“S.N.L.” couldn’t manage that, at least when it’s taken the candidates head on. But it’s done some fine work around the election’s edges.

“S.N.L.” is a mainstream media institution, no less than “Meet the Press” or the presidential debates. (We’ve had televised general-election debates on a regular basis only since 1976, a year after “S.N.L.” started.) So there’s a kind of dutifulness to its election satire, which unfolds with all the ritual merriment of a candidates’ pancake toss at a state fair.

The big change the show made this fall was to bring in Mr. Baldwin to pinch-hit. His boorish Trump felt like penance for “S.N.L.” having let the candidate guest-host the show last November during the Republican primary campaign, and maybe for NBCUniversal’s larger entanglements with him — the former “Apprentice” host, sucked up to by Billy Bush, coddled by Matt Lauer, patted like an apricot sheepdog by Jimmy Fallon.

Was Mr. Baldwin’s Trump good? Mimetically, it was worthy of a biopic. If I try to visualize Mr. Trump from the debates now, I see Mr. Baldwin instead, hulking, heavy-breathing, his lips pursed open like the suckers of some deep-sea creature.

But there wasn’t a distinctive spin on Mr. Trump as a character, the way Kate McKinnon developed her Hillary Clinton long ago into a savage yet sympathetic portrait of political thirst. The scripts mainly highlighted moments, like Mr. Trump’s lurking in the second debate, that the writers’ room of Twitter had already hashed out in real time.