Chris Rock gets ‘SNL’ into the Christmas spirit with a very special cameo

SNL finally got back to being SNL this weekend.

After handing over the show’s cold opens to a bunch of celebrity ringers led by Dana Carvey for the season’s first eight episodes (we were somehow celebrating the fiftieth season of SNL … by having Carvey in every episode?), SNL broke free of that curse this episode.

Carvey wasn’t in this episode. There were no political cameos. We got an episode of SNL that was solely focused on Chris Rock as its host and the show’s cast.

I sometimes think that my stance on cameos makes it look like I’m against them on SNL. That’s not the case. I grew up loving a good cameo on SNL. But a cameo has to be a surprise. (Also, make us miss you. An Adam Sandler cameo is a reward since it’s rare.) It has to be something you’re not expecting when you‘re watching an episode. That’s fun. Getting bombarded with Alec Baldwin and Dana Carvey and Maya Rudolph isn’t fun. It’s a burden. And thankfully SNL escaped that burden this week.

Rock is obviously one of the greatest talents to ever come out of SNL. But he’s not a great host. It was hard to miss his over reliance on cue cards. (I’m pretty sure he wore his glasses in every sketch that wasn’t a pre-tap so he could read the cue cards.) As hosts go, Rock didn’t kill the flow of the episode’s sketches as much as Jean Smart did in the season premiere, but it wasn’t the smoothest of episodes.

But at least it was an episode free of political cameos.

COLD OPEN

Crime Stories With Nancy Grace

It took nine episodes of Season 50, but we finally broke Dana Carvey’s hold on the cold open. I kept expecting he would pop up at some point, but instead we got Sarah Sherman as Nancy Grace baffled by the appeal of Luigi Mangione.

• An SNL legacy: We haven’t seen someone portray Grace on SNL since 2014, but Sherman follows in the footsteps of Ana Gasteyer, Amy Poehler, Abby Elliott and Noël Wells.
• “You could look at him and tell he had hoes”: Man, Kenan Thompson is looking trim these days. He barely put the work in when it came to pretending to eat that McDonald’s food.
• Dana Carvey finally went home: This wasn’t just the first cold open this season without Carvey. It was the first cold open without any kind of celebrity cameo. I guess someone over at Studio 8H finally realized this gimmick wasn’t working anymore.

THE MONOLOGUE

I wasn’t surprised when I saw someone hand Rock a microphone to jump into his standup monologue. This weekend was the former SNL cast member’s fourth time hosting the show, adding to gigs in 1996, 2014 and 2020.