Ashton Kutcher has now hosted Saturday Night Live four times. Does that seem weird to anyone else? I wouldn’t immediately guess that he’d be the That ’70s Show cast member to host most often, or that he’s hosted more than, say, Scarlett Johansson or Justin Timberlake, who both have their own recurring characters. Looking through the invaluable SNL transcripts site, I see that none of his episodes have been particularly memorable, though he did appear in a Falconer sketch as “the Muskrateer,” and his most recent appearance, in April 2008, was surprisingly decent.

This week’s episode, then, fits right into the Ashton Kutcher SNL oeuvre that we all forgot existed. It was surprisingly good in the sense that it was one of the least recurring-character-heavy episodes of the season, with only a typically middling and pointless View sketch and some amusing Update appearances representing the retread factors. The first post-monologue sketch wasn’t The View or a Kristen Wiig tic-fest, but a very funny bit with Kutcher playing a golddigging pool boy spurned by his departed 110-year-old lover. It exploited a funny idea without just hitting a single joke over and over; that sounds simple, but isn’t always as easy as it looks.

But also like some of his past appearances, the episode was a bit rote; nothing else matched that early high. The sketch with Will Forte as a Roman leader taking creepy pleasure from grape-feeding was appealingly weird, but thin; same goes for “What Is Burn Notice?” — the game show that challenges contestants to describe the apparently popular USA network series. Personally, I’d have more trouble with “What is Criminal Minds?” — a couple of my regular SNL-watching buddies actually love Burn Notice and it’s certainly among the top three or five cooler-sounding cable shows that I never watch but suspect I might like if I did, whereas I have no idea what separates Criminal Minds from its cop-show brethren apart from it not being set in the Navy, not involving crazy forensics or cold cases, and not, as far as I know, taking place in Miami. But anyway, it was still a kinda-sorta funny sketch poking fun at the show’s admittedly vague ad campaign.

The kinda-sorta-pretty-good stuff kept on coming all night. Andy Samberg’s Rahm Emmanuel impression isn’t one of his most dead-on, but the laughs it gets are certainly the most cathartic the show, which hasn’t been specializing in political humor since late 2008 at best, can offer these days. The Oscar nomination bit was funny enough. I liked that band of dads reuniting their eighties punk band at a wedding at the very end of the show. Kutcher didn’t do much to help or hurt, apart from a downright puzzling Mel Gibson impression — he got Gibson’s weirdo defensive posture right, but the voice was a gravelly mess.

So I guess Kutcher is a kind of gap-filler, inconsequential host; he hasn’t worked up enough strong material to qualify as a hosting event, like a Steve Martin or Alec Baldwin appearance, and he doesn’t give off that Jon Hamm major-repeat-host-of-tomorrow vibe, either. He just does pretty typical episodes that you probably won’t remember when he hosts again in a couple of years.

Episode Grade: B-

Friday Night Lights this (back in January) week opens with all the dreams we thought we had: Julie’s dreams of a life with Matt, Billy’s dreams of not going broke when his kid is born, Tim’s dreams of land of his own, which we only just learned about last week in December.

Look, I’m not saying this is as bad an idea as the season 2 murder. I’m just saying it makes me want to scratch that girl’s eyes out.

In Dillon, land of broken hearts, the Taylor household is melting down over Julie’s clothes. Gracie doesn’t have any pants, which has Eric befuddled, because apparently a two-year-old can’t wear just any pants you find that fit her, and Julie is all in a snit because none of her clothes for her college interviews, as if those happen any more, will go together unless she finds this one shirt. Eric is still wearing Coach Shorts, but he’s the only man on the face of the fucking planet who can wear them and not look castrated.

BUDDY! BUDDY IS BACK! The East Dillon Lions are facing the Campbell Park Timberwolves, the other worst team in the league, in the game that gives this week’s episode its name. We cut to Luke’s W.C. He yells to his mom about a follow-up with his doctor, but apparently Luke’s abdominal smushing in the cow fence last week was no big deal. Yeah. I so bet it wasn’t.

