I did watch most of it, and some of it I still found funny. I was surprised at how good a performer Fallon is. I never ever think of him as an impressionist and yet some of his are flawless! It was just depressing realizing that I haven’t watched it in so long that I’m two to three generations behind! Seeing past cast members whose tenure I completely missed now hosting. I can still remember the first time that happened with Chevy Chase. Hearing the audience’s extended cheers at the beginning of a now classic sketch and wondering what they’re cheering about.
The Weekend Update reunion was particularly confusing because I do remember Tina Fey and Fallon and Amy Poehler etc. but not the exact combinations (Fey & Fallon but also Fey & Poehler but also Poehler & the current guy maybe?) I was kind of hoping that they were gonna go all out with that WU reunion and have Norm MacDonald then Dennis Miller then even Chevy walk out! Would have been cool.
And about WU, I disagree with those who prefer it to be ‘sketch-like’. That essentially ended with the original cast (Chase, Curtain, Ackroyd & Murray) and the 1970s. Treating it like a ‘real’ fake newscast is not only unnecessary, it just doesn’t work. Think about how awful it was from 1980 until Dennis Miller. First Murray’s brother did it with Mary Gross with very mixed results. Then Brad Hall took over, and his was probably the **worst **WU of all time! Then they were so desperate they did a season were the guest host hosted WU too! Not a good idea. Say what you will about Dennis Miller but he literally saved WU from a half decade of mediocrity!
And then look what happened when he left. Two words: Kevin Nealon. Nealon was primarily a writer, and a sometimes ok sketch player. But he rivaled Brad Hall in his awfulness as a Weekend Update host. And his reign seemed to last for years! Once again, like Miller, Norm MacDonald saved WU because, again like Miller, he just used it as a vehicle for his standup. But MacDonald, again same as Miller, was a top-tier standup comic.
And then he got fired for making too many OJ jokes (an NBC exec apparently played golf with the murdering scumbag!) It was somewhere after that that I think Tina Fey took over, and I was I had been watching then cause all the clips I’ve seen of her Weekend Updates show me that she was as good as MacDonald & Miller & Chase! Again, it was her doing standup, not pretending to be a phoney newscaster…
If you have Netflix, they have the archives of most seasons of SNL available on streaming, but with each episode trimmed to 40 or 50 minutes: no musical guests; a selection of the sketches; and the entire Weekend Update. Sometimes they don’t even include the host’s monologue.
I still can’t say it’s the funniest show ever, but it is much better.
That didn’t hold with the Dubya impression. Will Ferrell kept it until he left, but then it cycled through a number of people who didn’t necessarily go when their turn was up.
Oh, and I forget to mention, who the hell is this** Micheal Bublibliey**?! Even after reading his Wiki entry, I have never heard of him before now. How much of a pop star is he in America? Never heard him mentioned on The Soup (which is where I get most of my pop culture info)…
I don’t think it’s fair to lay the blame for the bad years on just the anchor. The deadpan style that I prefer requires writers that can master that form as well. The Colbert Report works because he and the writers can create that character and have a great ability to mimic the tone of what they’re parodying. The Onion News Network is also good. SNL has either done it badly, or not at all, for decades, but I don’t think the style itself is flawed.
I love The Onion and even more Cracked.com. Their over-exaggerated / deadpan style I find hilarious. I liked Stephen Colbert on the old Kilbourn Daily Show and would like him now if he wasn’t a liberal Democrat. But I don’t think this would work on SNL. Nealon was very low-key and deadpan, and it was awful. Christopher Guest did WU like this too, and although it wasn’t quite as bad, he was completely forgettable. You just can’t pull that off if there’s a live audience in front of you.
When you have a confident, experienced stand-up at the helm, even when the joke bombs they can still get a laugh breaking the 4th wall and acknowledging it. Again think Dennis Miller or Norm MacDonald (even Chevy could pull this off). Its 2012. We get that it’s not a sketch about a phoney newscaster, its a monologue about the news. In fact, all the trappings required in doing it the other way would just seem corny and distracting.
Giving this performance a C is being very kind. He kept smiling in a weird way, his timing was off and at one point it looked like he was struggling to remember the lyrics. He also seemed to have a hard time following which camera to look into.
Dude looked baked to me.
I wish Timberlake had been available to do the Barry Gibb talk show - for some reason I really love those.
SNL is funny. It’s not always hilarious, but it’s funny. Just watch it and try to enjoy it. You might laugh, you might not. That’s what DVR’s are for. Too much nitpicking over a comedy sketch show.
The only thing missing from the last episode was a Samberg digital short - those are usually hilarious, but Buble had to pimp his Christmas CD currently for sale.
It’s always funny when old cast members make cameos. Fallon brought back most of the cast he used to work with and I thought it was great.
It’s funny, people. Just watch and laugh, that’s all you have to do. Simple.
Somebody on morning radio today made the comment “They did a reunion of all the old Weekend Update anchors!”
What?!?! How old are you?
A reunion would have been Colin Quinn, Norm MacDonald, Kevin Nealon, Dennis Miller, Jane Curtain, & Chevy Chase.
Bringing back the last two does not make for a reunion of “all” the old anchors.
Michael Buble seems to be just the current throw-back era crooner of the day.
Wasn’t everybody ga-ga over the reemergence of Tony Bennet a couple years back? And Harry connick Jr. was hot for a while, then Rod Stewart made a run at it…
OMG I loved both of these. The “Seasons Greetings” thing, if you didn’t know, was something those guys did when they were cast members. I liked it because it was just…dumb. Now that all of those guys are more established (well, not Sanz, but he’s all tight now) and they came back to do their stupid song…it made me LOL
I normally don’t like Tracy but his dancing was superb!
The Beethoven thing I thought was truly inspired. Different strokes, I guess.
I’m going to have to find the Mick Jagger mirror thing that someone mentioned. I liked the one in this show too!
At least he and Chris got the night off from K-Mart.
So it had a million special guests, but no Alec Baldwin!? This was the episode that was predicted by the Christmas show Alec Baldwin foresaw in the 1998 Christmas episode! In the 1998 episode, Alec Baldwin got a visit from a future Jimmy Fallon, who showed him that in 2011, when Jimmy Fallon guest-hosts, ‘Baldwin’ will have become a synonym for ‘shit’ because Alec did such a bad job hosting that night.
I can’t believe they just let that go without any mention.
