Posted in: NBC, Peacock, TV | Tagged: saturday night live, snl

SNL Warned by Trump While Pete Hegseth Has Bro Meltdown (Cold Open)

During tonight's cold open, Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost) has a military meltdown, and Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) has a warning for SNL.

With NBC's Saturday Night Live returning tonight with host Bad Bunny and musical guest Doja Cat, a whole lot of folks were waiting to see what SNL had planned for its Cold Open. To say that a lot has happened – most of it really, really not good – over the past five months would be a living-on-another-planet level understatement. With that in mind, how did the long-running late-night sketch comedy and music series kick things off? Yup, SNL is mocking "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth's (Colin Jost) Quantico meeting with military leaders. From the military being "too gay" to being too out of shape, Hegseth was mocked for disrespecting women in the military. After a disturbing description of Trump, Hegseth made it clear what they were looking for: "Hot, shredded, hairless men who are definitely not gay."

Jost's Hegseth is cut off by James Austin Johnson's Trump, who put an early warning out to SNL to play nice. After taking some shots at Jost not being trusted to run the full cold open and how it's sad SNL is relying on him for the cold open, Trump had FCC chair Brendan Carr (Mikey Day) make a quick appearance, to the tune of Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" (but Trump still forgets his name). From there, Trump offered a quick rundown of his summer before shifting back to some not-too-subtle warnings to SNL that he's watching (and to keep an eye on Marcello Hernandez) as the show opened.

During the 77th Emmy Awards red carpet, SNL EP Lorne Michaels spoke with Entertainment Tonight's Nischelle Turner about the recent changes. "The show has always brought people in from different ages and different generations, and it's how it revives itself," Michaels explained. "It's always hard when people leave, but there's a time for that, and our audience has always stayed relatively young, and more so now with TikTok," Michaels added, pointing to how SNL has had a long tradition of cast changes, and that while it can be painful, it's also one of the main reasons why the long-running late-night sketch comedy series has lasted as long as it has. "Change is good. The people we're bringing in, I'm really excited about." You can check out the exchange in the video above, where Michaels also discusses what it was like working on SNL50 for two years.

NBC's SNL Season 51 cast includes Michael Che, Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Marcello Hernandez, James Austin Johnson, Colin Jost, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson, and Bowen Yang, along with current featured players Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline. Joining them are newcomers Ben Marshall, Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Kam Patterson, and Veronika Slowikowska.

New writers for this season include actor-writer Jack Bensinger (Rap World), stand-up comedian Jo Sunday (Just for Laughs), comic Maddie Wiener (The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon), actor and writer Rachel Pegram (Harley Quinn), writer-comedian Claire McFadden (Second City), Maxwell Gay (The Harvard Lampoon), and Tucker Flodman (The Harvard Lampoon).

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