The High-Stakes SNL Sketch About … Domestic Chores

Netflix’s true-crime documentaries have a recognizable sheen to them—the streamer even released a comedy series mocking its take on the genre. Yet its latest hit, The Perfect Neighbor, takes a different tack. Unlike the average true-crime doc, the film doesn’t rely on soapy reenactments and first-person accounts to piece together its story: a Black woman’s murder by her white neighbor in 2023, which rocked a tight-knit Florida community. Instead, it leans on primary-source material culled from body cameras and interrogation rooms. The unvarnished approach stands out among the flashier titles in Netflix’s catalog—so much so that it became fodder for a Saturday Night Live spoof last night. Using that same device, it probed a different, more mundane topic: the division of household labor.

The sketch was a trailer for an imagined forthcoming Netflix true-crime docuseries called Gone Without a Trace, which tracked three men rattled by their wives’ sudden disappearance. This week’s host, Miles Teller, and the cast members Ben Marshall and Kenan Thompson played the bereaved husbands; they retold their version of events through a combination of sit-down interviews and security-camera recordings. The concept involved direct nods to The Perfect Neighbor’s use of real-time footage—particularly a moment where Teller’s character, Doug, paced around his front porch while speaking with body cam–wearing cops.

Via a series of “never-before-seen interviews” with the men’s partners—played by Veronika Slowikowska, Ashley Padilla, and Sarah Sherman—we soon learned that these spouses hadn’t been abducted at all. Instead, two of the women were traveling. (“I had told Doug about it maybe 45 times,” Slowikowska’s exasperated character said.) Sherman’s character had the most absurd story of the bunch: She happened to just be in the bathroom for a while. With their wives away for a spell, the husbands swiftly unraveled at home. “Whoever took her left a bunch of cryptic notes,” a stupefied Doug said. The sketch then cut to an indoor security-cam shot of him reading Post-its stuck to the fridge. They instructed him how to heat up food and finish the laundry, prompting him to cry out to the presumed kidnapper putting him to work, “Is this a game to you?”

The men’s utter dopiness was played for laughs, yet the true-crime framework shrewdly animated a deeper discussion about what’s become known as the “mental load”: the unspoken work that women in heterosexual partnerships too often take on for their household. Studies conducted in recent years have shown that women in heterosexual couples predominantly take on the brunt of domestic tasks—managing the family’s calendar, unloading the dishwasher, feeding pets. This is not to say that men don’t contribute to the household at all; rather, research suggests that some men aren’t cognizant of their partners’ frustration, as the women silently project-manage their home lives. Sometimes, as the sketch underscored, the men won’t realize it until they are left to fend for themselves.

The SNL parody never mentions the phenomenon by name, but doing so wasn’t necessary to get the point across. The women explained to viewers that they had not only told their husbands where they were going but had also reminded them of it constantly. The true-crime trappings offered a pointed tool for presenting evidence that contradicted the husbands’ oblivious assertions. One wife had marked her work trip on a calendar by circling, starring, and adding arrows clearly pointing to the dates she would be away. Padilla’s character offered the most blistering example: She entrusted her befuddled husband, played by Thompson, with handling child care alone. “I just wish I could have prepared myself,” he said in an interview. “But there was no way I could have known.” The sketch then cut to a recording of Padilla’s character, bags in hand, repeatedly telling her husband that she would be visiting her sister upstate.

In satirizing some women’s impressions of their male partners’ cluelessness as a high-stakes matter, SNL subtly commented on these fraught domestic dynamics. Mimicking The Perfect Neighbor was a cheekily zeitgeist-y maneuver—a way to illustrate, as is the case in many true-crime docs, how these men failed to recognize the warning signs before their supposed tragedies struck. More harrowing still: The husbands refused to learn how to, say, care for the kids and make Cup Noodles without lighting the house on fire. They instead resigned themselves instantly, as if waiting for their partner to offer them one more reminder to do the most basic of chores.