OH MY GOD FLASHBACK TO SEASON 1. Tim is talking to the real estate lady who was all suggestively asking him about the blitz back in the pilot. Seriously, I cannot believe either the show or I is bringing this up again. He’s talking about the property he and puppy Skeeter checked out this week, and I’m still concerned that that lady there is going to shove her hands down his pants. The real estate lady says the purchase price is $85,000, but $75,000 if he can pay half up front, and has she ever met Tim Riggins? Next shot is of him loosening his tie outside, and then of him shaking hands with the real estate cougar, and oh man, I am worried he has just promised her ten bundles of copper wire and a bucket of meth.

Shit! Lost is starting already? Tonight*?! With the show being off the air for almost a year, I meant to, you know, try and remember what was happening before the season premiere. Oops, too late, I guess. Or is it?

If you’re like me and forgot to do a Lost refresher, here’s what you can read to get back up to speed.

TV Guide has been doing “catch-ups” about all of the characters, so you can see where we left off with Jack, Kate,  Hurley, Richard, Sun & Jin, Sayid, Sawyer, etc.

New York Magazine’s Vulture blog does a good job of collecting theories about this season that have been floating around the Internet. They mostly sound like BS, but some of them are entertaining.

The AV Club does a great “pre-game” post from the point of view of just having re-watched seasons four and five. The writer grapples with whether the story all hangs together, lists our most pressing outstanding questions, and even includes a recap video.

I easily tire of “Doc” Jensen’s Lost interpretations, but people seem to love him, and those people would probably be interested in Entertainment Weekly’s Lost package. The best feature is a list of 10 episodes you need to see to basically get the gist of what’s going on. It’s all very Locke-heavy.

Just for fun: Jersey Shore’s popularity means that people are all about Italian-Americans now, so this one Italian-American family seeks to capitalize on that with their video recaps (via Flavorwire). And New Yorkers might be tickled to see the island mapped out, NYC-subway-style.

And, though everyone might be flipping out that “the first four minutes” of the season premiere were leaked online, two of those minutes are really the last two minutes of last season finale. If you’re really super-impatient, you can watch that to get your “previously, on Lost” fix.

*Groundhog Day. Does this mean that our favorite Losties will have to keep re-living their days until they get them right?

Jon Hamm’s first gig hosting Saturday Night Live, around this time last year, was held in almost weirdly high regard. It was a decent episode, to be sure, but I feel like most of the appreciation stems from (a.) general Mad Men love, (b.) the fact that January Jones made him look even better in retrospect, and (c.) the hilarious ad for “Jon Hamm’s John Ham.” But as with Justin Timberlake, who hosted a completely mediocre episode that was inexplicably well-liked, only to come back and host a second episode that was nearly as good as everyone thought the first one was, Hamm made a triumphant return to the SNL stage this week, backed by some of the season’s best material.

I was afraid that Hamm’s quick return would mean a lot of clumsy rehashing of what worked about last year’s episode (or maybe even what didn’t), but the writers found an excellent way of sorta-reprising “Jon Hamm’s John Hamm” with “Hamm & Buble,” a pork-and-champagne-themed restaurant based on Hamm’s creepily insistent mispronunciation of musical guest Michael Buble’s name.

Throughout, the show played up Hamm’s capacity for well-dressed menace and/or sleaze, as in an unusually excellent monologue showing clips from his pre-Mad Men career, including a hilarious reference to Martin Lawrence’s ill-fated monologue from some fifteen years ago. I have to give it to Hamm: something about his dashing good looks seems to inspire the writers; they even attempted a second political sketch after the characteristically limp opener about the State of the Union address. The Hamm-assisted riff on newly elected Massachusetts senator-hunk Scott Brown was probably the most inventive political sketch they’ve done since The Rock Obama.

The show got even better and weirder after a strong Weekend Update. For example:

Yeah, I know. I watch his show a lot these days. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a Scottish accent. Dan agrees with me.

