Saturday Night Live: Miles Teller impresses while Ramy Youssef aces Zohran Mamdani

Saturday Night Live’s post-Halloween episode opens with a political debate forum from New York City, where leading mayoral candidates make their final appeal to voters ahead of Tuesday’s election. Said candidates include disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo (host Miles Teller), “young, socialist, Muslim” frontrunner Zohran Mamdani (Ramy Youssef), and nutbag Republican longshot Curtis Sliwa (Shane Gillis). Related: Saturday Night Live: Sabrina Carpenter aces a silly episode that mostly avoids politics Cuomo notes that “as soon as you are elected mayor, everyone in the city immediately hates you and, in that way, I am already one step ahead of the game”. Mamdani promises a number of free services to help with the rising cost of living even as he admits he won’t be able to make good on them. Sliwa, meanwhile, talks about getting shot by various mob families and suffering genital attacks by Yakuza and Lords of the Flatbush gangs. Disgraced outgoing mayor Eric Adams (Kam Patterson) shows up and endorses Mamdani to cost him votes, but it’s no match for Mamdani’s sex/white guilt appeal. Before the candidates can make their closing arguments, they’re interrupted by president Trump (James Austin Johnson). After his usual weaving diatribe (“I have good brain! I did so well on my cognitive test that they immediately gave me an MRI!”), the New York native compares himself to the hero of his favorite musical, The Phantom of the Opera, before launching into a ballad from that show. Each of the guests is well suited to their character – Teller goes full on New York goombah, Youseff has Mamdani’s puppy dog charm, and Gillis nails Silwa’s meathead insanity – but it’s nonetheless damning that SNL had to bring in three ringers to cover the field, rather than use any of their actual cast (at least they gave Adams to one of their own). It’s especially egregious considering they cut Emil Wakim – who would have made a perfect Mamdani – shortly before the season started. Also, while Johnson’s Trump is always on point, he wasn’t needed here, particularly since he’ll show back soon enough. Teller last hosted in 2022. He is especially happy to be back during Halloween weekend, since he and his sisters once went trick or treating as the Night at the Roxbury guys (“We just looked like little Greek men”). He talks about moving a lot during childhood as well as losing his Los Angeles home in the Palisade fires earlier this year. It’s a heavy transition, although he ends the monologue with a chuckle-worthy joke about 30 Rock’s fire exits. What Did I Do Last Night is a game show where “three deeply hungover contestants have to figure out what they got up to the night before.” Still dressed in their costumes (a piece of corn, a formerly sexy cat and Dracula), the players vie for the grand prize of a bacon, egg and cheese and bottle of Pedialyte by remembering who they bit, fought and kissed during their debauched blackouts. Funny enough, but it feels like the drunken antics could have been a bit crazier. Next, Teller plays both Property Brothers, busy taking on their biggest challenge yet: renovating the East Wing of the White House. They have to navigate a number of challenges, including Trump’s love of garish luxury (his mood board includes pictures of Vladmir Putin’s palatial estate and Jabba the Hut’s pleasure barge ), first lady Melania’s (Chloe Fineman) creepy tastes (her Christmas decorations are made up of Halloween props), a lack of available workers due to ICE raids and the government shutdown, and Trump’s plans to stay on past his second term (“We’re not leaving, we’re going to be doing something called coup”). When the brothers, who hail from Canada, ask for payment for their work, Trump sticks his secret border police on them. The type of obvious but perfect melding of pop culture and current events that has been sorely missing from SNL this season. At a studio backlot, three professional hockey players – one New York Ranger, one Los Angeles King and one Nashville Predator – attempt to film a series of promos for NHL Outreach Day. Problems arise from the script, which has the players refer to themselves by their team’s name: “I’m a King on the ice, but I’m also a king in the community” and “I’m a ranger in my community” are all well and good, but “I’m a predator in my community” causes obvious problems for the third player. This joke repeats several times, but unlike the previous game show segment, it ratchets up each time. It’s only too bad that the supporting characters played by Ashley Padilla and Andrew Dismukes drag this otherwise solid sketch down with bad mugging. Gone Without a Trace is new Netflix documentary about disappearance of three suburban housewives. Per interviews with the wives, they were never actually missing, their idiotic husbands just didn’t remember they were on business trips, visiting family, or, in the case of one wife, “literally in the bathroom … dumping”. A good premise and solid send up of male solipsism. A news show airs live from a new set, backdropped by a working newsroom that gives viewers a peak behind the curtain. Things get off to a terrible start as the ill-prepared staff crash into doors, browse manga erotica on their computers, loudly promote their Onlyfans, and get electrocuted by the copy machine. Simple and stupid, but not necessarily in a bad way. Musical guest Brandi Carlile performs her first song of the night, a protest anthem advocating the separation of church and state. Then it’s on to Weekend Update, where Colin Jost laughs about Trump’s weird penchant for placing candy on the heads of young trick or treaters visiting “what’s left of the White House”. Jost welcomes their first guest, former Congressman George Santos (Bowen Yang), newly pardoned and sprung from 80 in lockup. As always, every word out of Santos’s mouth is a lie: “I was in jail with other white-collar criminals even though I’m black.” He pretends to take phone calls from famous jailbirds Ghislaine Maxwell and Luigi Mangione and takes credit for the Louve heist and Dodger’s World Series victory. One of Yang’s better caricatures. Their next guests are two people who just hooked up (Dismukes and Padilla, again). Ostensibly there to discuss the government shutdown, they are so enamored with one another that they’re only able to talk about themselves and their sexual desires: “Maybe the Republicans are scared because their government hasn’t been open in … a long time. Not since Jason, actually.” One of the best Update segments of the season thus far, with Padilla and Dismukes displaying much better chemistry here than in their previous sketch. At a tense press conference, the lead detective assigned to a serial killer case answers tough questions from the media, including an unrelated one from a would-be comic book scribe. His rejected pitch for a series called Gargirl (“Half-gargoyle, half-girl, all justice”) eventually hooks the rest of the press pool, the cops and the killer himself. The third sketch in which Padilla (who gets a funny freakout moment reminiscent of Will Ferrell) and Dismukes are giving the spotlight. Carlile performs her second set before the show wraps up with a restaurant-set sketch in which Teller and Marcello Hernández’s extra-Italian waiters piss off one of their patrons (Mikey Day) by aggressively flirting with his wife (Fineman). This one is wall-to-wall Italian food puns, most of them bad, although Hernández yelling “Maybe you should get the FOC-CACIA!” earns a double take. Weak ending aside, this was a stronger-than-average episode. Teller makes a good host; willing to play the straight man most of the time but able to go big and goofy when needed. SNL is relying a little too much on Johnson’s Trump this season, but that is to be expected. One thing the show definitely needs to do is make better use of its new cast members, as they had almost nothing to do this episode.