‘Heated Rivalry’ star Connor Storrie takes his shot at hosting ‘SNL’

At long last, SNL is back. With the show’s Olympics hiatus over, the moment was finally here for Heated Rivalry breakout star Connor Storrie to finally host the show.

(SNL has been gone for so long that Deep SNL Thoughts had time to transform into The Cold Open. It’s the same SNL coverage that you love, just now with a better name and logo.)

This episode felt like it was going to be a big one. SNL had touched on the runaway popularity of Heated Rivalry with “Heated Wizardry” in Finn Wolfhard’s episode, but Storrie himself hosting? That was going to be a moment. (SNL even released an extended blooper cut of Storrie’s promo, something I’ve never seen the show do.)

This was an episode of SNL where the host was eager to break through, eager to prove that he belonged on the Studio 8H stage ... but the show couldn’t meet that moment.

There are a lot of SNL episodes where a host gets written around or can’t keep up with the pace of the show, but it was hard to watch this weekend’s episode and not wonder why the show’s writers hadn’t come better prepared to allow Storrie to fully capitalize on this moment.

From what I saw from Storrie on Saturday night, this one could’ve been a Glen Powell episode. He was ready to thrown himself into whatever SNL wrote for him, but instead so many sketches felt half-baked. SNL banked a ton on “Hey, it’s Connor Storrie! Hey, it’s a handful of Olympic hockey players! Hey, it’s Hudson Williams!” making up for a lack of wild ideas for Storrie to play out.

I’d imagine that Heated Rivalry fans won’t be disappointed by this episode, though. Storrie didn’t stumble. (And he even stripped down for a sketch or two.) He did everything the show asked of him — I only wish SNL had asked more.

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COLD OPEN

Trump Iran War Address Cold Open

SNL could skip the Donald Trump stuff these days. It’s not James Austin Johnson’s fault, but people are just tired of him. Let’s focus on bits like Colin Jost as Pete Hegseth.

I didn’t know what to expect with the cold open. The rational part of me thought SNL would skip Johnson’s Trump, but the part of me that’s watched SNL for decades knew that we were in store for more of this bit. The show doesn’t know how to break out of this mold. There’s a president. Someone portrays the president. Repeat.

The folks over at The SNL Network noted that this was Johnson’s 50th time playing Trump, joining Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton and Alec Baldwin as Trump as the only people who have ever portrayed someone fifty or more times on the show.

• “Sup, dillweeds?” I’m always happy to have seen Jost’s take on Hegseth in the cold open, but SNL should’ve gone deep into the White House cast of characters instead of featuring Johnson’s Trump.
• “We love the GameCube, it’s underrated”: The GameCube was the first non-handheld console I ever owned (thanks, confirmation money!), so I will always defend it.

THE MONOLOGUE

Going into this episode, there was a lot of, um, chatter over the news that Quinn Hughes and Jack Hughes, two members of the gold medal-winning United States men’s Olympics hockey team, would appear on SNL.

The big news in the cold open was that Storrie was joined by not only the Hughes brothers but also Hilary Knight and Megan Keller of the women’s gold-medal team. The crowd didn’t seem to quite know what to do with the Hughes brothers, but they showered Knight and Keller with an extended ovation.