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OK, I’ve watched almost an hour of Saturday Night Live tonight and it SUCKS. Just like its other shows opening this season. When they can’t even find anything amusing to say about Halloween, it’s time to hang it up. Jeez, why is it so hard for showbiz to do funny that’s actually funny? At least Monday night’s The Women Of SNL is a retrospective of better days.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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The reason the show is so bad is because Lorne no longer knows what’s funny he’s at least 10 years past his prime. He’s the problem get rid of Lorne bring in somebody younger and the show will be good again. To keep him at the helm year after year is the definition of insecurity and insanity. He’s a relic from the 70′s. And yet they will keep him where he is until he’s in his 70′s.
best show of the season
They should have never dropped Jenny Slate. She was hot AND funny, and she deserved a chance.
She said the f-word by accident, one time, during a skit where they had to say “fricken” over and over again, and she’s banished. Super lame.
She’ll be famous again, one day.
Also, she sucked. She didn’t get dropped immediately. She finished the season. Nothing she did was that funny. The doorbell lady was annoying, her Hoda was okay…
She is currently on Bored to Death on HBO…
More importantly, the whole SNL series just sucks more an more every year. It might be better for her to have gotten off the Titanic.
Gotta agree. Guru Lorne is the reason the show sucks. He is afraid to take risks and is afraid of offending people, especially his celeb friends. The show just sucks big time. I mean think of all the stuff that is going on in the world each week. And then turn on SNL hoping to see a biting / edgy & funny skit about any of those things, and you end up with lame, unfunny, tired, rated G crap. But that’s the stuff Lorne likes – lame / bland and unoffensive crap. One wonders why SNL even has a writing staff since they just seem to come up with the same boring stuff each week. Too bad MAD TV is off the air. Now that was a funny show.
I’d like to second the MadTV point. That show could be deliriously stupid, but it had a zany energy and edginess running through it that always kept it watchable.
I’d like to third. Not exactly sure why MadTV was kicked off the air, but that move made no sense to me.
4th supporter. MADTV IS HILARIOUS!
it is cancelled bc fox is stupid.
They gave wanda sykes a show which too was cancelled.
The show has never recovered from the departure of Chevy Chase.
ive been watching since day 1 nearly 30 years and all i can say is, if you want to watch anything remotely funny on s n l, you need to go to the retro channels. the whole show is geared for 5 year olds. where they got these writers is anyones guess. it looks like they dont care if its funny or not. they start with a premise that isnt funny, then beat it in the ground with endless repetition becoming more juvenile every minute. i remember watching when belushi and the gang were really funny. a few members of this cast have talent, but they need some material…..
Hear, Hear!
I guess that’s subjective because I thought tonight’s Halloween epi was pretty damn funny. The prior epis this season have been middling to weak, but tonight’s was pretty great, IMO. Did you also tell the kids to get off your damn lawn tonight?
I completely agree with you Nikki. I find it so sad for an institution like SNL to be SO SO SO bad nowadays…It hasn’t been good since Tina left and you have shows like Daily Show and Colbert that turn in LOL shows 4 nights per week…and SNL can barely get me to crack a smile once a week? Sad!!!
Maybe they need to take a cue from Hollywood and do SNL in 3D… Hollywo3D is turning otherwise bland suckfests into profitable bland suckfests by throwing in the gimick of 3D… maybe the gimmick magic of 3D can rub off on SNL’s own brand of suck.
SNL hasn’t been good since Tina Fey left. Mediocre to weak writing + marginally talented actors = SNOREFEST.
Agreed. They need to kick Lorne off and replace him with Tina Fey. It’s really difficult to get through the skits at this point. The actors can only be as funny as the writing.
Seriously. Feels like they lost their mojo years ago and only occasionally stumble into something funny anymore. It’s sad for a show that we’ve all been watching for 30+ years. No more great writing. No more shock factor. No more great characters. Where’s Belushi as the Samurai Tailor? Where’s Will Ferrell as George W Bush (or Neil Diamond). Even Smigel with the occasional cartoon. There’s a ton of talent out there, but SNL just can’t get them. Sad.
That party skit with Liberace — Bad. At least KDOC ch.56 had an Elvira movie fest…
The Women Of SNL? Speaking of suck…
Bitch pleeze, the Men of SNL suck just as bad.
I was going to ask about “The Pets of SNL,” and then I remembered Toonces the Cat.
i actually think its the best one in a while. the ‘back to the future’ audition impressions are funny and dead on. hader’s alda, hamm’s robin williams and jay pharoah’s eddie murphy were perfection. shy ronnie part two made me chuckle with rihanna – not as great as the first one but still funny. and the couple who can’t remember their songs with armisen and wiig is funny. to me, anyway. definitely not a suckfest.
and hamm really went for it on every skit. i thought he was pretty committed which always makes for a good host. you thought he was bad too?
Right on, the skits you’ve highlighted were terrific. SNL is always hit and miss, comes with the territory.
It doesn’t actually. Watch the pre-2009 shows and you’ll notice the difference. Also, much of The Daily Show and Colbert Report is in fact BROADCAST funny.
