Sure, Saturday Night Live has had its ups and downs, but anyone who gets nostalgic for the good old days of the long-running late-night sketch comedy series is probably remembering the past through rose-colored glasses. There have always been good and bad hosts, musical guests, sketches, and even casts.

So it’s best to look at each show individually, because when it works, it works, and Saturday’s episode with Aubrey Plaza hosting, the first new show of 2023, definitely worked more than it didn’t.

Plaza opened the show with a monologue remembering her days working as an NBC page, long before she was a fixture on Must-See TV. She also told the audience she was from Deleware and “was actually voted the most famous person” from that state edging out president Joe Biden.

“That’s a fact and he was pissed, he was livid,” she said. Then Plaza showed a video of Biden congratulating her, saying, “Aubrey, you’re the most famous person out of Deleware and there’s no question about that. We’re just grateful you made it out of White Lotus alive.”

Plaza toured the studio 8H, running into Kenan Thompson, who said he’s been waiting for her to get him a flat white since 2004, and then she bumped into former SNL castmate and her Parks and Recreation co-star Amy Poehler. More on Poehler later.

Plaza appeared in a spoof of her show White Lotus that was titled “Black Lotus”, though she didn’t play her character on the HBO drama about guests at an exclusive hotel. In “Black Lotus,” the staff, played by Plaza, Thompson, Ego Nwodim, Punkie Johnson and Devon Walker, shut down all the ridiculous requests played by guests Chloe Fineman, doing her pitch-perfect Jennifer Coolidge impression, and the rest of the cast. The mock show’s tagline is “Welcome to Black Lotus, bitch,” and it was plugged as coming soon to HBO and Starz.

The other parody starring Plaza capitalized on the popularity of M3GAN, along with the recent news of a sequel to the story of an AI doll gone murderously rogue. Fineman perfectly essays the original M3GAN, while Plaza is brought in as M3GAN 2.0, and the two compete to be the most popular at a gay bar.
The two dead-eyed dolls have a TikTok dance off, but there can be only one gay icon. Allison Williams cameos as herself in the short. which also featured Bowen Yang.

During Weekend Update, Plaza appeared as a guest in character as April Ludgate, the role she played on Parks and Rec, to “encourage young people to get involved in local government,” according to host Colin Jost. After unenthusiastically listing some jobs that the youth who wanted to do no more than the bare minimum should apply to, ‘April’ got annoyed and said Colin should talk to her former boss. To no one’s surprise, Poehler returned, this time as her P&R character Leslie Knope. Poehler played Knope as being fascinated with the news segment, saying,  “I want to pick your brain about this job, about this show because I used to watch this when Seth Meyers did it by himself with no one else and he made it look really easy.”

She also made a reference to Joe Biden, whom her character famously crushed on, and then asked if he could see her.

“I think he pre-recorded that,” Jost said, to which Leslie snarked, “Oh, I thought this show was live.”

Then Poehler did a callback to her time behind the Weekend Update desk, asking if she could tell a joke and got into the anchor chair for the first time in years. See the clip to see how she did.

The rest of the skits on the show were hit and miss, with Plaza doing a great job as part of a couple (with Mikey Day) scaring their new neighbors with their freaky performance on the game Taboo, and as a film noir vixen who married and was widowed by five husbands who just so happened to be really old, and once more as Miss France in a beauty pageaent skit that mocked a recent Miss Universe contest where the participants just screamed things for no reason. Tony Hawk and the Property Brothers cameoed in the pageant sketch and Sharon Stone appeared in the film noir bit.

As for the rest, your enjoyment level would probably depend on your appetite for singer Sam Smith, and jokes at the expense of George Santos (if that is his real name,) and the recent Avatar sequel. But that’s Saturday Night Live for you; as always, you enjoy the good parts and just jettison the bad sketches from your memory forever.