Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard took hosting duties on Saturday Night Live following the show’s hiatus, kicking things off with a sketch about generational clashing and their deeply incompatible definitions of “selling out.”
Wolfhard plays a teenager eager to hit the road with his indie band, much to the dismay of his father (James Austin Johnson). Not because Dad is anti-dreams or anti-music, but because he’s a pop star — and his son absolutely will not be slumming it through grunge shows at East Coast dive bars. As he puts it, “What could be more fulfilling than selling out arenas for the year and a half preceding 9/11?”
The sketch hinges on the wildly different ideas of artistic fulfillment between father and son, while also finding time to pile on chaos elsewhere. Dad’s boy band mates keep shamelessly hitting on Mom (Ashley Padilla), adding another layer of absurdity to the family dynamic. Those members include Curtis 5000 (Marcello Hernández), Cyber (Jeremy Culhane), and K-Dog (Andrew Dismukes), who is unmistakably just Kevin Richardson from the Backstreet Boys.
