Are the ‘SNL’ White Boys OK?

It’s unclear what type of witchcraft Lorne Michaels performed on a specific generation of comically inclined white men, but if the current streaming slate is any indication, our boys aren’t doing so hot. For the past two months, late-stage SNL alums have filled the airwaves with enough angst to fuel a Jeremy Strong acting seminar.

There’s Bill Hader’s career-defining Barry, which ended on a wobbly “oh, wow” after a series of confounding if ambitious bangs. Meanwhile, Jason Sudeikis potentially pump-faked the conclusion of Ted Lasso as if Tim Cook backed up the Brinks truck at the eleventh hour (Season 3 reviews be damned). Over on Peacock, Pete Davidson is starring in Bupkis, his second crack at dramatizing his life story within the span of three years, after the Judd Apatow–directed movie The King of Staten Island. And John Mulaney’s recent stand-up special, Baby J, culminates the workshopping of his return to the stage after a public divorce and rehab stint.

Judging from the existential vibes of each project, you wouldn’t be able to tell that these men belong to the last group of comedians SNL could turn into household names. Instead, the mood is closer to a spiritual malaise.

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Imagine trying to describe to your pandemic-era self that the quirky half-hour sitcom you just found on Apple TV+ about a lovable American football coach turned soccer manager was destined to become an hour-long prestige dramedy about the deep psychological wounds of every person tangentially connected to a sports team.

Travel back even further to 2018, and try to account for how far Bill Hader’s darkly irreverent show about a hitman turned aspiring actor has come from its initially goofy and contained premise. Do you start with the tragic arc of NoHo Hank and Cristobal or the time skip that gives a conspiracy-pilled Barry a child?

In scope, quality, and overall execution, these programs couldn’t be more different. Ted Lasso has become a four-quadrant flagship for a streaming service in search of an identity, while Barry routinely punched above its narrative and filmmaking weight class. Yet over time, each series crept toward similar conclusions. As the accolades and viewers mounted, so too did a push for a particular brand of seriousness—and, by extension, “prestige.” Series that started as comedies adept at drama settled into becoming dramas with small spurts of comedy. With time, Lasso and Barry accentuated the ongoing crisis of a genre and industry—one where the commercial viability of comedy is in flux with little reprieve in sight.

Collectively, theatrical comedies haven’t grossed over $2 billion domestically since 2011; that number was halved by 2018. The year before the pandemic decimated movie theaters, there wasn’t a single comedy in the top 25 at the domestic box office. The days of SNL alums like Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, and Mike Myers going on to lucrative movie careers have been over for longer than most would like to admit, with it being 10-plus years since Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler consistently cleared $120 million to $150 million at the domestic box office.

As the bottom fell out for theatrical comedies and fewer of the practitioners made the jump to movie stardom, the world of TV became a refuge. Shows that started out as outliers (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Louie) became blueprints (Atlanta, Master of None, Dave). The waning years of Peak TV are partially the story of comedians working through their auteurist visions on the small screen and seeing how resilient the medium could be to the brunt of their creative ambitions.

If any show illustrates the tonal and narrative chaos of this phenomenon, it’s Ted Lasso. In its inaugural season, Lasso felt spiritually aligned with the type of sitcoms that’d been left for dead by the streaming economy. Led by showrunner Bill Lawrence, Ted Lasso shared the same bouncy and kinetic DNA infused in Lawrence’s prior work for linear TV (Scrubs, Cougar Town, Spin City). Its corniness and overflowing sincerity were features, not bugs. In a half-hour context, the warmth and vague Midwestern charm of Sudeikis as a performer—the types that worked in bursts on the big screen—were allowed to flourish. Then, for the show’s third season, Lawrence took a creative back seat to Sudeikis and so too did the previous iteration of the show.

“Ted Lasso was a rare thing, because I would be disingenuous if I were sitting here saying it felt like mine from the start,” Lawrence told Vulture in March. “The third year, it would’ve been criminal for it not to have been 100 percent his voice. That’s the way that show should work. It was his vision from the start.”

Sudeikis’s vision was destabilizing, like watching a man inherit a perfectly functional plane only to decide he’d like to transform the aircraft into a submarine. In its third season, Lasso became more millennial morality play than sitcom, each episode unfolding like an after-school special on the ethics of deleting nudes, love bombing, and “Shut up and dribble.” It’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood if every character explained their emotional state through DJ Khaled and Nora Ephron references.

