I didn’t like it.
Lorne Michaels appeared on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s podcast and talked a bit about the (then) upcoming new season. He acknowledged that for the COVID years he kept adding people to the cast - but nobody left. He didn’t say that it was a terrible and destructive management decision on his part though everybody (i.e. the audience) noticed.
Looks like he’s doing something about it now. Giving the newcomers some decent time onscreen is a big change, and doing it by admitting that they’re new and will need time to become familiar seems to work well. Now if somebody will tell the writers that giving a game host terrible material is also destructive, maybe the season will improve by May.
I liked the Try Guys sketch, if only because I had no idea what any of it was about and once I looked it up I had a revelation. This is the pop culture that SNL always gets accused of not living up to? SNL maybe has ten million things wrong with it, but it’s never hit Try Guys level. (Didn’t it used to be called Jackass or is my mind time-fluttering again?)
No, it was originally on Buzzfeed. Then their show Squid Wars was on YouTube Red. Then they named themselves Try Guys and got their own channel on YouTube. They host a show on the Food Network too:
I honestly thought it was about the same as the opener - like 2 really good sketches, and the rest, crap. SNL was never 100% gold, it’s just that the gulf between the good and the bad seems quite large to me in these two episodes.
I love Sarah Sherman’s stuff and I think her weirdo, gross humor is a great changeup from the gameshow-talkshow-Keenan Thompson mugging norm (which are all fine, but well used, imo). She should get that last sketch of the night spot every week.
The only thing that really didn’t click in the eyeballs sketch was Brendan Gleeson. His timing was just a bit off in his sketches and I thought it hurt the amping up zaniness of the concept.
I think that’s true of the vast majority of the episodes throughout the years. Sure we remember the really good stuff from the early cast or the 1990s cast or whatever, but ninety percent was crap.
The “advice for new cast members” sketch was funny. Molly Kearney was really great, they had me laughing out loud! Of course, they’re from Cleveland (like Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, who also slay) so maybe I get GET IT but they did really well.
Marcello Hernandez’s bit about baseball players on Weekend Update was really funny. I really wish he’d found a way to highlight Cleveland’s actual Dominican player who hit a walkoff home run with a fantastic showboating bat flip to win the wild card game in the 15th inning, earlier that Saturday. The player did a fantastic post-game interview too. Maybe Hernandez was prescient! Anyway, I hope to see more from him he seems fun.
I laughed, my wife didn’t.
“It’s actually ‘they,’ not ‘she,’ but it didn’t seem the right moment for the pronoun talk” was a perfect moment.
Same reaction here. My wife doesn’t like Adam Sandler, she didn’t like John Belushi, and she’s never been a fan of SNL. She must have something wrong with her. To further prove that point, remember she married me.
Has anyone mentioned the new “SNL” logo? My designer friends cannot stop talking about how it’s only three letters, but they do NOT fit together.
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I finally went back and watched some entire shows from the “classic” first few seasons. Wow, was there a lot of dreck in between the great stuff. Sure, you’d have a Bass-O-Matic™, but it’d be followed by a truly forgettable fake sitcom and an awkward movie parody.
So now when I sit through two mediocre sketches, a funny one, then a terrible one, I think “Ahh, just like the good ol’ days…”
Well, it’s not like I just started watching it; I’ve been a regular viewer for years, and started watching in the first season. I even said in my post that no episode is 100% good, but these episodes feel different to me. Maybe they were as bad as I thought they were, or perhaps the new writers/performers are taking it in a direction that does not appeal to me as an older man.
Yes, yes! I thought his timing was off as well. He was just lagging behind in everything. As experienced as he is, does he not have any time on the stage?
As others have said, the, “It’s actually “they”, not “she”, but it didn’t seem the right moment for the pronoun talk.” was a great line from Molly.
I’m with ya. I never know who the host or the noise, Uh… musical guests are. Didn’t understand 3/4 of the other stuff either.
I usually watch it on Sunday morning and fast-forward through many of the musical guest and more boring sketches (like The Californians, which I never liked).
I hated the Californians. I resented that they wasted time that could have been spent on a GOOD sketch. Then, right when they were just about done making new ones, I realized it was nothing more than a ten-minutes-to-one sketch that let them be silly. Once I stopped looking for jokes in the sketch and just started watching to see them clown around and try to make each other break, the sketch became fun. I wish I’d understood that earlier. I’m sometimes dense like that.
I enjoy maybe one or two musical guests a season. I just don’t enjoy most of today’s music. Makes me feel a bit old, but like the old man I am, mostly I blame the performers and not my age. It was good enough for my dad, and his dad. . .
Except that they never held The Californians back to 10 minutes to one. IIRC it was usually the first or second sketch, meaning it aired before Midnight.
I always considered it to be an acting class assignment. How long can you stay in character with the insipid Valley Girl accent and exaggerated soap opera dialog and mannerisms (I’m looking at you, every performer who played the maid) while rattling off the names of every highway in SoCal without repeating.
Of course, that makes it worth doing once, maybe twice. Looking back in time I see that Kristin Wiig and Jason Sudeikis did “A couple of A-Holes” more than a couple of times, and Joe Piscopo and Robin Dukes’ diverticulitis managed to keep Doug and Wendy Whiner on the air for three seasons.
I assumed that sketch (The Californians) is funnier if you’re used to the way that people from California (at least Southern California) constantly talk about which route they took to get someplace. I’m not from that area, so the whole thing doesn’t entertain me at all.
Incidentally, do you all know about the promotions for each episode that are on YouTube (and also on broadcast television, perhaps) that are available a couple of days before the episode is first shown? Each of them consists of the guest host, the musical guest, and one cast member saying some clever comments (or at least supposedly clever) about that week’s show. This video is this week’s promotion:
A re-run!??? Only three weeks into the season!??? You can’t be serious!
So, let’s figure out how many episodes for each season did they have before the first rerun.
48 had 3 episodes before the first rerun.
47 had 4 episodes before the first rerun.
46 had 6 episodes before the first rerun.
45 had 3 episodes before the first rerun.
44 had 3 episodes before the first rerun.
43 had 3 episodes before the first rerun.
42 had 4 episodes before the first rerun.
41 had 3 episodes before the first rerun.
You can figure out for all 48 seasons the number of episodes before the first rerun by clicking on the URL below. Go down to the table where there’s a line for each of the 58 seasons. Click on the number in the first column (under “Seasons”). That will get you to a list of all the episodes for that season, giving you the guest host, the musical guest, and the date originally aired for each episode: