What Didn’t Work in Season 43 of <em>Saturday Night Live</em>

The opening sketch of Saturday Night Live’s 43rd season finale epitomized the show’s direction this year. It was chock-full of celebrity guests, with Alec Baldwin in his usual role as Donald Trump, Ben Stiller as the president’s beleaguered attorney Michael Cohen, and Robert De Niro as a watchful, stone-faced Robert Mueller. It wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, mostly just referencing the news of the week and expecting an audience reaction, but there were cute little moments that stood out, like the exaggerated, reptilian hand gestures that went into Kate McKinnon’s performance as Rudy Giuliani.

Despite the generalelegiac almost by default, thanks to the piece of pop culture it was satirizing—the mournful, tense, famously baffling final scene of . Trump was the Tony Soprano analog, constantly looking over his shoulder for trouble approaching. Mueller was the man in the Members Only jacket, lurking in the background, a possible end to a story that has dragged on and on and on and on (as the refrain in Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” goes). Before we found out what happens, things cut to black; only this time, the lights turned back on for the cast to yell, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”