Sharing the culture you love—a beloved song, that book that changed your life—can help translate your inner world to the people you love. Or it might make you look really strange. So it goes in one sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live, in which a trio of teen girls at a sleepover (played by Sarah Sherman, Veronika Slowikowska, and Jane Wickline) take turns playing clips of their favorite get-ready-with-me videos, the popular format where content creators dress and prepare themselves for the day ahead. Two of the girls share par-for-the-course videos, before Sherman’s character introduces everyone to the influencer she loves the most: @ColoradoVicky1 (Dakota Johnson, the show’s host), a woman whose life doesn’t seem so aspirational.
As she smiles cheerfully, her eyes vacant, Vicky invites her audience to “get ready with me for court-ordered electroshock therapy.” In another clip, she styles herself in green lipstick and a Teletubby-esque antenna in preparation for getting “5150’d on the roof of a San Bernardino Whole Foods.” “She seems… unwell,” says Slowikowska’s character. But Sherman’s teen girl pays no mind to such judgments, or to her friend’s question about how she even found this account, whose videos don’t even have double-digit views. “I’m legiterally addicted to her ass,” Sherman says. “Guess my algorithm is just cool-mazing?!”
These days, everyone uses a different internet. Algorithms serve up specialized content catered to each user’s unique interests, creating a warped mirror of their own reality, and last night’s sketch cleverly captured the disconnect that sometimes arises when people reveal their private online consumption to each other.
@ColoradoVicky1’s behavior only gets more bizarre the more clips the girls watch. Without blinking once, Vicky explains that her “outfit of the day” is a pair of handcuffs, which she plans to use to attach herself to the actor who plays Turtle in Entourage. She one-ups this proclamation with an even stranger how-to video, in which she asks viewers to tag along as she makes brunch and gives herself a lobotomy. (“You’re gonna want to start by finding a really good power drill,” she monotones.)
[Read: The loneliness crisis hits SNL]
Sherman’s friends seem to get progressively more put off by her media diet. It doesn’t help that Sherman’s character isn’t the only one in the house who could probably stand to log off. Every few minutes, her dad (James Austin Johnson) comes into the room with snacks, and immediately reveals how depressed he is: “I’m just gonna go drink in the pool for a while, stand in the deep end,” he announces, before leaving the room. When the sleepover guests are concerned, Sherman explains that her dad is just in a funk: his boss discovered he dresses up like Sailor Moon, and he just found out that Draft Kings uses real money. His particular online milieu is bleeding into, and beginning to harm, his real-life existence.
When her friends ask if they should get help, Sherman’s character insists that they “stop giving him attention—that’s, like, exactly what he wants.” She continues to ignore his not-so-subtle cries for help, until the sketch’s ending beat, in which he randomly shows up in @ColoradoVicky1’s livestream as her new lover. Sherman seems thrilled by this development, announcing that Vicky is going to be her new mom. Finally, her father’s real-life depression is good for something.
Teen girls and their dads alike are vulnerable to having their minds and lives warped by their feeds, the sketch warns. And once brought to light, these online rabbit-holes might not translate so well to real life: The sketch-comedy version of this is funny because it’s so familiar, while the fracturing of reality outside SNL is mostly just unnerving.
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