"You watch," an SNL alumni was telling us and another SNL alumni at a post-Emmy party last week, "Seth Meyers is going to show the same spine Jon Stewart is and Saturday Night Live is going to again be worth watching."
"Without false hopes," as Lily Tomlin once observed, "the economy would collapse." Oops. It has. But you'd never know that by watching Saturday Night Live.
The cold open featured idiotic 'jokes' about sound effects and alleged spoofs of politicians which had little to do with the actual candidates. You also had Alec Baldwin doing a lousy impression of Rick Perry, the voice was too high and the accent got lost somewhere in Alabama, never making it down to the Lonestar State. The whole skit was so bad it was as though Laugh In had never aired, as though Nichols & May had never broken through, as though the TV censored Don Rickles remained the height of comedy.
In last week's actual GOP debate, there was a comedy gold mine. But you'd have to do the work which means (a) watching and (b) writing actual jokes that had something to do with the politicians.
We remembered how Michelle Obama made many embarrassing statements in 2007 and 2008 and Saturday Night Live never said peep. The same with fake Elizabeth Edwards (who, please remember, felt the need to imply that Hillary made the wrong choices and had an unhappy life because of it -- unlike her and her faithful husband John). Because apparently spouses were off limits unless they had been president (Bill Clinton). We remembered that because they did a little 'joke' about Michele Bachmann's husband being gay. If you're asking, "What?" Well, you get your news from the news not from The Young Turks and Think Progress. And though they are always the first to howl that someone went too far on Barack, they are always the first to poke their depraved noses into a married couple's personal life. It was appalling to see Alec Baldwin take part in that skit, Alec who had so passionately and frequently called out Kenneth Starr's prurient interest in Bill Clinton's sex life.
You might also wonder why the skit strived to portray Michele Bachmann as horny but then you'd remember Seth writes this crap. He sexualized Sarah Palin, why wouldn't he do the same with Bachmann?
Crap was all it was. They brought Alec on Weekend Update to play Tony Bennett. We groaned because Tony got battered all last week. But we had no need to fear, topical is not something Seth can handle. So the overly long skit never referenced Tony's remarks about 9-11 or about the Iraq War and what Bully Boy Bush allegedly told Tony. That's when it starts to hit you that even topical is beyond Seth's range.
The rest of the show was not just useless, it was repeats restaged. You got a parody of a war movie -- again. You had a game show -- again. You had film auditions -- again. Including one by Alan Alda -- again. You had a commercial parody -- again. All that last one did, was demonstrate that Gilda Radner had much better writers when she did the perfume parody "Hey You" than Krirstin Wiig has for "Red Flag." Also true, hatred of women wasn't as strong back then.
As the 40 or so minutes that weren't commercials or music filled the 90 minute bloc, they decided to note All My Children. The long running daytime drama went off the air Friday, after forty-one years. The skit could have been funny. It opened with 'Susan Lucci' (Vanessa Bayer) toasting others but this show isn't really about the women these days. So Lucci had nothing to do. Instead it was avery lame attemptat parodying a soap opera -- a lame attempt apparently not written by anyone who'd ever watched an actual soap opera.
Alec Baldwin's watched a few. He was even in the cast of one, The Doctors, on NBC. On that show, he was involved with a woman who was actually the mother of the woman he thought he was actually romancing. So you'd think he would have said, "This skit is lame and not really about All My Children. Is there a way that we could do a skit about AMC? Instead of just dusting off tired jokes and squeezing them into this generic skit?"
Alec's refusal to make that, or similar, statements goes a long way towards explaining how last night's was the worst of the 16 broadcasts he's hosted. Explaining even more is that Seth Meyers remains the head writer.
Meyers, who turns 38 before year's end, is not just too old for Weekend Update, he's too stupid. Around the time he started making stale jokes about Bill Gates' haircut, viewers might have been forgiven for wondering if this was a repeat broadcast from the 90s?
But the big puzzling is being done in the suites of NBC. That's where execs are trying to figure out what the hell is going on? The most popular hypothesis is that Lorne Michaels has just lost interest in the show. Leaving aside his original run with the show, no one can think of a season where not a single new person was added to the cast. There's also the fact that NBC thinks the cast is too old. For example, Jimmy Fallon became a star on SNL and, as the suits point out, he left the show when he turned 30 whereas, last night, you could play "Oh, Look Who's Balding" with several male performers. It's felt that, at 33, Andy Samberg should be the senior performer and surrounded by a host of people in their 20s and that, if Lorne weren't so bored with the show, that's exactly what would be happening, that and John Mulaney would be headwriter.
But the opinion we were most interested in was from our false hopes friend, the SNL alumni. Did he find it funny? "Well . . .," he started before bumping into a long pause, "all good things come to an end." True. But SNL hasn't qualified as "good" for some time.