America loves a redemption arc. It just depends on who is seeking redemption and from what. In the case of Justin Timberlake, who hard-launched his comeback on Saturday Night Live this week — arguably too soon — it may be less of an arc than a redemption quadrant.
By any metric, Timberlake has had a rough go of it lately. Putting out the 46th-most-popular album of 2018 would be a major achievement for a brand-new artist, but it was a four-alarm fire for one of the most recognizable names in pop music since the late ’90s. The fact that the album in question was called Man of the Woods and had this cover only made it more ripe for mockery. A flop album cycle, though, was just a warm-up for what came next: Timberlake had a supporting role (as a villain) in reclamation projects for Janet Jackson and Britney Spears. In each case, it wasn’t Jackson or Spears who needed redeeming, but the aughts-era cultural landscape that discarded them both while uplifting Timberlake, despite his involvement in their reputational downfall. By the time Spears broke sales records with the release of her tell-all memoir last fall, goodwill for Timberlake had plummeted to historic lows.
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Now, here he is, just a few months later, attempting to climb back toward his previous heights, seemingly the only way he knows how — at a woman’s expense.
It’s almost hard to imagine now, but at one point, Timberlake was considered an SNL fan-favorite host, with multiple recurring sketches in his repertoire. For him to begin teasing his first album in six years and then return to SNL after a decade-long absence, all in the span of about a week and a half, was bound to steal some oxygen away from whoever happened to be hosting. Unfortunately, it ended up being his The Social Network scene partner, Dakota Johnson, whose name I am now mentioning for the first time in paragraph four of this recap.
Unlike this episode’s musical guest, the host has had a transformative past several years in a positive way. As Timberlake was sinking, Johnson shed the last vestiges of being famous mainly for the Fifty Shades movies and for her star-crossed parentage and is now known more as an appealing presence in indie films like A Bigger Splash, The Lost Daughter, and Cha Cha Real Smooth, not to mention a scorched-earth appearance on Ellen that aired out DeGeneres more efficiently than a deeply reported exposé later did. She brings a wry charm to her monologue, accompanied by an adorable clip of her at age 7, outshining her father at his press event by making goofy faces. And then, Justin Timberlake enters the chat.
His appearance during the monologue is surprisingly, and winningly, self-effacing. He offers to appear in sketches, touting his membership in the Five-Timers Club as bona fides; she, in turn, reminds him that his heyday on the show ended a full decade ago. Ouch. She also claims she is glad he “chose [her] show for [his] comeback,†forcing him and us to acknowledge together that he does indeed have something to come back from. This is just smart PR in action. Had Timberlake’s involvement in all nonmusical proceedings of the night ended here, it might have even been successful. But that, of course, is not what happened.
The show later devoted what was by far the longest sketch of the night — nearly seven minutes — to a revival of Timberlake’s Barry Gibb Talk Show with Jimmy Fallon, who has some redemption of his own to explore. To be fair, bringing back the sketch makes sense as an easy nostalgia play for millennial viewers, and it does have some funny lines. (“I fear nothing,†Fallon’s Barry Gibb says at one point. “I watched Saltburn with my entire family.â€) However, it would have been better suited to a Timberlake-hosted episode at some later date after his potential comeback has actually taken hold. Instead, Johnson is forced to take a backseat for the second time in the night, with a practically nonspeaking role.
Worse still, the length of that scene likely bumped what would have been one of the best sketches of the night, in which Johnson gets more space to be funny, from airing at all. (More on that later.) This screen-time erasure helped cement this show as the occasion Timberlake “chose†for launching his comeback, rather than one anticipating the release of what might be Johnson’s biggest movie yet.
Timberlake’s comeback attempt has barely begun, but the way this episode played out was enough to make me wish he’d go back to the woods.
Here are the highlights:
Home Videos
A stroll down memory lane goes all the way sideways in the night’s best sketch. While showing sentimental old movies to his adult son (Andrew Dismukes), a gray-haired Mikey Day pops in a VHS recording of “The day I found out I was gonna be a Daddy.†It turns out to be an episode of a show called Corey — a Maury-Springer hybrid, in which a much younger Day disputes his paternity in classic “Not the Father†fashion. Even better than all the spot-on ’90s period detail — namely Day’s plastered Lego hair and all the baggy clothes — is the decision to have the assembled family other than Dismukes play it straight, as though they’re watching a genuinely special moment from their treasured past.
Please Don’t Destroy — Roast
Take notes, Timberlake: This is how you do self-effacing. For their first video in nearly two months, the Destroy Boys go blow-for-blow with Johnson in a roast battle, tearing into each other’s actual career blemishes and respective nepo-ness with the ruthless ferocity of a random Twitterer. There are too many great burns on either side to single out any in particular, but what the hell, let’s go with Johnson rechristening the trio as “Lonelier Island.â€
Big Dumb Cups
In what some are calling the most necessary occasion to make a sequel to a sketch ever, SNL revives its Big Dumb Hats from November 2022 to ridicule the Stanley Cup phenomenon. Johnson syncs up nicely with Chloe Fineman and Heidi Gardner here, nailing the vacant enthusiasm of a certain brand of affluent white lady. Don’t be surprised to see this formula revisited in the future for next year’s “dumb-ass thing.â€
Lost Bag
Devon Walker gets his very own Weird Guy Who Annoys People sketch in the lineage of Kristen Wiig’s Target Lady. His airport employee Samson Gibson has a lisp, a ponytail, and no filter, ruining passenger Dakota Johnson’s day just because he can — and he is a hoot. Whether he ends up being a one-off or joins Lisa from Temecula and Garrett from Hinge in this cast’s burgeoning stable of recurring characters remains to be seen.
Horny Little Dork
Most sketches that find their way to YouTube but not live television tend to be cut for quality-control purposes. Or at least it appears that way to an outside observer. This one, however, feels like what viewers would want from Dakota Johnson hosting SNL — a sharply observed, domming serve about undersexed men deep in long-term relationships. Had it appeared during the show, at the expense of a few minutes of the Barry Gibb Talk Show, it would have elevated an episode that needed the boost.
Cut for Time
• For anyone else who may have been wondering, after a throwaway joke in the cold open, So Help Me Todd is indeed a real show on CBS, starring Marcia Gay Harden and Skylar Astin, despite sounding like a fake show that might exist in the world of 30 Rock.
• James Austin, Punkie, and Dakota — that’s a lot of Johnson! Sorry, it had to be mentioned.
• If nothing else, the restaurant sketch may have permanently installed the phrase “chicken fongers†into the cultural lexicon.
• Gardner’s Weekend Update tarot reader Jan Janby mainly reminded me of this all-timer tweet, even though it was funny in its own right.
• Elsewhere in Update, Bowen Yang’s A Guy Named Ethan desk piece was a perfect way to cap off a week in which everyone with two eyes and a Peacock subscription suddenly became an expert on the Academy Awards. This bit also paired well with Colin Jost’s joke about Lily Gladstone’s Best Actress nod, the first ever for a Native American: “It’s a historic moment her fellow nominees are calling, ‘Please don’t let us win.’â€
• Few celebrity cameos have ever looked more like they accidentally wandered onto the wrong set than Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran and Mark Cuban in the book-club sketch.
• Speaking of that sketch, to anyone writing in the comments below, I just have one request: Don’t ask me if I’m okay. I’m okay. But if everyone starts asking if I’m okay, I might start crying.
• Dave Chappelle appears among the cast during the good-byes, even though he was in zero sketches. Meanwhile, Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal were reportedly spotted near the set just before the show started. Perhaps there is an alternate universe in which a much different episode made it to air.