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The moment Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth began berating the military officials assembled at Marine Corps Base Quantico last week, he set Saturday Night Live up for an alley-oop. With his clenched fists, hot temper, and stars-and-stripes pocket square, the former Fox News host—as SNL was eager to point out at the top of its 51st-season premiere—did enough self-parody that Colin Jost didn’t have to add much to nail his take on Hegseth. Jost simply ratcheted up the volume and the attacks on soldiers’ physiques. With its cold open, the sketch series pulled off one of its most consistent tricks: identify an absurdity emanating from the political establishment, make the party responsible say the quiet part out loud, and wait for the headlines and social-media posts to roll in.
But if the show’s send-up of Hegseth established that there are still moments in the broader culture that can get everyone talking about the same thing, the rest of the episode argued the opposite. The sketch that earned the most live hooting and hollering was not the politically topical one, but the pop-culturally zeitgeisty one—about a very particular movie that surprised many with its wild success this summer. In an episode featuring a pair of established Top 40 hitmakers—host Bad Bunny and musical guest Doja Cat—the real-life stars of the animated Netflix film KPop Demon Hunters stole the spotlight. And they underscored SNL’s clear desire to keep up with the shifting center of the pop-culture universe.
The women of HUNTR/X, the fictional pop trio that leads the sleeper hit, provided the kicker to a sketch that poked fun at what it’s like to be on the inside (and outside) of a huge cultural phenomenon. Bad Bunny is the lone KPop Demon Hunters–obsessed member of his friend group, played by Mikey Day, Chloe Fineman, and Sarah Sherman. His affection for the children’s movie—in which a pop song is all that stands between humanity and a demonic apocalypse—comes as a surprise to them: He has no kids, so this is something he cued up on Netflix all by himself; he’s so familiar with the soundtrack that when Fineman’s character suggests they shift the conversation to a different topic, he goes right into daydreaming about HUNTR/X singing its Billboard No. 1 hit, “Golden.” In the mind of Bad Bunny’s progressively more frustrated Hunters lover, nothing is as important or relevant as the animated pop stars’ tussle with the soul-sucking minions of Gwi-Ma.
It all sounds perfectly silly coming out of a grown man’s mouth, and the film’s taxonomy of magical entities really gives Bad Bunny a run for his cue-card-reading money. But the enthusiastic crowd seemed to find much of the lingo legible, and many of the folks at home could likely follow along too—whether they’re parents or not. According to Netflix’s internal data, KPop Demon Hunters is the most popular English-language original in the company’s history. It is also, in a rarity for a streaming movie, a merchandise-generating, box-office-topping sensation, reminiscent of a time when a handful of popular movies could make for reliable watercooler fodder. Returning from its summer hiatus, SNL had plenty of other blockbusters to base sketches on: reimaginings of Superman and The Fantastic Four, even the idiosyncratic horror-comedy film Weapons. That it tried to make a splash with HUNTR/X shows where the SNL team sees the most cultural heat coming from—and demonstrates that it has a little more savvy than the movie studio that initially handed off KPop Demon Hunters to Netflix in the first place.
[Read: The one big change SNL is making]
SNL’s ability to synthesize a broad spectrum of pop culture into sketch comedy has always been key to its endurance. But it’s notable that the show’s interests have widened to encompass an anime-inspired streaming cartoon about supernaturally powered Korean pop idols. The sketch also emphasized how much of the SNL’s frame of reference originates in virtual spaces, a tendency also glimpsed in the taboo-testing “Weekend Update” debut of Kam Patterson, who repeatedly prodded Jost to let him use the N-word. A favorite of the button-pushing podcast Kill Tony, Patterson at one point said that “the people on the internet would disagree” that he brings more to the show than provocation. And the first person viewers saw on-screen this week was Patterson’s fellow newcomer Jeremy Culhane—a fresh face to those who have never encountered social-media clips of his impish appearances on the niche comedy streamer Dropout.
Monoculture has always been something of a myth, a faint collective memory of a society with fewer avenues to, as Sherman put it in the KPop Demon Hunters sketch, “experience any culture.” Survey a large enough cross section of last night’s SNL viewership, and you might find that the number of viewers who saw their tastes reflected in the episode’s Jeopardy parody is roughly equal to those who recognized the comic stylings of the legendary Mexican comedian known as Chespirito; an homage to his massively popular sitcom, El Chavo, closed the night. The KPop Demon Hunters sketch ultimately argued that for all of the movie’s peculiarities—the weaponized music, the demonic lore—it’s a classic crowd-pleaser at its core. The songs are bangers, the visuals are bright and engaging, and the women of HUNTR/X are every bit the superheroes that Superman and the Fantastic Four are. And for some members of the SNL audience, these pop stars are news makers on par with, if not exceeding, the self-styled “secretary of war.”
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