It took over a decade, but Will Forte’s MacGruber — the MacGyver send-up he debuted as a recurring SNL sketch, and which he turned into a movie in 2010 — is back, this time as a Peacock show. So when Forte returned to the program that made his name, it was inevitable he’d bust out the character again. It was classic MacGruber, which is to say the bite-sized sketches that always end with the easily distracted special ops agent failing to defuse a bomb, but somehow not killing himself and his unlucky companions.
But this time there was a twist: MacGruber got really into internet misinformation. In the first sketch, he outs himself to his teammates (Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe) as an anti-mask anti-vaxxer, complete with a fake vaccine card that’s actually a Sizzler napkin. The next time we see them, he’s caught COVID, which he’s treating with Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and other nonsense treatments. By the end, he’s gone full alt-right, donning QAnon Shaman attire and refusing to believe that the ticking time bomb represents real time.
Over his eight seasons on SNL, Forte played — and “killed” — MacGruber some 27 times, joined by the likes of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Betty White, even the real MacGyver, Richard Dean Anderson, himself. Luckily when he left the show, he took MacGruber with him, though it’s nice to see him back in his native habitat.
You can watch the sketches in the video above.