Robert De Niro's "disaster" of a cameo encapsulates SNL's Trump era bad decisions

Slate

As legendary of an actor as De Niro is, he just isn't good at live sketch comedy. Yet Saturday Night Live keeps bringing him out to play Robert Mueller. "About three minutes into this week’s Saturday Night Live cold open, all of the bad decisions the show has made during the Trump presidency slowly swung into perfect, awful alignment," says Matthew Dessum. "Watch in horror as a once-in-a-lifetime harmonic convergence between the show’s love of celebrity cameos, their weakness for reassuring their audience that everything will be okay, and their apparently difficult-to-read cue cards unleashes gravitational forces that tear the cold open to pieces." Dessum adds: "Whatever was going on with Robert De Niro is a disaster. He rarely makes eye contact with (Alex) Moffat, staring instead at what must be the cue cards, he delivers jokes like he’s reading them for the first time, and at one point it seems like he either skipped some lines or a last-minute edit rendered the dialogue nonsensical, because he answers, 'That depends on how much you want to visit your family,' in answer to a question no one asked...The result is hard to watch, but weirdly, it ends up being more honest than the sketch would have been if they’d executed it flawlessly."

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