The most glaring of these moments happens when fan-favorite curmudgeon Roy Kent struggles to forgive sports journalist and critic Trent Crimm. The perceived slight? Crimm wrote an unsavory review of Kent’s soccer debut at 17, a copy of which Kent has carried in his wallet for decades. “I thought I was being edgy,” Crimm says to Kent. “I was trying to make a name for myself. All I really did was, uh, look for the worst in people. I’m sorry.” It’s the moment when Lasso transitions from a show about the power of kindness to a meta examination of those who would reject such a creative endeavor (i.e., critics).

In most sitcoms, the scene would be a clumsy if unremarkable story beat about the dangers of [checks notes] hurting someone’s feelings through cultural criticism—a medium not exactly thriving or lucrative enough to blunt any of Lasso’s momentum. But the moment feels like a direct response to the mild wave of “Ted Lasso is bad, actually” criticism that popped up in the wake of the show’s transition from unexpected hit to Emmy juggernaut. (Ted Lasso has earned 11 Emmys, regularly beating more critically acclaimed shows like Barry and Atlanta.)

If the hand-wringing over Lasso’s slow march from breezy comedy to prestige-lite dramedy seems overblown, consider that the Season 3 finale features a scene of a character sincerely asking, “Can people change?” The same subtextual question that’s fueled the past 25 years of TV storytelling (The Sopranos, Mad Men, Succession) is simply Xeroxed by Lasso. Instead of leaving room for ambiguity, the characters treat this philosophical query about the human condition as an uncomplicated life lesson that can be answered within the confines of a five-minute conversation.

Even less esoteric topics, like divorce, are crushed under the show’s heavy-handedness. In Lasso’s first season, Ted runs to the U.K. to avoid a collapsing marriage. This was two years before Sudeikis’s real-life split from partner Olivia Wilde became one of the defining tabloid stories of the pandemic. Thankfully, there are no scenes of Ted beating the shit out of Harry Styles, but what we get in their place isn’t much better. Some of Season 3’s most dramatic scenes are also its worst. (See: Ted admonishing his ex-wife over FaceTime or cursing out his emotionally distant mom.) They feel hollow because the show’s titular character so often feels like a mascot. (Fitting, given the character’s origins.) It’s nearly impossible to know what Sudeikis or the show’s creators have to say about the intricacies of marriage and separation when the show’s worldview so often presents Ted and his worldview as unimpeachable.

Thankfully, the SNL tabloid-to-sitcom-beat pipeline isn’t reserved for only Ted Lasso. The prerequisite for a show like Bupkis rests entirely on a deep understanding of real-world Pete Davidson, who plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself. The pilot begins with Davidson Googling his name, becoming emotionally unmoored by what he finds, watching VR porn to cope, and accidentally ejaculating on his mother (played by Edie Falco) in the process. Even prestige TV’s undisputed matriarch isn’t immune to the oedipal tomfoolery of her progeny. From there, the show launches into punch lines about Ariana Grande, Kanye West, and Davidson’s penis size, all topics that would be alien to anyone who isn’t extremely plugged into TMZ or rap Twitter.

While Lasso plays coy with how much we should conflate Sudeikis and Ted, Bupkis is an opportunity for Davidson to wax poetic about the plight of modern celebrity. “I’m, like, a sensitive guy,” Davidson tells his therapist, played by Charlie Day. “And I’ve told people how sensitive I am and what I struggle with, and yet they still fuck with me, and I don’t get it.”

For years, the axis of most sitcoms leaned toward fiction over fact. Part of the allure was the slickness of the illusion. Full House wasn’t based on the life of Bob Saget—in fact, it cut the other way, with the squeaky-clean Danny Tanner playing against the raunchy comic’s IRL image. Even when a show was based on the namesake and career of a comedian, like Seinfeld, it rarely seemed concerned with the minutiae of that person’s life. There’s a reason Jerry’s stand-up routines had very little bearing on the narrative implications of any episode.

It’s not solely the fault of the 21st-century comedian that so much of their work must interrogate the modern plight of their own celebrity. Of all the things the social media age has upended, the relationship between the heckler and the heckled is among the most heinous. Once that dynamic moved from the confines of hole-in-the-wall comedy clubs to the internet, the balance of power shifted. Instagram, Twitter, and the like elevated heckling to a fine art. In response, comedy has also become immersed in the dark art of PR spin.

Enter Baby J.

Like Lasso and Bupkis, Mulaney’s latest special reserves time for a throat-clearing explanation. For years, Mulaney seemed slathered in a wholesome sheen that often distracted from a darker artistic outlook. Dressed in pristine suits and sporting a movie star smile, he embodied a specific brand of 2010s quirkiness (think: Vampire Weekend, 500 Days of Summer). Within the first 10 minutes of Baby J, there are two separate bits featuring Mulaney skewering this version of himself. First, he bursts into song about his 2020 rehab and divorce from his first wife, Annamarie Tendler, comparing his decreased Q rating to that of the “less problematic” Bo Burnham—another colleague whose recent work revolves around our era of internet morality. He follows with crowd work that sees Mulaney warning a fifth-grader, “If you’ve seen me do stand-up before, I have kind of a different vibe now.”

