SNL's Post-Midterm Cold Open Hit 9.9 Million Views. Sarah Sherman's Schumer Got Frozen
The Druski episode's opener, with Kenan Thompson as Hakeem Jeffries and a James Talarico cameo, is SNL's most-watched YouTube upload of the week by a mile.
By the Heckle Desk · · 1 min readSNL's Post-Midterm Cold Open had about 9.9 million views on YouTube by Monday afternoon, more than double anything else from Druski's episode. The next closest sketch, Dru Can See Everything, sat around 4.3 million. Democrats won the midterms, and the most-watched sketch of the week is about how they still can't get anybody to look at them.
It opens with Sarah Sherman as Chuck Schumer and Kenan Thompson as Hakeem Jeffries, toasting their blue tsunami. Sherman's Schumer is a man who has finally won something and has no idea what to do with his hands. Then James Austin Johnson's Trump arrives, freezes the scene and talks over everyone, the way he has in what feels like every cold open since the invention of television. The two Democrats stand there frozen, winners of an election, unable to move, which is what Variety took as the point: the party is being told it's time to step aside, and it's too stiff to do it.
Then Texas Senator-elect James Talarico walks on as himself, introduces himself as the guy who's been texting you every day for five dollars, and asks Trump how many more of these freeze-the-action openers the show plans to do. Trump says infinity. It's the best line in the sketch, and it belongs to the show making fun of itself, which is the only time SNL is ever completely honest.
The cold open is built like a joke about attention. The Democrats won, and the camera still went to the other fellow. That's the most accurate political observation SNL has made all year, and they made it by accident, because the bit was supposed to be about Schumer. A man can win the House and the Senate and still not win the room.