Well, that was certainly of a piece.
Say this for Shane Gillis: Now that he’s hosted Saturday Night Live twice, it’s harder to assume that had he kept his featured-player spot back in Season 45, he would have become the Jeff Richards of the 2020s, an odd bro out in an eclectic ensemble. Richards just seemed vaguely adrift in his short time on the show, connecting with the odd impression or his one Weekend Update character, but not really vibing with the rest of the cast or giving a clear idea of his own vibe. With Gillis, there’s a clear sensibility at work in “his” sketches, and maybe there just would have been a whole lot more of that stuff, satisfying Lorne Michaels’ nagging feeling that the show was reaching out to an untapped portion of the audience that actively wants less out of SNL.
Then again, maybe Gillis staying occupied by doing a bunch of terrible SNL sketches (and presumably appearing in the occasional good one) would have laid more immediately bare his CBS-sitcom-sensibility, rather than gussying it up with edgelord podcast cred and the weird parasocial connections that go along with it. I’m sorry, I don’t get it. I’m sure Gillis is a good hang if you’re his actual friend; he seems affable enough to let himself be the butt of a joke. But the thing is, that’s never really borne out in many of the SNL sketches he’s done. It’s not as if he plays the overt hero, exactly. Yet even in sketches where the joke is about his character being a loser, a dumb guy, a bad father, whatever, there’s this undercurrent of hostility towards everyone else in his orbit that isn’t just sour, and doesn’t just turn Gillis into the would-be identification point as a default (though it is and does do that). It also—more importantly—renders most of the jokes predictable, even mechanical in their joylessness.
Take this week’s “Dad’s House” sketch, built on a totally solid foundation. It has notes of Andy Samberg-era observational-meets-conceptual sketches like “The New Boyfriend Talk Show” and “My Brother Knows Everything,” where common relationship awkwardness has the frame of a cheerful TV broadcast—here the idea being a kids’ show hosted by a weekend-custody dad who isn’t that great at taking care of kids. It’s a funny idea, right down to having the dad’s new girlfriend played by a kid-show-style puppet. And the execution is almost uniformly terrible, with stale “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” knockoffs (the word of the day is “alimony,” yuk yuk!) and other jokes predicated on how the dad doesn’t really know or like his kids, and thinks the girl he just slept with is a filthy slut! There’s no second level or escalation or anything: The sketch tells you right up front that this is a dumb loser dad who sucks, and then you start the timer on when he’ll get impotently mad about his ex’s new boyfriend. Good sketch actors can make this stuff seem specific and stick in your brain. Gillis seems to focus a lot of energy on containing a smirk.