Netflix’s true-crime documentaries have a recognizable sheen to them—the streamer even launched a comedy collection mocking its tackle the style. But its newest hit, The Excellent Neighbor, takes a distinct tack. Not like the typical true-crime doc, the movie doesn’t depend on soapy reenactments and first-person accounts to piece collectively its story: a Black girl’s homicide by her white neighbor in 2023, which rocked a tight-knit Florida neighborhood. As a substitute, it leans on primary-source materials culled from physique cameras and interrogation rooms. The unvarnished method stands out among the many flashier titles in Netflix’s catalog—a lot in order that it turned fodder for a Saturday Night time Reside spoof final evening. Utilizing that very same machine, it probed a distinct, extra mundane subject: the division of family labor.
The sketch was a trailer for an imagined forthcoming Netflix true-crime docuseries referred to as Gone With out a Hint, which tracked three males rattled by their wives’ sudden disappearance. This week’s host, Miles Teller, and the solid members Ben Marshall and Kenan Thompson performed the bereaved husbands; they retold their model of occasions by way of a mixture of sit-down interviews and security-camera recordings. The idea concerned direct nods to The Excellent Neighbor’s use of real-time footage—notably a second the place Teller’s character, Doug, paced round his entrance porch whereas talking with physique cam–sporting cops.
Through a collection of “never-before-seen interviews” with the lads’s companions—performed by Veronika Slowikowska, Ashley Padilla, and Sarah Sherman—we quickly discovered that these spouses hadn’t been kidnapped in any respect. As a substitute, two of the ladies had been touring. (“I had advised Doug about it perhaps 45 occasions,” Slowikowska’s exasperated character mentioned.) Sherman’s character had probably the most absurd story of the bunch: She occurred to simply be within the toilet for some time. With their wives away for a spell, the husbands swiftly unraveled at dwelling. “Whoever took her left a bunch of cryptic notes,” a stupefied Doug mentioned. The sketch then reduce to an indoor security-cam shot of him studying Put up-its caught to the fridge. They instructed him the best way to warmth up meals and end the laundry, prompting him to cry out to the presumed kidnapper placing him to work, “Is that this a recreation to you?”
The lads’s utter dopiness was performed for laughs, but the true-crime framework shrewdly animated a deeper dialogue about what’s turn into generally known as the “psychological load”: the unstated work that ladies in heterosexual partnerships too usually tackle for his or her family. Research performed in recent times have proven that ladies in heterosexual {couples} predominantly tackle the brunt of home duties—managing the household’s calendar, unloading the dishwasher, feeding pets. This isn’t to say that males don’t contribute to the family in any respect; somewhat, analysis means that some males aren’t cognizant of their companions’ frustration, as the ladies silently project-manage their dwelling lives. Typically, because the sketch underscored, the lads gained’t understand it till they’re left to fend for themselves.
The SNL parody by no means mentions the phenomenon by identify, however doing so wasn’t essential to get the purpose throughout. The ladies defined to viewers that they’d not solely advised their husbands the place they had been going however had additionally reminded them of it always. The true-crime trappings supplied a pointed instrument for presenting proof that contradicted the husbands’ oblivious assertions. One spouse had marked her work journey on a calendar by circling, starring, and including arrows clearly pointing to the dates she could be away. Padilla’s character supplied probably the most blistering instance: She entrusted her befuddled husband, performed by Thompson, with dealing with baby care alone. “I simply want I might have ready myself,” he mentioned in an interview. “However there was no approach I might have identified.” The sketch then reduce to a recording of Padilla’s character, baggage in hand, repeatedly telling her husband that she could be visiting her sister upstate.
In satirizing some girls’s impressions of their male companions’ cluelessness as a high-stakes matter, SNL subtly commented on these fraught home dynamics. Mimicking The Excellent Neighbor was a cheekily zeitgeist-y maneuver—a method to illustrate, as is the case in lots of true-crime docs, how these males failed to acknowledge the warning indicators earlier than their supposed tragedies struck. Extra harrowing nonetheless: The husbands refused to learn to, say, take care of the youngsters and make Cup Noodles with out lighting the home on fireplace. They as a substitute resigned themselves immediately, as if ready for his or her associate to supply them yet another reminder to do probably the most fundamental of chores.
