‘Property Brothers’ unleash ‘White House Makeover’ as Miles Teller hosts ‘SNL’

When SNL announced that Miles Teller was hosting the first installment of its November batch of episodes, my reaction was a very solid oh.

When Teller previously hosted in 2022, he did a decent job shepherding the episode along, but nothing from that gig stood out. Because I care about all of you, the loyal Deep SNL Thoughts readers, I went back to his episode and refreshed my memory to make sure I wasn’t forgetting any standalone sketches.

I wasn’t.

Teller’s last episode was pretty disjointed, bouncing from a sketch featuring the Charmin bears (there was suspiciously a real Charmin commercial right after Teller’s monologue) to a sketch where Teller played a jacked Grimace chatting it up with the rest of the McDonaldland gang.

Despite Teller’s efforts as a host, his second time hosting left an even weaker impression than the first.

The episode’s standout sketches were a Weekend Update segment that Teller played no part in and a pretaped sketch about the destruction of the East Wing of the White House powered by James Austin Johnson.

I’m not sure what’s happened with Teller’s two episodes. He’s clearly a game SNL host with leading man vibes, but we now have two episodes that he’s hosted that have both failed to land a breakthrough sketch. (Well, at least a breakthrough sketch that focused on Teller. I’m definitely going to keep talking about Ashley Padilla and Andrew Dismukes on Update.) And it’s not like Teller’s episodes have come at the end of a run of episodes and the writing staff is spent. He’s hosted a season premiere and the fourth episode of a season that even had a one-week break before it.

On a purely technical note, the episode ran smoothly up until the end. The show struggled to get back on air after posting the final photo card featuring Teller before cutting off before the host could finish thanking the episode’s guest stars and the cast.

This weekend is also the three-year anniversary of the relaunch of Popculturology, the site that Deep SNL Thoughts spun out of and that began the path to what would become The Omnicosm.

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The OmnicosmBill Kuchman

COLD OPEN

NYC Mayoral Debate Cold Open

The political cold open is back at SNL. With a twist. The show kicked off with the New York City mayoral race. This was the third straight episode where the host made an appearance during the cold open, with Teller playing Andrew Cuomo. He was joined by former hosts Ramy Youssef as Zohran Mamdani and Shane Gillis as Curtis Sliwa.

• Him again? Man, Lorne Michaels really, really, really wants to punish us for having to fire Gillis a few years back. I get that SNL is dealing with some diversity issues that prevent an actual cast member from playing Mamdani, but no one on staff could handle Sliwa?
• “This guy knows about hands on, right, Cuomo?” I love Johnson as Donald Trump, but SNL needs to stop doing this. Either find a natural way to fit Trump into a cold open or skip him. This sketch was already going on too long.

THE MONOLOGUE

Teller was back hosting SNL for the first time since 2022 (he did make an appearance during SNL50), and he once again brought up how he and his sisters used to dress up as characters from the show.