Do you remember listening to the radio as a kid, and getting excited to hear a popular song? But as the weeks wore on, it became less and less exciting, until finally, you had to change the station. The DJ played the song too much, ruined it.
That’s what Saturday Night Live did to Domingo.
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The character first appeared in the “Domingo: Bridesmaid Speech” sketch, which first aired on October 12, 2024. It starred Ariana Grande, Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, and Heidi Gardner as the titular bridesmaids, performing a song for the newlyweds Matthew and Kelsey, played by Andrew Dismukes and Chloe Fineman respectively. Marcello Hernandez was the star of the show as Domingo, the suave lover who managed to whisk Fineman’s character off her feet.
To the tune of the then-hit Sabrina Carpenter song “Espresso,” the women, and eventually Marcello’s Domingo as well, recounted the tale of how Fineman’s character cheated on Dismukes’ character during the bachelorette trip.
That sketch, from the SNL Season 50 premiere, went absolutely viral. No one could get enough of the catchy song. According to an oral history of the Domingo character from Vanity Fair, it was the most viewed video across SNL’s social media platforms. By the end of Season 50, “Bridesmaid Speech” racked up more than 171 million views.
And Saturday Night Live, never a program to let success fade with dignity, went on to produce three more Domingo sketches.
The worst of these was Season 51, Episode 3’s cold open. SNL finally listened to those who have been begging for a break from the political cold opens, and gave us the fourth installment of Matthew and Kelsey’s story—which also marked Sabrina Carpenter’s second appearance in a Domingo sketch. The excitement for the reunion of Hernandez and Carpenter, who served double duty as both host and musical guest for Episode 3, was completely drowned out by Domingo being well past his shelf life.
The cold open quickly became the most downvoted sketch in the history of the r/LiveFromSaturdayNightLive subreddit, beating out a Morgan Wallen catastrophe. The final nail in the coffin—hopefully—for Domingo came from Ariana Grande herself. She told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show just over a year after “Bridesmaid Speech” premiered: “I think Domingo is … I think Domingo is dead.”
Let’s hope so. But, as we send the Latin lover off into the Afterlife for Jokes SNL Beat to Death, we should think of Domingo like that song that got played too much on the radio. In order to hate it, you had to love it first.