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Cold Opening – Road to the White House
The best part of all those cookie-cutter Mitt Romney sketches from this season has been Mitt attempting to sound like an actual human with actual human interests, so a compilation of those bits was an apt choice. B

Sofia Vergara’s Monologue
Rather lightweight, but the joke about how Hispanic people age fast initially and then stop aging completely was funny, despite being based on a very small portion of reality. B

Just Friends Booty Shorts
I am pretty sure this commercial parody was about just wanting to clear things up, as opposed to homophobic panic. Anyway, while the sight gags were generally funny, it didn’t make much sense that the clothes would be a stereotypically gay style if Andy and Jason’s characters were not in fact gay, and I didn’t get the sense that they were supposed to actually be gay and they were just hiding it. B

Bein’ Quirky with Zooey Deschanel
Abby and Taran didn’t really do anything they didn’t do last time as Zooey D. and Michael Cera. Kristen’s Drew Barrymore is very accurate, but it’s nowhere near as funny as her Björk (not much is). As for the role played the host, Sofia had Fren Drescher down just right and even managed to divert her accent, but there wasn’t as much depth as there was to the goofy observations of Zooey Deschanel’s portrayal of Mary-Kate Olsen. And Andy’s purposely half-assed Mayim Bialik had that Samberg-patented stupidity that generally works. B

Almost Pizza
A reductio ad absurdum of the style of those DiGiorno commercials. B+

News Promo
Here is a nondescript, one-joke sketch that SNL seems to do to death, but this worked – quite well – thanks to Fred Armisen’s curious exploration of the performance space. B+

Gilly
Well … they did mix things up a bit. C

One Direction perform “What Makes You Beautiful”
This is why One Direction should not have been invited on SNL so early in their career. They sounded fine while harmonizing, but during the individual parts, they were blatantly unpolished. A group whose raison d’etre is clean, rich vocalizing should not have that problem. This song is actually somewhat enjoyable, so that shortcoming was really too bad. C+

Weekend Update
-The Jokes: A good ratio of hits to misses (well, good for Seth). I enjoyed the Mary J. Blige joke. It had a classic twist. B
-The Segments: -Drunk Uncle: Stefon may be the best current recurring character on SNL, but the title of most quotable actually belongs to Drunk Uncle (and when you also consider Anthony Crispino, quotability seems to be a forte of Bobby Moynihan). Basically every word from a Drunk Uncle bit ends up quoted on Twitter. “Wi-if organic” had an odd sort of truthful social criticism, and “So I’m not ‘wahhhhh!!! wahhhhh!!!'” was a boner gag that actually worked. A-

The Manuel Ortiz Show
I laughed. Inexplicably, whenever this sketch airs, I laugh. And I laughed this time a little bit more than usual. B-

Lil’ Poundcake
Not quite the classic that three airings in one season would seem to indicate, but close enough. Original Grade: B

Watch What Happens: Live
Right on. A little bit too in love with going over the edge, though. B-

One Direction perform “One Thing”
The same issue of lack of polish was just as present here as it was in their first song, and on top of that, this song doesn’t have as much energy. C

Pantene Commerical
Kate McKinnon had Penelope Cruz’s voice down like all get out, but she looks nothing like her, so it was a little jarring, but, oh well. For whatever reason, the humor of the difficulty with hard-to-pronounce words always works for me. Kudos to Sofia Vergara for allowing herself to look like an idiot. A-

The 74th Annual Hunger Games
It was kind of worth having to hear Sofia Vergara scream incessantly to get to that joke about the Hunger Games Puppy Bowl. B-

Overall
Hey, that wasn’t so bad. Sofia wasn’t as annoying as I’m sure some people feared. The only major problem with this episode was One Direction, and I don’t feel like being mean to them. The one sketch that I didn’t particularly like was Gilly, and it wasn’t awful, and I can deal with it.