If they won’t (or legally can’t) get rid of Lorne, hopefully they can at least fire half the writing team and lure in some Comedy Central writers.
I had the same thing happen to me tonight while watching the crap they call comedy! SNL jumped too many sharks at this point…It’s over!
They’re just in a transitional period. Look at 1980-1981 and 1994-1995 in particular. Those seasons were much worse. This season is just mediocre, which is a shame since the cast is great.
You are right, Nikki. SNL does suck, with only one or two brief moments of levity.
But I am amazed you have chosen this show to talk about and haven’t mentioned one word about how horrible “The Big Bang Theory” has been for the last three weeks without the presence of the – now it’s obvious – absolutely necessary Kaley Cuoco. Without her, the show – the most popular comedy on the air – is an absolutely morbid suckfest. Chuck Lorre must be pulling big hanks of that great head of hair out.
I always thought Kaley was cute and sexy and funny, but I never realized how, without her, the show is about four REALLY unattractive men nobody would ever spend one moment alone with.
It’s amazing how this young woman’s capricious insistance of engaging in a potentially dangerous sport came very close to destroying a billion-dollar enterprise.
Hurry back, Kaley. Like Ginger Rodgers, who made a short, balding man with a reedy singing voice into a worldwide sex symbol, your talents are greatly missed.
It’s been obvious for sometime that Lorne has his favorites.
I love Kristin Wiig but she seemed like she was in more sketches than Jon Hamm. Come on! There are other people on the show.
I’ve been a fan since season 1 but I think it is time to clean house and bring in some fresh people. Including a new producer.
Nikke, SNL jumped the shark more than a decade ago. It’s hard to believe that NBC continues to pay Lorne Michaels to produce such dreck. What are the execs at NBCUNI smoking, anyway? The last time they produced a show that was interesting and edgy was in 2008 when Tina Fey came back for all of those guest spots as Sarah Palin. And prior to that, it was already dying. No one even knows who the “not ready for primetime players” are anymore. Nor does anyone care. It’s time for a new, unconventional, fresh start in that time slot.
“Not Ready for Prime Time Players”? Have you been in a coma for the past three decades? That term hasn’t been used to identify SNL’s cast in more than thirty years.
If Lorne Michaels had been put out to pasture 20 years ago, we would’ve been spared of Rob Schneider. Being responsible for that guy’s career is a serious war crime.
AND David Spade, AND Will Ferrell, AND Jimmy Fallon.
Good for you for calling it, as this show is unwatchable and irrelevant. The writer is subpar and there’s no need for this show anymore when you have “The Daily Show.”
Yeah, the writing is stunningly bad.
Many of the current writers are related to noteworthy New Yorkers and other media/political people.
Spoiled rich kids who went to impressive colleges, but don’t know comedy.
I think this is a problem with TV comedy in general. How many genuinely funny shows are there on TV? I can only think of “Curb” and a few others. Larry David is a genius comedy writer but he only went to the University of Maryland and worked as a cab driver before starting out in comedy, not very common for comedy writers today who tend to be products of Harvard or other top schools. Conan is probably the only funny guy I can think of with an Ivy League degree.
Comedy is not like being a lawyer or a dentist, most of the best comedians would be unable to be productive members of society were they to have any other job.
A substantial portion of the writing staff from the classic years of the Simpsons were Ivy League. The hilarious Jordan Carlos went to brown. So did the hilarious Harrison Greenbaum, who won the Andy Kaufmann award this year. And much of Futurama’s staff is PhD’s in physics, math, etc. Phil Lamarr and Lewis Black both have degrees from Yale.
I’m a comedy writer who didn’t go Ivy League (not smart enough), but plenty of hilarious people I know did.
We need to ease up on the SNL hyperbole. SNL is same as it ever was, average. Some weeks there’s a handful of laughs, other weeks there aren’t any. This isn’t new. Everyone likes to get nostalgic about the “good ‘ol days” of SNL, but I wonder how many have you gone back to the old seasons on DVD and survived. Yep, pretty average. A fun time capsule, but rarely significantly any more or less hilarious than SNL is in its current incarnation, just with a few more famous people involved.
We like to think it was amazing because Steve Martin was involved and when you see a 1-hour retrospective it looks like they hit a home run every time. If you’ve ever gone back and watched a 10-minute Muppet sketch that is 100% laugh free, you’d see this isn’t the case.
We watch SNL BECAUSE we like to complain about it and BECAUSE we hate to miss it that once a month they do something that everyone is talking about. I think people who hate SNL watch it as much as people who like it. Everyone knows the “SNL sucks” guy who has seen every episode since 1994.
Personally, as long as I have Jason Sudekis hopping around in a red track suit, I’ll keep watching.
But I do miss Jenny Slate.
Something intelligent in the Comments section for once.
So true about Sudekis. What up with that?!
This comment is genius in its awesomeness.
I do miss Jenny Slate. I also miss Casey Wilson. Whenever they replace someone, I try to pay attention to just how good the replacements are.
So far no breakouts. Jay Pharoah does good impressions, but Will Smith and Denzel Washington? I’d like to see some more relevant impressions.
