Announcement regarding the future of SNL reviews

I still haven't bothered watching the beginning of the Kerry Washington show; I did watch the Lady Gaga episode but I don't think I'll be posting a post-mortem on the show.  I actually found myself a little distracted and eager for the show to end last night, and not in any mood to regurgitate details of the show for my review, which would have been another variation of "the cast is strong, but the writing lets them down".  Even Lady Gaga, whose whole raison d'etre is to draw attention to herself, seemed like she was grasping at straws with her performances: the dry-hump with R. Kelly almost seemed like a parody of the lengths she goes to in performances.  My response to this was simply "And....?"

I see the show still has these bright spots, but the fact is I don't feel like staying up until 2am my time just to watch SNL anymore.  If there's something going on in the real world, I'd rather do that than watch something that will be mostly made available online the next day anyway.  There's always the chance something infamous may happen in the live show, or the audience may be witness to the birth of a new classic, but when was the last time either happened?

I watch it because it's a routine more than anything.  I may tune in to see a particular guest or to see if there's a big change after Seth Meyers finally leaves the show, but the show just doesn't have the importance it once held for me.

I would have thought that the thing that would have turned me off the show would be another disastrous season on the level of the Janeane Garofalo/Michael McKean year, but I honestly have no problem with the cast in general; most of them are very strong performers who find ways to work with whatever they're given.  I just don't know if SNL is really the best use of their talents anymore.  Landing a spot on the show is an achievement and a way to get name recognition, but I can't get over the feeling that they rein themselves in to belong to the institution.

I still plan on completing my 1982-83 reviews, but afterwards I'm going to take a long break from dissecting the show.  I'd rather watch to be entertained than watch to analyze; I have other priorities, and there are only so many hours in a day.

SNL 35.1 Megan Fox / U2 post-mortem.

I thought I'd do something different for my SNL reviews this season; rather than do a sketch by sketch analysis, I thought I'd just to a shorter summation of my impressions of last night's show.

Tonight was the season premiere of the 35-year-old show, which has received renewed notice  thanks in part to Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression.  Although they didn't quite sustain the momentum from the pre-election shows, last season was the most solidly enjoyable year since Will Ferrell left in 2002.  This, plus the two teaser Weekend Update Thursdays that ran so far this season built up expectations for the season premiere. 

During the summer, news broke about two featured players being fired (the horribly misused Casey Wilson and the solid Michaela Watkins) and being replaced with two new females, Jenny Slate and Nasim Pedrad; as well as speculation that Darrell Hammond and Don Pardo were both gone.  As well, SNL continued with its tradition of booking a not particularly promising host for the season opener by selecting Megan Fox, the bargain basement Angelina Jolie, to kick off the year; they did try to compensate by pairing her up with musical guest U2, whose previous two appearances provided instantly memorable moments such as Bono spontaneously running around the studio and reducing some of the female SNL cast to tears.

The show was particularly weak.  Pardo was back but Hammond was gone.  There was one particularly notable moment (which I'll get to later), but overall the writing wasn't there (aside from Weekend Update).  Megan Fox wasn't absolutely terrible as anticipated (she was at least better than Michael Phelps), but she wasn't another Anne Hathaway: she did not add anything to the sketches she was in and did not really seem to have an innate comic sensibility or even much of a game-for-anything vibe that less funny hosts have been able to coast by on.  The phone chat and Grady Wilson sketches were the biggest laughs of the night (maybe Transformers too, cheap as it was), but the sketches about the airplane and the Russian bride didn't go anywhere, and they found it necessary to dilute an otherwise strong WU with an appearance by Kenan Thompson's awful Jean K. Jean character: it wasn't funny the first time and it wasn't funny the 43 times they've done it in the following 18 months.   Even U2 was somewhat underwhelming: aside from a big video screen and Bono swinging a bit on his microphone for "Ultraviolet" (a song almost 20 years old) during the goodnights, it was a pretty laconic performance.

I've learned long ago that the season premiere of SNL is usually not one of the stronger shows of the season.  What this show is going to be remembered for, though, is the mistake that happened at about 12:40 am in the otherwise unmemorable Biker Chick Chat, a showcase for new featured player Jenny Slate.  The main gimmick of the sketch was the constant use of the euphemism "frickin'", but when a script repeatedly uses a word clearly intended to take the place of another you can't say on network TV, and combine it with someone new to live network television, something's bound to happen.  And that's precisely what happened.

This is not the first time an f-bomb was dropped on SNL, as three cast members and a number of musical guests already broke that taboo long before.  It was also a clear accident and not premeditated.  What makes this notable, though, is that this is Slate's first SNL, and despite appearing a few times last night, Biker Chick Chat was her first speaking role, let alone first sketch where she played the lead.  There is speculation on the internet about whether this spells the end of her SNL tenure (if fired immediately, she would be tied with Laurie Metcalf and Emily Prager for shortest SNL stint), but if the self-appointed guardians of morality cause a huge outcry over the accidental use of a four letter word that has been said on network TV before, and after midnight to boot, they really need to get over themselves. 

I'd be more concerned that Lady Gaga will try to outdo Slate on the October 3 show by changing every other word in her song to the c-word and then mark the 17th anniversary of the Sinead O'Connor incident by shaving her head and tearing up pictures of multiple popes.