 episodes, almost always anchoring the cold open in the same format.
The frustration isn’t with the impression itself — Johnson’s Trump remains sharp, and the wig was even subtly updated to reflect a more current look — but with the creative laziness surrounding it. A writers’ room stocked with professional comedians ought to be able to find more imaginative entry points into the political moment than a recurring White House briefing. The cold open, which should set the tone and energy for the entire show, became instead a weekly anchor dragging things down before the first commercial break.
If the cold opens represent the season’s most glaring structural problem, Ashley Padilla represents its one unambiguous triumph. She is not just the best performer on the current cast — she’s actively transforming mediocre material into something worth watching, a feat very few cast members in the show’s history have managed so consistently. What New York Times critic Jason Zinoman called the “Padilla Pause” — that charged, unhurried beat she holds before a punchline while visibly working something through — is the mark of a performer operating at a level the rest of the cast simply isn’t matching. With a sketch comedy background rooted in actual improv and sketch training, she does what the best SNL performers have always done: she takes words off a page and turns them into gold.
The supporting cast, by contrast, offered little help. Several new cast members — Tommy Brennan in particular — were nearly invisible by season’s end, and the back half of the season somehow gave them less to do rather than more, which is the opposite of how a transitional season should work. Mikey Day’s persistent breaking became a weekly irritant, recalling the Jimmy Fallon era in the worst possible way. Marcelo Hernandez generated considerable outside buzz on the strength of a stand-up special, but a closer look at his SNL work reveals a performer who tends to play the same note repeatedly rather than demonstrating genuine range. Jeremy Culhane’s Tucker Carlson impression earned real-world acclaim, but the character seemed to be working from a circa-2014 version of Carlson rather than a genuine satirical portrait of who he is today.
One of the season’s more discussed moments was a Ryan Gosling episode built entirely around making the cast break and laugh on camera — a deliberate violation of a 50-year Lorne Michaels rule. The sketch was even announced as such with an on-screen chyron. That SNL chose to finally cross that line and still couldn’t make it into a genuinely funny sketch is, in some ways, the perfect encapsulation of the season: precedent broken, creative dividend uncollected.
The writing room more broadly showed signs of creative exhaustion. A sketch about men spontaneously singing together at a barbecue drew comparisons to a bit from Anchorman that is now more than two decades old. Recurring pieces like the Norwegian film parody and the Shop TV sketches were wheeled out again with little variation, suggesting a staff that has learned to lean on what worked once rather than push toward something new.
The numbers tell the starkest story. For the second consecutive season, not a single sketch received a 5-star grade from either grader — a trend that, notably, began after Will Ferrell’s departure in Season 27 and has been accelerating. Season 51 is a rebuilding year, but it’s not clear we know what the final structure is going to resemble.
We cover all this and much more in this episode of Wasn’t That Special. Please subscribe and join us for a trip through every year of SNL, and consider joining at the Executive Producer level, where you get a whole load of extra commentary and clips that will help you become an SNL expert!
