Grace Reiter made her Weekend Update debut on the October 10 episode of SNL with a deadpan line about her mother: “My mom stuck me in the corn maze for three hours so she could kiss a farmer.” She appeared in three sketches that night, and critics came away convinced the 25-year-old featured player carried a show that Shane Gillis struggled to hold together.

Reiter, who joined the cast this season, is the first SNL cast member born in the 21st century. She built a following of roughly 4 million on TikTok with committed, often unhinged short-form comedy, and her 2025 YouTube parody “The Hunger Games (but Better),” shot with friends in three days, has passed 14 million views.

Her Weekend Update debut put her opposite Ashley Padilla, who played a frazzled mom stuck bringing her “problem child” Coco after a babysitter fell through. Padilla pitched wholesome fall activities while Reiter cut in deadpan: the kid fell into a leaf pile and went missing for a day, then came the corn maze line. Fans called the pairing the highlight of Update.

She closed the show in a middle-school chess tournament sketch as the divorced, trashy mom of a mortified competitor, with Gillis as the dad in a mullet and football jersey. Their loud cheering turned into flirting and a disruptive reunion that ended in a lewd embrace on the chessboard table. SNL Rankings called her “very physical… and it works wonderfully,” and said the sketch was strong enough to have led the show.

Reiter also played Gillis’ dying mother in a hospice sketch opposite Sarah Sherman, rounding out a range that ran from bratty kid to elderly mom in one night.

Gillis, hosting for the third time, drew mixed reviews, including an uncensored F-bomb he dropped during a “Green Eggs & Ham” parody that Mikey Day ad-libbed around. Deadline’s review credited Reiter with saving the episode, and Vulture wrote that she “had a very good show” and is “carving out a space of her own.”