‘SNL’ Mocks ‘House Hunters’ With Liev Schreiber

Saturday Night Live offered its take on House Hunters this week in a skit starring host Liev Schreiber.

Schreiber played a typical House Hunters husband in the digital short, joined by Leslie Jones as his on-screen wife. The skit mocked some of the usual outlandish tropes of the HGTV series, including the massive budgets and unlikely fixations for prospective buyers. Their characters, Anne and John, were hoping to get a house with a “big yard, gas stove and charm.”

While talking things out at the kitchen table over wine, Jones and Schreiber adopted some of the stilted discomfort of the show’s usual subjects, who are not used to being on TV. They referred to every house as some variation of “split-level,” and the homes they had looked at featured more and more outlandish quirks.

The first house they looked at “didn’t have any windows, just drawings of windows,” while in the second one, “the floor was vertical. Remember? We kept shooting straight down.”

Anne and John considered all of these cartoonish options with straight faces, constantly returning to the question of whether or not there was room for John’s “man cave.” Finally, after pondering a house with live-in magicians, an invisible house and one actual man cave, they settled on “an abandoned split-level filled with Australian vampires.”

They were excited to have a house with a big yard, where John’s sister (Heidi Gardner) could “run around,” and they were willing to put up with a toilet on the ceiling and a gas stove on their bed. In addition, we finally got to see how John would set up his man-cave.

“If I can’t have the cave, I’ll just keep the man in the basement,” he said, as the screen showed Pete Davidson sitting alone in a finished basement.

“The asking price was $390,000, but we ended up paying $9 billion,” John bragged, “plus closing costs.”

The skit did a thorough job of skewering House Hunters — a show that most people have at least seen glimpses of. The reality series has a strange power over audiences, with many wondering why it fascinates them so much. Still, in spite of the mockery, House Hunters will likely be okay. The series has produced over 1,700 episodes since it first aired in 1999. As long as real estate continues to confuse and interest people, the show is probably not going anywhere.

This was Schreiber’s first time hosting SNL, and many were impressed with his comedic skills. Schreiber held his own in sketches with the boisterous cast, and he seemed to be up for just about anything.

For many people, Schreiber was incidental to this week’s episode of SNL. They were more interested in seeing how the show would handled the latest explosive political headlines, and whether or not Pete Davidson would apologize for his joke about wounded veteran and new Congressman Dan Crenshaw.