SNL made Will Forte seem "ordinary"

The A.V. Club

"The only sketch that really captured the Will Forte-in-a-bottle magic was his monologue," Dennis Perkins says of the Saturday Night Live alum returning to host for the first time. "Running down all the former cast mates who’ve hosted SNL before him, Forte channeled his manic energy into a very funny and Forte-like blank-eyed staredown of barely repressed resentment. Noting how, of the ridiculously stacked in retrospect stars of Forte’s eight seasons, his first call to host came after everyone from Andy Samberg, to Jason Sudeikis, to Fred Armisen, to Kristen Wiig (twice), to Bill Hader (also twice), to Seth Meyers (just an Update guy!), and even John Mulaney (four times—for a writer?!) got their turn, Forte was the portrait of thwarted glory. That Wiig came out to steal his thunder (and roles from an even more underused cast than usual) was only exacerbated by Lorne showing up in the audience to claim that autocorrect was responsible for Forte being booked in the first place...Forte is singular in a way a lot of his illustrious former cast standouts are. For Forte, it’s all about desperately tamped-down mania and laser-focused, disquieting excess. But, man, does Saturday Night Live squander what they’ve got here, shoving Forte into a series of awfully generic roles that could have been filled by almost anybody. The threesome sketch is most illustrative, as Forte’s Cialis-chugging professional third is merely mildly grotesque as he preps married couple Mikey Day and Heidi Gardner for their big, very sweaty night. Repeatedly referring to Day’s Tate as 'Taint' and unbuttoning his loud swinger’s blouse over his tummy is all comic sleazeball 101, with only the joke of Forte’s Gannon testing out the hotel bed’s durability allowing a glimpse of Forte being Forte."

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• Will Forte made SNL weird again: "As would so often occur during his time on SNL, Forte bulldozed past absurdity to find fresh hilarity," says Amanda Wicks. "The current cast member Bowen Yang shared the clip on Instagram with the caption 'legend.' Forte is a champion of eccentricity, adeptly playing awkward, tightly wound characters whose veneer often comes close to shattering—if it hasn’t already. Last night, Forte revisited his version of weird, bringing a playful looseness that generated this season’s strongest night thus far. After the previous particularly bleak episode, Forte’s presence was a welcome shift for SNL. Instead of wrestling with the bizarreness of our present reality, the show leaned into a jubilant zaniness of its own. Forte’s comedy felt like a release—and the cast responded with vigor."
• Forte's hosting stint turned into a long ad for Peacock's MacGruber -- but that's okay: "There was never any doubt that Forte would nail his hosting duties, but luckily, the show let him get as weird as he wanted for most of the episode," says Zach Vasquez. "Much of it played like a long advertisement for Peacock’s MacGruber series, but that’s not hardly something to complain about. Along with Sudeikis’s episode from October, this is the best SNL has been all season. It’s only too bad every episode can’t be handed over to a cast member from that era of the show."
• Pete Davidson and Colin Jost turned their Staten Island Ferry purchase into a big "Weekend Update" joke
• Forte and SNL made MacGruber an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist
• SNL pays tribute to late Emmy-winning writer John Bowman, co-creator of Martin