Will Forte Makes ‘Saturday Night Live’ Hosting Debut, Brings MacGruber With Him

Will Forte returned to the Saturday Night Live studio to host after his 2010 departure from the show. Forte created several hilarious characters during his SNL tenure, and one of them, MacGruber, premiered last month as a series on the NBC streamer Peacock.

After the Cold Open, Forte delivered his host monologue with plenty of passive-aggressive screeds about how “not bitter” he is to be the last of his SNL co-stars at the time to host. His MacGruber co-star Kristen Wiig then joined for a pretty perfectly-awkward skit. There were several more jokes at Forte’s expense, including another cameo by Lorne Michaels where he confessed that Forte was only hosting because he text him instead of Willem Dafoe by mistake.

All-in-all, Forte and the monologue writers could have taken the bitterness bit farther, and the monologue felt slightly lukewarm after the excitement of seeing him back wore off. Check out the monologue here:

Other sketches included “Kid Klash,” a surreal spoof of kids game shows like Double Dare, and “Threesome,” which featured Forte as an unpleasant proposed threesome partner for a married couple. The show highlight, however, was when Forte, Wiig, and Ryan Phillippe reunited for another series of MacGruber sketches.

The sketches revealed that Forte’s mullet-wearing uber patriot character was an anti-vaxxer, and humorously escalates the premise until he’s a full Q-Anon theory-spouting nut. You can watch the sketches all together below:

All-in-all, it was great seeing Forte back in the SNL fold even if a couple of sketches weren’t as strong. Almost the entire episode was carried by the fantastic MacGruber sketches, and some strong Weekend Update segments which were fronted by Bowen Yang and new hire Sarah Sherman.

MacGruber’s eight-episode first season is viewable in full on the Peacock Streaming app.