So y’all know there are a lot of things I love (it’s true! I’m not angry at everything), like cheese, Tim Riggins, American whiskey, moderately expensive writing implements, yoga pants, Triscuits, and shopping at mostly-empty Targets. And you know I love Craig Ferguson, puppets, and musical numbers on TV. Here’s something else: I also love Rosie O’Donnell.

I do. I never watched her daytime talk show, because I had to go to school, or her on The View, because I have a job, but A League of Their Own is one of my more frequently quoted movies (along with Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Moonstruck, Mrs. Doubtfire, and, of course, Center Stage and Bring It On) and I love her in it. I want to see the sequel when Doris not only rips up the picture of her ugly, mean boyfriend and throws it out the window of the moving bus, but also makes out with Lori Petty a little. I’ve always liked Rosie’s willingness to put herself 100 percent behind whatever she believes in, and to say what she thinks even if it gets her in trouble. I admire that in a lady. And I’ve always wanted to bitchslap Elizabeth Hasselbeck, ever since Dan handed me a layout of a Survivor story a thousand years ago and her smug, pointy little face was staring out of it. (Sadly, that page is not online in the vast digital archive of the work we did a long time ago that now embarrasses us. But I found a feature story Cristin wrote!)

Which is all a very long way of saying that Rosie O’Donnell was on Craig Ferguson’s cold open tonight, and they lip-synched Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” and there were puppets. It was great. Please to enjoy.

You guys, Matt Saracen is gone. Julie doesn’t know what to do, and neither do I.

Yes, welcome back to our regularly-scheduled Friday Night Lights recap, only, like, a month late. Sorry.

How much you want to bet Mindy puts Dr. Pepper in the baby bottle?

Outside forces boosted this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live; it wasn’t particularly stellar in the area of writing or even of regular-cast performance, but the host and musical guest both pulled more weight than usual. More surprising: the Ting Tings, whose songs have always struck me as the bad kind of catchy, the nyah-nyah approach to earworms. They were semi-inexplicably booked to play a couple of songs that have been making the rounds for like two years now, but given that old-news quality, their stripped-down performances were actually quite engaging, seeming to shrink the SNL stage to a more intimate size. The live version of “That’s Not My Name,” with its minimalist beginning building into a more familiar, noisy climax, was actually more fun than the radio cut; “Shut Up and Let Me Go” was less transformed, but included an enjoyable cowbell shout-out.

Less surprising, due to her general awesomeness, was Sigourney Weaver as host. I speculated last week that Charles Barkley might’ve had the longest gap between hosting gigs, but Weaver actually broke that record this week; she last appeared in 1986, fresh off of Aliens. Fitting, then, that she matched her second collaboration with James Cameron with another go at SNL — and hey, the show finally managed to book the star of an already-out movie that hasn’t bombed and has in fact grossed a bajillion dollars. I guess they did that with Taylor Lautner, too, but Sigourney Weaver is a sixtysomething lady — not exactly the demo SNL chases.

I’ve never had much use for Jimmy Kimmel. I’m like Lucille from Arrested Development: “I don’t know who that is and I don’t care to find out.” But he impressed me by going on The Jay Leno Show and making things as awkward as possible. Kimmel’s show airs at 12 on ABC. He easily could’ve stayed above the fray on this whole late-night situation, or he could take easy pot-shots at Carson Daly like Letterman did. Instead, he totally bullies Leno–and Leno isn’t really able to turn the tables on him. So I give a tip of the cap to him. Watch the clip below. It’s really uncomfortable.

If you missed How I Met Your Mother’s 100th episode, you also missed the musical number. Of course there was a musical number!

I applaud the show’s decision to reign it in at one song, instead of an entire musical episode. Musical episodes of shows can be fun, but they often employ some kind of gimmick to explain away the presence of the songs (magic spells, weird aural diseases, and the like). That wouldn’t really fit on How I Met Your Mother. I love that they have the guts to just break into song, even if they Rob Marshall it at the end. For your pleasure (after 30s of commercials):