Saturday Night Live Season 50 Premiere Recap: Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris Sets the Tone in the Cold Open

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There’s a sketch from an October 2016 episode of Saturday Night Live that—no matter how you voted in the last two presidential elections, or how you will in this year’s trilogy-conclusion-coded contest—will give you time-traveling goosebumps.

The episode aired nine days after the leak of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which former president Donald Trump exalted grabbing women “by the pussy.” The sketch is the cold open, the first of the night. The camera settles in on former cast members Cecily Strong and Alex Moffat, both playing journalists moderating a debate between Trump (played, then, by Alec Baldwin) and Hillary Clinton, played by Kate McKinnon. McKinnon’s take on Clinton by this point in the election was well established: a gleeful ambition monster, a woman who has to be told by her staff that she can’t be her own VP, who warms up her vocals by singing “first female president—me-me-me-me-meeee!”

As she introduces the players, Strong says, “Please welcome Republican candidate Donald Trump and—” She glances at Moffat. “Can we say this yet?”

He shrugs. “Probably fine.”

“President Hillary Clinton,” Strong finishes. The laugh she gets is swift and sure. And—as we know now, of course—wrong.

Later in the sketch, when asked to name something she likes about Trump, McKinnon’s Clinton says, “I do like how generous he is. Just last Friday—” She does a karate kick for emphasis. “—He handed me this election.”

Again there are big laughs, from an audience still three weeks away from hearing the actual punchline. The episode of SNL that aired on November 13, 2016 opened with a very different vibe. It was the first after Trump, not Clinton, won the election. There was no sketch. The stage was dark, the audience somber. McKinnon—in costume as Clinton, but not really in character—sat at a piano. She sang Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah.” When the song was over, she looked into the camera. “I’m not giving up,” she said, “and neither should you.”

Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on Saturday Night Live.

NBC/Getty Images

The words were meant to be encouraging, but McKinnon’s eyes—a distinct shade of week-long-cry pink—betrayed the real experience of that week. If you were a woman who’d been reveling in the thought of the first woman president, if you’d worn your white suit to the polls, taken a selfie with your daughter or mom or grandma, or let yourself doze contentedly off at eleven p.m. on election night…you had, on an existential level, just had your ass handed to you.

“And live from New York, it’s Saturday Night,” McKinnon concluded. The studio was silent.

***

Cut to this weekend’s season 50 premiere of SNL. Much has shifted since the last time the show had a major-party female nominee to play with. While both political parties have spent the last eight years having identity crises, Saturday Night Live has functioned as a bewildered, fractured mirror. Baldwin’s moist-lipped, bitter Trump gave way to James Austin Johnson’s spiritually accurate free association. A head-spinning number of actors tried to capture President Biden: Jim Carrey, Woody Harrelson, Moffat, Johnson, and finally Mikey Day. After portraying Clinton as an Oval Office inevitability in one form or another since 2015, SNL’s political sketches became largely about men again with the odd female characters fading, like their corresponding real hopefuls, into the background. (I’ll give you $20 right now if you can tell me, without googling, who played Nikki Haley last season.)

The one female impression audiences could count on was Maya Rudolph’s fun-aunt Kamala Harris, who had gone from senator to presidential candidate to sitting vice president to—in the blink of SNL’s 2024 summer hiatus—presidential nominee. As Rudolph’s Harris put it in last night’s cold open: “The funt has been rebooted.”

So she has. The Harris (via Rudolph) of 2020 was a Harris in limbo. She was a Harris who made playful clouds of Lysol while she waited for the pandemic to pass, who sipped a piña colada while she waited to learn how bad Hunter’s laptop would be for her boss. The Harris (via Rudolph) of 2024 is a Harris in action. Last night’s cold open script followed the lead of the real Harris pitch, painting her as a women’s rights advocate (“I will protect your va-georgia”) and a second amendment moderate (“I have a gun. A cool one”). Rudolph nimbly recapped the campaign’s cultural flashpoints, from Harris’s “vibes”-driven rise to the symphony of skepticism that was her faces at the debate.

Nods to the historic-firsts potential of a Harris win were conspicuously absent as were—needless to say—old delusions about Trump being a joke. The cold open did not have a take or a game, as they say in sketch comedy—a funny thing reinforced, again and again, through beats of the same idea. More than anything else, it was a collection of realities. A sign that a show known for distilling things we’ve been trying to say all week will, this fall, simply aim to glue the mirror back together and hold it up. This is what it is, last night’s sketch seemed to say. We don’t know where it’s going any more than you do.

Dana Carvey, Andy Samberg, Maya Rudolph, and Jim Gaffigan backstage at Saturday Night Live.

NBC/Getty Images

But the not knowing, if hell on the sanity, is good for the art. It has been years—years—since a presidentially-concerned sketch on SNL achieved any semblance of escapism. (Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer in an Easter Bunny outfit got pretty close.) There’s been plenty written on how hard the spiking bizarreness of our politics is on comedy writers; less attention has been paid to where it leaves consumers of the form. When a joke is just a fact that made you sick earlier in the week, you don’t so much laugh as you do hold your breath, waiting for the era to pass. Last night’s cold open, with its delightful turns by Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz, Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff, and Dana Carvey as President Biden, portended zero when it came to the future. Instead, it pulled together a team who seem determined to have as good of a time as they can, for as long as they can. Joyful warriors.

On first watch of the cold open, I worried all those men were pulling focus from Rudolph. She was the one we’d been waiting to see all summer, and in the end she spent half the sketch standing two feet behind the podium. But when I watched again, I noticed something about the men: Rudolph’s Harris may have ceded them the mic, but it was up to her to decide when they had to get off the stage. She ushered them off when she was ready and, along with Carvey, it was she who delivered the last iconic word, with subtle persistence. Run it back, and you’ll see: Her mouth is saying live from New York. But her eyes are saying: I’m done waiting–and I’m not giving up, either.

Megan Angelo is the author of Followers and has written about television, film, women and pop culture, and motherhood for publications including The New York Times, Elle, The Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Slate, and Romper.