Mad TV is pretty good these days. The cast members don’t look like they are just reading lines and the sketches seem to have a bit of wit behind them.
And there are so many things wrong with Saturday Night Live.
1)There is no talent there. None of the writers are funny. None of the actors can go a minute without looking for the cue cards. They can barely get through a sketch without cracking up which is really sad since they aren’t even funny.
2)The adversarial system needs to go. They might be able to crank out a funny sketch or two if they worked together.
3)Let’s be honest. None of the regulars on Saturday Night Live wants to be there anymore. It’s just another stepping stone on their way to movie stardom. All they have to do is get their one funny character on the tv. Then the sketch becomes a movie and bingo bango instant stardom. I blame this on whoever thought It’s Pat, Stuart Smalley, and those stupid dance club characters needed movies of their own.
4)The show has become lazy. They stick to easy jokes on easy targets: Paris Hilton is a slut, Dubya is dumm, etc. Even Weekend Update has become a waste of time and a showcase for characters. There is so much room for satire in everything and they just watch it all go by.
5)Lorne Michaels needs to go. It’s clear now that he was just getting lucky with the old casts. He’s the Phil Jackson of television: only as good as the group surrounding him.
6)Marijuana. If people would stop getting high before they watch SNL, they would see that the show isn’t funny. It’s almost enough to make me support the death penalty for anyone even caught near so much as a joint.
The people that inspire the players has changed. The older shows used more colorful personalities in New York as a bases for characters on the show. They now use to many people for the characters based on how well known they are and not quirkiness. In the news characters are not the same as interesting characters.That’s my opinion. I do like the one with the modern hip couple with the kid and butler. They all have all most identical names, that only a native speaker could pronounce. The hand chair, the weird modern clothes, food, and ecenctric behavor are great.
The difference is that he owns the franchise. I don’t know about legally, but professionally, he is just too well entrenched. He knows SNL and his crummy movies are all he has, and he’s going to milk that for all the easy money he can as long as he can. And if that means ruining the good name of SNL, that’s just fine with him. He created it; he can trash it.
Yeah. He’s been lucky, I think, to v-e-r-y gradually dumb down the franchise to an achievable level of mediocrity, and keep it just superficially fresh enough that the celebrity guest or the Weekend Update makes an occasional pop culture stir and gives NBC an okay rating in a slot that is no longer “appointment television.” The music feature is also still important to bands and artists. I imagine the share goes up when the guest band comes on.
Even stranger than SNL’s longevity is that no other network has run a serious competitor in the time slot (that I remember, anyway). Two seasons of a well-written LIVE comedy show on another network would cause SNL to either sink or rise to the occasion. Guess which would happen?
I personally thought the best season of SNL was 1993. IIRC they had Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Norm McDonald, Adam Sandler (yes, I thought he was funny back then), Rob Schneider (yes, I thought he was funny back then), David Spade (yes, I thought he was funny back then), and maybe Mike Myers and Dana Carvey were still there? I’m going by memory here, but it was a pretty good cast, who almost all went on to stardom.
An even bigger reason for me liking it so much, though, was probably the fact that I was 12 that year.
By the time I was about 14, I realized that they were aiming the show at people less mature than me and I stopped watching. Based on the 5 or 10 minutes I watch per year, it’s gotten consistently worse since then.
Yeah I don’t count MAD TV which is on the same night in over lapping time slots to be serious competition either. It sucks just as much but in different ways, they atleast try to shake up the formula sometimes.
I do have to say that for the most part the writers are good funny writers… It’s the factory that is SNL that destroys their work. They are constantly having to rewrite (which is why the actors always need cue cards, that and Lorne Michael INSISTS that they use them rather than memorize lines) sketches are cut for a myriad of reasons even at 11:25 Saturday night.
And each week they have to start fresh. Meaning no hold overs from the previous week. (this following scenario is totally fictional) So if Finesse’s skit about a black robot which killed in rehearsals gets cut because Lorne wants to make sure there is time for the Debbie Downer sketch that means Finesse’s sketch is dead altogether. They won’t even bring it back for next weeks show even though they build the set, got the costumes and it might prove to be a funny sketch… Each week they start fresh… Which is a completely assine way to run a sketch show.
If they really wanted to do something about the show, they’d abandon the live format. Broadcasting live is a stunt - they’d be better off rehearsing their parts, focusing on their performances and not remembering their lines, editing out bad takes, and using the opportunities presented by not having to base everything on what can be done on stage.
Here’s one reason the show sucks: the current cast members/writers don’t seem to understand that something’s only funny if the performer is taking it dead seriously. Think of Dan Ackroyd/Bill Murray doing “Weekend Update.” They treated the stories as if they were hard news. That’s funny. Nowadays Tina Fey and the other chick simply giggle through the entire thing as if it was a high-school senior talent show. That’s not funny. And it turns really not funny when they start commenting on how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ their last joke was. Does Lorne Michaels even bother to watch anymore? Or is he just like the rest of us?
SNL hasn’t entirely stopped being funny. It’s still funny occasionally, just in safe, predictable ways. Somewhere along the way, SNL definitely went from being part of the counterculture to being part of the mainstream. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing though, except that SNL nowadays isn’t funny enough, often enough. I’d like to see them shake the formula up some, both in the way the show is put together and in some of the behind-the-scences policies that limit the show. However, I disagree with this:
If they did this, they would no longer be the same show. It’s almost like saying, “If they really wanted to do something about the show, they’d make it 30 minutes long, and a cartoon, based around a family, with a fat buffoon of a father…”
The show’s live format (and the many years of tradition the show has behind it) is a source of strengths and weaknesses. They need to get better at playing to their strengths.
It must be a relatively new phenomenon, because when I flipped through Jay Mohr’s memoir in the bookstore one day, he complained about sketches being delayed from one week to the next.
I forget which magazine did an inside look at the SNL writing team 8-10 years ago –Rolling Stone? Esquire? – but the big thing was that every writer had to sign off on every sketch on every show. The goal was no bruised egos, but it made for a lot of watery-sound-alike sketches. Michaels was in firm control and was very concerned that everything be duly vetted and done by committee, with himself as the veto power.
Granted there have been some bad years, and bad casts, but it’s the deciding line the point at which SNL became “safe”? And doesn’t this line belong where employees there decided job security was more important than creating edgy comedy? What’s sad to me is that there’s a reason it’s on after prime time, but the majority of the time, they can just put any skits into their prime time “Best of…” clip shows without worry.
Another thing is apparently the endless push to establish recurring characters. I would wager that even the lamest recurring character skit is automatically considered golden above any potentially funny skit without a recurring character. Of course, with SNL, recurring characters are what get actors film deals after they leave the show.
If anyone thought SNL was about comedy, question why they gave that Simpson girl do-overs, so that she could perform again and “prove” that she doesn’t lip-synch. The first time it wasn’t funny, it was embarrassing and awful. The second time, that’s just pathetic. Is anyone out there besides 8-year-old girls interested in that Simpson “product”? And if that doesn’t show an intented demographic for the show, I don’t know what does.