I don’t watch Saturday Night Live anymore (can’t stay up that late) but generally watch the selected clips that (for some reason) the New York Times always runs online on Sunday. Oh, my… last night was painfully bad.
Yes, it was.
All/ mostly new writers perhaps?
For as long as I can remember, SNL’s season openers have been at least somewhat disappointing. You’d think that, with all summer to come up with ideas, they’d open strong, but it seems they need a little while to get back up to speed.
Yeah, I thought last night was mostly meh-to-bad. The cold open wasn’t particularly funny, but it was meta and self-aware and not a bad way to introduce a new season with some new cast members. Weekend Update was, as usual, good for some laughs. The guest host, whom I was unfamiliar with, did a perfectly good job. But, overall, not one of my favorite episodes.
We laughed out loud at a few of the jokes in Weekend Update, but otherwise, it was pretty dreadful. We weren’t familiar with the host, and obviously comedy isn’t his thing, but he was likeable, gave it his best shot and came off well despite the bad writing. A few of the sketches we just didn’t understand at all. For example, the AMC Theatres bit was well-produced, but since we don’t watch off-the-air TV anymore, we had never seen the commercial with Nicole Kidman that was the source of their parody, and no idea what it was all about. That’s on us, I guess. Apparently, we’re not hip enough for the room. Hope it gets better because this episode was a dud.
I shut it off a couple minutes into the intro, because it was just so boring, and didn’t watch the rest.
The AV Club agrees with you.
It was a bad episode, which isn’t uncommon for the first one of the season. And it’s not uncommon for even legendary seasons to have a few bad episodes.
But what did anyone expect? I’d have been far more shocked had it actually been good. I mean, they lost something like 40% of their cast from the previous season, and I don’t have any idea what the writer turnover was.
I kind of think this is a “rebuilding year” like the cold open suggested. I mean, they’ll have some funny skits, but they’re going to have to build another ensemble that “clicks” together. Unfortunately, that seems to happen on a multi-year cycle, so we’ve got a few years to go before it’s really funny again.
Just FYI, it’s not a TV commercial. It’s shown as part of the trailers at AMC movie theaters.
It wasn’t awful, it was mediocre. The opening bit was a perfectly fine way to introduce the cast. it will take about three episodes for the season to either gel or fall apart completely.
What I don’t like is the tendency over the last couple of seasons for Weekend Update to be less Che and Jost, and more an excuse for short or solo bits that don’t get a full sketch treatment.
I liked the Charmin bears skit. But i laugh at pretty much any poop jokes. I have simple tastes.
Thanks for clarifying! All the more reason we wouldn’t have seen it. AMC abandoned and ultimately demolished their theaters in our town years ago and the closest AMC theater is 30 miles away. And it’s the only one.
AMC is a big circuit, that’s true, but millions of people have never set foot in one of their theaters. Why do a sketch based on something most people have never seen?
I believe AMC is the biggest cinema chain in North America. In any case m, when you’re satirizing popular culture, you’ve gotta go with what you know. There’s nothing that’s going to be 100 percent saturated, especially in our fractured cultural landscape. I would guess over the past 50 years, they’ve done topics with much less cultural reach than AMC cinemas.
My wife was asking several times if we are just old and out of it or if just was not at all funny.
I was reassuring her that this time at least it was the show, not us. Glad to hear that I was right! 
Weekend Update has been doing these sorts of bits forever (Adam Sandler, for instance, did quite a few of them). But you may be right that they’ve been spending more time on them lately.
I had no idea who’d been fired; when they showed the cast at the beginning, I was so relieved to see Che and Jost.
I’d watch an hour and a half of their Weekend Update.
No, the usual assortment of hits and misses. There was hype about a reinvention of the series. That reinvention never materialized. I can’t speak about the musical guest; I fast forwarded beyond that.
I was surprised when they had what I thought was a fake commercial for BeReal, which turned out to be real.1 And what I thought was a fake commercial for T-Mobile, which turned out to be real. And then what I thought was a real commercial for McDonald’s, which turned out to be fake.
1 I’ve never even heard of BeReal so of course I thought something that utterly idiotic had to be fake.
I enjoyed the lantern fly and the host’s resemblance to Rachel Maddow.
Hey, you’re better off than I. When I ask my wife (or she asks me) that question, the answer is often BOTH.