The rest of the special feels like watching a celebrity searching their name on Twitter and responding to what pops up. In lesser hands, each of Baby J’s meta bits could feel like a vain gesture toward image rehabilitation. But Mulaney infuses each with a tinge of melancholy. Instead of imbuing his story of sobriety with nobility, he ruminates on its small indignities. A life of drugs is all fun and games until you’re famous enough to have Fred Armisen at your intervention, but not famous enough to be recognized by other patients at rehab. Rather than obsess over the injustice of the celebrity system, Mulaney ponders the absurdity of his past position. As he so eloquently puts it, “Likability is a jail.”

If any show has built a monument to interrogating the inane curse of likability, it’s Barry. Part of the show’s initial charm came from witnessing SNL’s Stefon contort himself into a grisly and darker comedic package. It was the Bryan Cranston–to–Walter White playbook remixed for the late 2010s. Instead of being the type of show that was invited to the White House, Barry often interrogated the type of person who thrives in the celebrity system. If the impulse of modern comedy is to correct the record of who you are, Barry succeeded by examining the foolhardy nature of that proposition. It’s not unlike Barry’s perception of Abraham Lincoln, undone by jumping down one YouTube-and-Amazon-book rabbit hole.

To its credit, Barry stayed functionally lean even as its artistic aspirations grew. The show’s episodes remained 30 minutes, with Hader taking over all directing duties for Season 4. Instead of expanding the cast list, the show narrowed its focus, documenting in hyper-detail the moral decay of its four leads and the Hollywood apparatus that loomed over them. In Hader’s conception of L.A.’s creative community, talent and artistic integrity might as well be liabilities. You either turn your trauma into a true crime podcast or win an Oscar that leads to a directing gig on a superhero movie called Mega Girls.

But even though Barry managed to stay as considered, complex, and daring in its final season as it was in the preceding three, it wasn’t without signs of duress. The same drive to constantly one-up itself that crystallized the show’s greatness also became its own kind of albatross. Hader has compared the feeling of sustaining Barry to bouncing a ball on a racket. “People started coming around and looking at me doing it, and I was like, ‘Yeah. Oh, look at this,’” Hader told The New Yorker. “And then it’s been six years of more and more people coming and watching me bounce this ball on a tennis racket, and it just feels like more and more pressure to not drop it.”

The result was a final season prone to long stretches of anguish and misery with little reprieve. One of the funniest scenes of the entire series—Barry showing his son the mortal dangers of Little League Baseball—is followed by Sally giving that same son alcohol to avoid explaining the latest crisis in their fugitive lifestyle. The only moment when Hank and Cristobal get to fully unleash their comedic chops in Season 4 is in an early Dave & Buster’s free-for-all.

It’s the right of any long-running comedy to modulate how much humor means to its ongoing equation. Just because Barry began in a slightly less self-serious place, that doesn’t mean it needs to return there. But it’s the punch line the Hader comedy ends on that feels more deflating than triumphant.

In a flash-forward scene, Barry’s teenage son, John, finally watches the biopic based on his father’s life. Mark Wahlberg and Daniel Day-Lewis are nowhere to be found. Instead, we’re treated to a schlocky movie that rewrites Barry as an abused veteran turned John McClane action hero. With Gene viewed by the public as the mastermind behind Janice’s death, Hollywood refashions Barry’s story as one of redemption and triumph. In death, the world finally sees the hitman turned actor as he always wished it would: a victim of his violent choices instead of the main perpetrator.

The result is like watching the classic armchair CEO take—“this TV show should’ve been a movie”—written to its logical conclusion. Why settle for an irreverent comedy (fictional Hollywood or not) when a sweet, melodramatic biopic is right there for the taking? Does Barry become Barry without Hader’s auteurist streak, or is the show fondly remembered as a good if inconsequential HBO comedy?

Even if Hader’s final meta wink leaves you comedically wanting, the truth of the scene is no less potent. Ted Lasso lost the plot. Giving Barry a Boruto to raise is a respectable risk and also a drag. Pete Davidson walked so Matty Healy could run. There’s nothing more American than watching funny white boys struggle with their successes, no matter how futilely. If the history of Abraham Lincoln can be rewritten, what hope do the rest of us have? Legacies are tricky like that.