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The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n 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<\/i> up for an alley-oop. With his clenched fists, hot temper, and stars-and-stripes pocket square, the former Fox News host\u2014as SNL<\/i> was eager to point out at the top of its 51st-season premiere\u2014did enough self-parody that Colin Jost didn\u2019t have to add much to nail his take on Hegseth. Jost simply ratcheted up the volume and the attacks on soldiers\u2019 physiques. With its cold open, the sketch series pulled off one of its most consistent tricks<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n But if the show\u2019s 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\u2014about a very particular movie that surprised many with its wild success this summer. In an episode featuring a pair of established Top 40 hitmakers\u2014host Bad Bunny and musical guest Doja Cat\u2014the real-life stars of the animated Netflix film KPop Demon Hunters<\/i><\/a> stole the spotlight. And they underscored SNL<\/i>\u2019s clear desire to keep up with the shifting center of the pop-culture universe.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s like to be on the inside (and outside) of a huge cultural phenomenon. Bad Bunny is the lone KPop Demon Hunters<\/i>\u2013obsessed member of his friend group, played by Mikey Day, Chloe Fineman, and Sarah Sherman. His affection for the children\u2019s movie\u2014in which a pop song is all that stands between humanity and a demonic apocalypse\u2014comes as a surprise to them: He has no kids, so this is something he cued up on Netflix all by himself; he\u2019s so familiar with the soundtrack that when Fineman\u2019s character suggests they shift the conversation to a different topic, he goes right into daydreaming about HUNTR\/X singing its Billboard<\/i> No. 1 hit, \u201cGolden.\u201d In the mind of Bad Bunny\u2019s progressively more frustrated Hunters<\/i> lover, nothing is as important or relevant as the animated pop stars\u2019 tussle with the soul-sucking minions of Gwi-Ma.<\/p>\n It all sounds perfectly silly coming out of a grown man\u2019s mouth, and the film\u2019s 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\u2014whether they\u2019re parents or not. According to Netflix\u2019s internal data, KPop Demon Hunters<\/i> is the most popular English-language original in the company\u2019s history. It is also, in a rarity for a streaming movie<\/a>, 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<\/i> had plenty of other blockbusters to base sketches on: reimaginings of Superman<\/i> and The Fantastic Four<\/i>, even the idiosyncratic horror-comedy film Weapons<\/i>. That it tried to make a splash with HUNTR\/X shows where the SNL <\/i>team sees the most cultural heat coming from\u2014and demonstrates that it has a little more savvy than the movie studio that initially handed off KPop Demon Hunters<\/i> to Netflix in the first place.<\/p>\n