‘SNL’ kicks off 2026 with a forgettable Finn Wolfhard episode

SNL’s been off since before Christmas, and maybe it should’ve taken another week to recoup? Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard made his hosting debut last night, but this episode came and went without leaving any kind of lasting impact.

After watching my Buffalo Bills suffer another catastrophic, heartbreaking postseason loss earlier on Saturday, I honestly didn’t expect to stay up and watch SNL. I was out of town and bouncing back from what I’m pretty sure was some kind of food poisoning courtesy of a central Pennsylvania fast-food stop, but how could I skip (or delay) watching SNL’s first episode of 2026?

It turns out I wouldn’t have missed anything.

Wolfhard wasn’t a bad SNL host. He was just one that I’m going to forget after this weekend.

If you’ve read these episode reviews for long enough, you’ve heard me talk about episodes of SNL where a host recedes to the background. But in those cases, the cast always steps up. Maybe it’s a big episode from Ashley Padilla. Maybe Andrew Dismukes has some huge moments.

Nope. That wasn’t the case for Wolfhard’s episode.

There were no standout moments. No sketches that people are going to talk about. The show leaned a bit into Stranger Things nostalgia without actually delivering anything fun or new or edgy. Wolfhard seemed to be enjoying himself, but he never broke out of a safe space. (Compare this to Glen Powell, who absolutely threw himself into his hosting gig last year.)

Even worse? I had to watch Josh Allen in local TV commercials after the Bills’ loss to the Broncos while watching this episode at my parents’ house in Rochester.

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COLD OPEN

Cabinet Meeting Cold Open

With SNL off since December, the show had a lot of news to catch up on, and what better place to do that with the cold open? The show jumped straight in with James Austin Johnson’s take on Donald Trump, mixing him in with established portrayals like Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio and Colin Jost’s Pete Hegseth while introducing Jeremy Culhane’s take on JD Vance and Ashley Padilla’s version of Kristi Noem.

This was the best we could hope for this cold open. It’s not like SNL was going to open with a children’s choir, so what else could they have done here?

• “Look, it’s JD. He got a makeover.” I’ll forgive you if you’ve forgotten that Bowen Yang was SNL’s Vance. Despite the vice president offering a ton of material, the show never focused on Vance. Was Yang’s departure a chance to change that?
• Noem is the time: We didn’t get Padilla as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, but she did assume SNL’s take on Noem after Tina Fey previously played her when Amy Poehler hosted. Despite speculation that Lorne Michaels could rightfully bump Padilla up to the show’s main cast, she remains a featured player.
• “Even I know you’re doing that wrong”: I feel like Jost has been waiting for this moment to play Hegseth his entire SNL career. It’s the most fun I’ve ever seen him having on air.

THE MONOLOGUE

Did I expect Wolfhard to do a slightly musical monologue? Nope. But did I expect to see cameos from his Stranger Things casemates? Absolutely.