Season 51, episode 8, Josh O’Connor

Something that’s genuinely unpredictable, sort of fun, and occasionally disorienting about Saturday Night Live’s current cast size is how the screentime balance can shift so much from episode to episode. Sometimes the effect is akin to watching different potential eras of the show test themselves out in real time. This week’s episode felt as if we had suddenly fast-forwarded a year or two, to a time when Ashley Padilla had gone from the cast member with the strongest fundamentals to a Kate McKinnonesque “just do let her do whatever, it’ll get laughs” baroque-stardom period—and then mixed that with an episode from a couple of years ago when it might feel like Bowen Yang would appear in the majority of the night’s sketches. This form of time travel also randomly Butterfly Effected Marcello Hernández into a demotion, sending him back to Update for one of those barely-veiled bits where the new guy who hasn’t been getting much airtime gets to do some of his stand-up at the desk. There’s no shame in that, exactly, but I would have thought Hernández was way too popular to do such a grab-baggy routine in his third season, when there’s a bunch of other less established stand-ups probably eyeing that spot.

Regardless, it’s not hard to imagine a version of the show dominated by Padilla and Yang; they’re both naturally funny in sometimes-complementary ways. It’s also a helpful reminder that simply shoving great performers to the foreground to take big swings isn’t always enough.

Padilla went first with a game show sketch that went the second of two ways SNL game show sketches tend to go: Either put the concept right in the fake show’s title, or generically imitate an extremely familiar format until the sketch lets slip the secret premise. This time, the eventually-revealed deal was that a Dating Game-style show has recently abolished its age limits, allowing an octogenarian played by Padilla to slip in as the third of three potential matches for a thirtysomething bachelor. The joke wasn’t precisely that old people are repulsive and unlovable (although… that wasn’t not there); it was more just Padilla saying stuff. Some of it was funny, like her demanding “hot, moist cake” at any given wedding; some of it felt like casting about frantically for catchphrases, like her yelling “why should I go?!”

The very next live sketch let Yang do pretty much the same thing: a weirdo who charges into a familiar situation and doesn’t do what they’re supposed to! It was especially familiar because he was reviving his somewhat more hyperactive version of the classic Will Ferrell patient-vexing doctor bit (and frankly, this isn’t too far removed from his Barry the Midwife character). Again: Some individual laughs but it felt like shtick on shuffle. And then later in the show, Padilla and Yang teamed up for a sketch about a twelve-year-old genius (Yang) attending college and nagged by his overbearing mother (Padilla) as he tries to fit in with more traditionally college-aged kids. This sketch combined premise overload with the verbal overload of their back-and-forth, hot-and-cold screaming matches, with Yang petulantly calling his mother “Heather” a solid two-dozen times. Absurd as it might sound, I think I’d like the more character-driven version of this sketch a lot more (and I’m sure Yang and Padilla could play that just as well).

Despite the hit-and-miss results, all this noise made strategic sense for an episode hosted by Josh O’Connor. He’s more than capable as a leading man in the movies, about to be widely streamed stealing the new Knives Out movie out from Daniel Craig, but his persona is still quiet and inward, something spoofed by this week’s sketch about sensitive male strippers. That’s actually where his episode thrived: sketches that didn’t feel like they were overcompensating with all-caps performance.

Those less recurring-character-style sketches didn’t have all be super-relatable, observational, or even fresh. Did enough people hear Lily Allen’s latest record, or get the general idea from context, for that sketch about people’s inner monologues reshaped into Allen-style songs to scan? No idea, but directly making some (light) fun of the musical guest’s highly specific style, ornamented with oddball character details made the sketch charmingly specific. Similarly, the types of dudes parodied by O’Connor and Ben Marshall in the male-stripper sketch could have been targets 10 or 15 years ago, and even then, only some of the cultural references would change. (It’s telling that Mikey Day’s character refers to them as Fleet Foxes.)