There was a definite lack of political sketches on Saturday Night Live, something you can see for yourself via our scorecard for this week’s episode. Apart fromthe Forrest Gump opening that mocked Jeff Sessions and his meeting with a Russian diplomat, there was no Trump or his surrogates throughout most of the episode. Weekend Update did its typical thing and focused on Trump’s sons, but the show seemed to ignore the big presidential stories of the moment after Octavia Spencer took the stage.
At least they did in the foreground of the show. There was no sketch devoted to Kellyanne Conway this week, giving her a bit of a break from the singing, dancing, and spinning she’s used to. Instead, Kate McKinnon kept popping up at random intervals between sketches in reference to the viral photo from earlier in the that featured Conway with her feet on the Oval Office couch.
It was confusing at first and led me to believe there was a Conway sketch on the way to address the silly controversy over the photograph. One never manifested, but McKinnon kept popping up throughout the night. After appearing before the voice actor sketch, she ended up on the musical stage ahead of Father John Misty’s first performance:
Then she popped up to close out Weekend Update, kneeling right on top of the desk to send out that important text or check out the top NCAA prospects as Jordan Peele joked about.
I didn’t catch her anywhere else in the show while watching but did notice she was absent from the final curtain call at the end of the show. Maybe she was hidden somewhere in the group, still texting and paying no attention to the world around her. Who knows, but it was a different way of handling a viral moment from this week without wasting time on a full sketch.
(Via SNL)
