Horse Racing Gets a Little Extreme on a New "SNL" Sketch

For the second time in as many episodes, a Succession cast member appeared on Saturday Night Live. This weekend, Kieran Culkin hosted for an evening that featured Culkin in a turkey costume, a heist gone wrong and the Please Don’t Destroy guys having an escalating series of awkward telephone conversations.

The episode featured multiple filmed sketches in which a familiar narrative takes a bizarre turn. In one, a planned theft of a supercar goes very wrong for a logical yet unexpected reason — making for an outstanding punchline once it becomes apparent where things are headed. The other begins in a very dramatic place, with an injured jockey and a crucial race on the line. But soon enough, it becomes very clear that we’re a long way from Seabiscuit.

I’m not sure how someone came up with the idea of “horseracing, but with the 90s” — but the combination of Culkin’s commitment to the sketch and some very unconvincing special effects makes for a good sense of “what did I just see?” It might not be the best SNL sketch involving a horse to air in the last year, but it definitely went somewhere unexpected. Sometimes, that’s enough.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…