SNL's 'Chess Tournament' Sketch Was Shane Gillis's Best Night. Grace Reiter Ran the Board
With SNL off this past weekend, the top sketch on YouTube is still the Oct. 10 chess-meet parents, at more than two million views.
By the Heckle Desk · · 1 min readSaturday Night Live took Saturday off, its first of two dark weeks before Inde Navarrette hosts on Halloween, so the sketch of the week is the one people are still watching from the last episode: Chess Tournament, from Shane Gillis's October 10 show. It had passed two million views on YouTube, more than that night's Weekend Update.
The setup is plain: a middle school chess tournament, and a boy named TJ, played by Jeremy Culhane, trying very hard to concentrate while his parents, Gillis and the new cast member Grace Reiter, carry on in the stands. They're exes. They start out fighting and drift, as exes in bleachers will, into flirting nobody at a chess meet should have to see. Mikey Day, Tommy Brennan and Jane Wickline round out the room.
Gillis's monologue got the reviews, most of them rough, and the night's reputation went down with it. But Deadline called Reiter a bright spot on an otherwise dull episode, and Exclaim, which was hard on nearly everything else, singled out her faces and her physical commitment. That's the thing about a new cast member: she has nothing to protect, so she spends it all.
And chess is the perfect setting, because it's the only sport where a parent's loud support is a medical event. In Little League you can yell. At a chess table you can be arrested for breathing in a pattern.
The best sketches find a quiet room and put two loud people in it. Weekend Update has the headlines. This one had a middle schooler who wanted to disappear and two adults who'd never learned to sit still, which is closer to the American condition than anything on the news.