The cold open of “Saturday Night Live” had creatures in the bleak future of 2045 recalling back at what caused the downfall of America. Was it the government shutdown? Obamacare? No, my child, says a grandfather played by Kenan Thompson. It was when Miley Cyrus performed at the MTV Video Music Awards.
So with Miley returning to host, the show addressed that whole overblown thing, with the old Miley (played by Vanessa Bayer, who made her name with that impression) trying to warn the new Miley out of going too far. It doesn’t work. The rest is history and the two of them team up to say “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”
Thus began the second episode of the season, which wasn’t quite as strong as the first even as it was clear the show was pandering to young people by not even translating the babble Miley spouted when she played a hip hop kid on the “Girlfriends” skit.
There’s no stopping Cyrus trying to act sexy, though, so she overplayed her Michele Bachmann by touching herself in a hip hop video about the shutdown (with Teran Killam quite a dead ringer for party boy John Boehner). In another filmed piece late in the show she disrobed and pretended to have sex with a couple of new members of the cast.
She was one in a group of Hilary Clintons in a middling bit about upcoming movies about her, in a bit framed by Killam’s Piers Morgan and Nasim Pedrad (barely seen this season) as Adrianna Huffington.
When the show leans too much on impersonation, it seems the writing suffers. So it was a pretty bad showcase early in the show when they did a line of celebrities trying out for the film version of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Miley’s musical moments seemed almost like setups for further jokes, but that’s just how she’s performing these days, with songs like “Wrecking Ball” a cross between Lana Del Ray and Lita Ford.
One thing that did stand out on the show, though, was during Weekend Update when Jay Pharoah did his devestating impersonation of Shannon Sharpe and Beyer did maybe her best character, a bar mitzvah boy who is just too serious.
It was a big show for Beyer, who returned later as a substitute poetry teacher who had a lot of funny vocal tics. So if the show didn’t work 100 percent for the real Miley, it did well for the woman who has impersonated her the longest.