Once you realize that SNL is kind of cyclical it isn’t so irritating; it sort of reminds me of college sports in that every season there’s some churn in the cast and writers, and periodically, they have chemistry, and standouts, and you get excellent seasons. Other seasons happen when things don’t gel, or you’re in a rebuilding year, or whatever.
And even in the good years, the hit/miss ratio on the skits is not as high as you’d imagine. Like @Smid says, there was a lot of crap in the early years as well. And back in the Mike Myers/Phil Hartman/Adam Sandler era. And in the Will Ferrell/Jimmy Fallon/Tina Fey era as well.
Part of the issue is that it’s a 90 minute sketch comedy show broken up by two musical guest songs. That’s a LOT of skits to do every single week. Most sketch comedy shows like say… Key and Peele or Chapelle’s Show, are 30 minute weekly shows that aren’t live. So there’s a whole lot more room for picking/choosing/reshooting/rewriting/etc…
Since they decided to air SNL live across all time zones, what flies at 1130p on the east coast means 830p on the west coast. Some of the sketches airing early in the show must be hard on the snobby and uptight crowd out west.
The musical guest the past few years are decidedly generation-centric. Many just don’t cut the mustard in my book. The lyrics suck, the musicians suck, the choreography sucks. There are standouts and note-worthy ones every once in a while. Last week’s Olivia Rodrigo was just god-awful. Couldn’t even sing on key. Lil Nas X this past Saturday was … interesting. His first number was highly homo-erotic. Maybe fine on east coast time but out in the west I bet the Mormon crowd was going nuts. However, his later number was really, really good. (For the record, he suffered a “wardrobe malfunction” during his first number, requiring using his hand in an extended performance as a cod piece.)
The only consistent sketch standout is Weekend Update.
I didn’t like Baldwin’s Trump. He made his mouth a pout. I always thought it should have been a smirk, as if he’s thinking, “I can’t believe all those suckers are buying my blatant bull-$#!+.”
That was a good bit, though not a politics sketch. If they would just dump their toothless attempts at political humor and do more stuff like that, it would be a huge improvement/
People have been saying this since 1975, though the most common compaint about it, starting well after 1975, is that the show is no longer good but was great whenever the complainer was about 17 years old.
And of course, no one likes the music the kids are listenin’ to nowadays.
SNL is, in fact, one of the best comedy shows on TV, and has been for a very long time, and has generally gotten better over time. It has had some rough patches but they were never very long, in part because they’re quick to change out writers and cast when things aren’t going well.
The women alone they’ve had in the last ten years are just amazing. Cecily Strong and Vanessa Bayer are all-time greats.
The 2016 cast was arguably the best in the show’s history. McKinnon, Bayer and Strong are in the running for top ten all time, Bobby Moynihan is excellent, Aidy Bryant is great, Jay Pharaoh was great though sadly underused, Jost and Che are pretty good on Update (Che is more a writer, really - he’s head writer) and everyone else was really good save Kyle Mooney, who I think is kept around to make Beck Bennett happy. Kenan Thompson has been there since 1932 of course. Reliably funny.
The 2011-2012 cast was a hell of a loaded team, too. Good Lord, the talent. Hader, Wiig, Elliott, Bayer and Moynihan, Samberg and Sudeikis still there, Meyers on Update. I was never a big Armisen fan but he got the job done.
There was a very long running show on Australian TV called “Hey, Hey it’s Saturday” which ran (during its heyday) during the evening on Saturday nights. It was live. It was familiar and formulaic in its basic structure but you never knew quite where it would go with things. It was mostly ad libbed. It was an institution and very well loved amongst my generation even though to be blunt I’m sure if you went back and re-watched it, the gems would be interspersed with a lot of meh stuff.
I always thought one of the secrets of its success was that it was the default thing to do on a Saturday night - if you weren’t out doing something, you could at least stay in and watch Hey Hey. Because it was live and ad libbed it had the feel of kinda being at a party with people you knew and you didn’t feel as much like you were a boring loser at home by yourself on a Saturday night as you might otherwise.
And of course given that by Monday morning everyone was talking about anything outstanding that had happened on Hey Hey, you knew you had been in the company of a lot of people on Saturday.
I wonder if SNL has the same feel and the same appeal?
This is a very good observation and a big part of its appeal for me.
To answer the OP, for dopers of a certain age anyway, it’s been a part of our personal culture for decades.
A shorter answer would be " it’s not baffling; people simply like things you don’t"
I recently watched some early SNL. I remembered some hilarious stuff, but I watched some full shows, and there really was a lot of “filler”. But did they know at the time? (“Gee, this Belushi sketch isn’t funny, but we have another half hour to fill, so here goes…”)
Or is it just in hindsight? Or just compared to the brilliant Aykroyd/Radner/Chase/Belushi stuff?
I guess I’m looking for more than the OP:
(See, this is the in-depth analysis we’ve come to expect…)
Big thanks to later posters for articulating why it often misses the mark.
Not only has SNL been very variable in quality, but I don’t think there is any general agreement about sketches, performers, guests, and years have been best. I don’t agree with KennyT about which parts have been best, for instance. I still want to know, KennyT, what sketch comedy shows you like. Are there any you like?
I think it’s always been the case that there’s been a moderate ratio of great skits to cruddy ones, both within any given episode, and across a full season. It’s kind of a statistical game in a way, in that when SNL is on the upswing, they have more good skits in any given episode and by extension, season than years when they’re not.
I still think that pre-recorded skit comedy has it a lot easier- they can re-shoot and re-do the skits within reason, and they can pick/choose in post-production the best mix for any given episode. SNL doesn’t have that luxury; there’s no reshooting, and for the most part, they’re making a decision as to episode content at some point well ahead of the episode itself, in order to give time for rehearsals and things. So it’s less… carefully curated, and more dependent on the skill of the performers in the moment.
SNL has done more pre-shot skits in the last 15 years or so, I think because that does enable them to edit and reshoot and get it right. Fake commercials are always done that way, and they do most musical numbers like that too. I think this emphasis started in the Samberg days with Lonely Island stuff, though before that they had the Robert Smigel cartoons, too. Use of pre-taped things also enables the live production a bit more time for set construction and costume design on the fly.
The timeframe for deciding what gets on air is quite literally right up to 11:30 PM EST. The show is performed twice on Saturday, both before live audiences; the “Dress rehearsal” in early evening, and the broadcast show at 11:30. Sketches are swapped out, changed, or reordered between dress and broadcast, depending on how the sketches are received during dress.
At first I thought you meant that the performances of the musical guests were pre-recorded (as opposed to being done live); but then I realized you were talking about the type of regular-cast sketches that were in the form of a music video.
Smothers Brothers became very political before they were cancelled. And that was 1966.
Heh, he was told not to. He wasn’t on SNL for years after that.
The “Show us your guns” commercial was in the very first episode. I thought it had been on later, but it was one of my favorites.
My sister worked evening shift at the time, and one of the nurses she worked with invited everybody over to her place after work to watch the first show. It became a ritual for them. I think that’s part of it. It became a habit which helped to bridge the “bad” years.
Sometimes some of the sketches done during the dress rehearsal are dropped for the actual show. The recording of those sketches is kept. Recently these sketches are occasionally put on YouTube with the ones done live, but they are marked as “Cut for Time”.
It occured to me, that you might not know I was referring to the SNL Season 1 only recurring segment with Muppets. They were horrible. And such large portions!
I have nothing against The Muppet Show, the Muppets film series, Sesame Street or Muppets in general. But I think you had to be stoned to like the SNL muppets. Or maybe 11.