I do not watch SNL to complain about it. However, we all reserve the right to make comments about any particular episode, without being accused of such. I don’t screech about the good old days of SNL, but I can honestly say that Saturday’s show was horrible. Frankly, I don’t hear anyone talking about the show these days at all, after the fact, except that it continues to be bad. I usually stick with an episode through the Weekend Update, before deciding whether or not to switch it off. Then I forget about it.
And, yes, Wiig’s characters are all pretty much the exact same, and a little bit of that goes a long way.
This is true. For as long as I can remember people have said “SNL isn’t as good as it was 10 years ago”, and then they list all of the cast members who have gone on to great things.
Guess what? Some of these cast members will move on to become famous and ten years from now people will be pining for the 2010 days.
On another note, when did this show get the rebranding of “Saturday Night Live: Featuring Kristin Wiig”?
I thought the first few skits were pretty funny. The Joe Biden skit was funny, the Rihanna and shy Ronnie music video was pretty funny and I loved the casting auditions skit for “Back to the Future”. They’re not going to hit a homerun on every skit. If they have 2-3 funny skits,they have pretty much met their quota. Yes, SNL has lost a lot of their funniest people in the last 10 or so years, like Sandler, Ferrell, Fey, Pohler, Rock, Schneider, Hammond, Kattan, Parnell, Morgan, Sanz, Dratch and Farley. We still have very funny people in Bill Hader, Andy Samberg and Kristen Wiig, but the show is currently being bogged down with too many “unfunny” cast members. In the glory days, the show always had a hilarious fat guy. Early on, it was Belushi, then it was Farley, then Sanz, then Morgan. That winning formula, is missing.
How right you are. I used to wait anxiously for Saturday Night Live to happen. The person who wrote about all of the former people who started out with Saturday Night Live, such as Will Farrell, Rachel Dratch, Cheri Oteri and many more people who I could hardly wait for the program to come on, now are not any part of the program. I even emailed Lorne Michaels and asked where the fun ended and “boring” programing began. When I asked him where I could see Rachel Dratch, he emailed me back and told me I could possibly see her on the “E” channel. So, I don’t even try to watch the SNL program any longer. It is “Boring”….
I like Bobby Moynihan, I think he’ll be better with better roles. He’s used as a side actor too much right now. Give him some lead roles and I predict he’ll be great.
I can’t believe that people even agree to host SNL anymore. It’s more of an embarrassment and chore than a privilege at this point. The writing and acting are god awful, and I refuse to believe that Kristin Wiig is the best writer on there and that’s why I’m forced to watch her in every single sketch the few times that I do tune in for the guest host. Tonight’s was another dud. Jon, do yourself a favor and skip SNL unless Tina’s doing the majority of the writing. Better yet, just stick to guest spots on 30 Rock.
NBC should have canceled SNL, given the slot to Jay Leno and left Conan hosting the Tonight Show.
“I can’t believe that people even agree to host SNL anymore. ”
It’s more of a resume builder at this point. The fact that it’s not funny is irrelevant. You’re “somebody” once you’ve hosted SNL.
that was a great idea, but conan is not a primetime character, so leno should have stayed in his spot and conan could have killed saturday night. I quit watching conan religiously about five years ago but i would tune in to him on a Saturday.
Tonight SNL told America, as a joke, that it makes no difference whether we go to the polls this election or not.
You’re right. It was not funny.
this episode was awesome, only because i got see to don draper kiss another man HOT!
What a shocker…the last good SNL cast was the Will Ferrell cast over 10 years ago, and that one was still not as funny as the early 90′s cast with Phil Hartman.
SNL has been hanging by the thread known as the “Digital Short” for years now. Everybody knew that thread was going to snap sometime and seems to have now. I remember hearing that the Sandler, Farley, Spade, Rock years were the worst but I never believed them because I thought they were generally funny. This past three to five years have really been the worst in my opinion.
I thought the skits got funnier after the Weekend Update.
The veteran players are hogging up the air time. They’re not bringing anything new to the table. Wiig is becoming a bore. Hader one note. Don’t even get me started on Keenan Thompson. Lorne needs to let the new kids show off some. This Jay Pharoah is a killer. Use him dammit! And they need to stop booking Hollywood actors. Book some stand up comedians on the rise to loosen up the sketches. Whatever the formula they have now it just ain’t working.
It’s a pity because Hamm, like Timberlake, seems like a really funny guy who’s perfect for this show and is up for just about anything. But the monologue was simply brutal.
The real timely, relevant live comedy was earlier in the day on The Mall with Stewart & Colbert. Having Cat Stevens and Ozzy Osborne in a battle of the bands was funnier than anything on SNL since Dick In A Box. How many seasons ago was that? Seems like forever.
Bashing this show has become a meme. It’s always been subjective whether or not it was funny.
There are some talented cast members on this iteration. Some of the stuff was tired relentlessly crotch related but it was still amusing, which I guess is sort of faint praise.
On the plus side Hamm is pretty great and it was worth tuning in for Rihanna. How has she not been put in a movie yet she was absolutely stunning – in both the Samberg skit and her performance.
She is in a movie – BATTLESHIP, coming soon to a theater near you.