Jude Law’s second time hosting SNL felt a little light on material. Not, to my surprise, in the usual manner of this season, where half the sketches or more are recurring bits and characters. In fact, tonight only featured two such sketches, and one, the game-show parody “Secret Word,” is relatively reasonable on the SNL repeatability scale. (The return of Fred Armisen’s awful stenographer character tested my SNL completism, as I took advantage of my late watching to fast-forward the hell out of that shit.)
No, what made the show feel thin, I think, was its four different non-live bits: two funny fake ads (one of which I sort of assume was held from another episode, since they haven’t done a proper fake ad in several weeks); another Digital Short that was really a music video for a song already released on the Lonely Island’s Incredibad album last year; and a semi-inexplicable rerun of the (hilarious) “Under-Underground Rock Festival” ad, a longer segment than usually gets re-used. On their own, these segments were funny. So close together, though, they came off as filler.
There were also two bits built around Law’s run as Hamlet on stage last year, the monologue and the audition sketch; and two sketches built around old TV, the aforementioned “Secret Word” and a Twilight Zone riff. None of these were too terrible, and in fact the silly Twilight Zone sketch that put Jude Law into the famous “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” episode with Bobby Moynihan as a mischievous though not particularly destructive gremlin was quite funny. I also enjoyed the odd Vicky Cristina Barcelona semi-spoof, with Jude Law playing a charming Spanish man promising two girls a weekend of beautiful scenery, great food, lovemaking, and murder by poison, and “Talk Show with Ravish,” in which a young Indian boy is pressured to host a talk show rather than become a doctor.
But the good stuff was oddly centerless; while the last two episodes swung wildly between repeat-sketch hackery and oddball invention, this one felt more like an odds-and-ends compilation. Law was funny, but due to the show’s odd pacing and wealth of pre-taped material, he disappeared for long stretches. Further contributing to the unevenness, we saw lots of the featured players, particularly the wonderful Bobby Moynihan, as well as Hader and Kenan, but very little Forte, Samberg, or Sudeikis. Armisen turned up a few times, but mostly sleepwalking. I wonder if they’re subtly preparing for the fact that Armisen and Forte, at least, seem primed to leave the show soon, while Moynihan and the new girls all seem due for a promotion. As much as I adore Forte and admire Armisen, that may be for the best. SNL in 2010 hasn’t been awful (in fact, the Jon Hamm episode was the season peak so far), but by and large, they seem to be stuck in a rut.
When an actual real-deal comedian hosts Saturday Night Live, for me, expectations shift. When you’re dealing with, say, Jennifer Lopez, or even someone you might sense is funny but isn’t really known for comedy like Jude Law, their job as a host is more to be game and comfortable, not necessarily to produce top-tier comedic work (hosts like Scarlett Johansson or Joseph Gordon-Levitt get bonus points when they seem to actively dig into their characters and enjoy themselves). But when Steve Carell or Paul Rudd host, or a former cast member like Will Ferrell or Tina Fey drops by, the possibilities seem purer; the host should be able to hit the ground running and do pretty much whatever everyone decides is hilarious.
Of course, Zach Galifianakis is more of a stand-up comedian than an actor, despite his good work in the otherwise overrated The Hangover. But a lot of SNL folk have come from stand-up over the years, and it’s always a treat to get a monologue from an actual comedian. This episode, featuring a longish bit of stand-up from this Comedian of Comedy, was no exception. Apparently a lot of this material came from his stand-up routine, but whatever, I hadn’t seen most of it and it was funny.
After that, though, the show went wildly uneven, even for an SNL episode. The material oscillated strangely between the kind of Galifianakisified stuff you might expect when a beloved, cultish comic hosts, and a mild Galifianakis touch on the kind of tired, plug-em-in recurring crap that would be better suited to a model, or an athlete, or an athelete-slash-model.
Jennifer Lopez served as both host and musical guest of Saturday Night Live this week. The last time she pulled double-duty on the show, the episode was delayed forty-five minutes by an XFL game. That’s not a bad Weekend Update joke. That actually happened back in the heady days of 2001, when Chris Kattan was still doing recurring characters and “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” ruled the airwaves.
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.
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:
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.
Let’s talk about this late-night talk-show kerfuffle business. I won’t be coming at this from the point of view of detailed industry analysis, because I don’t really know that much about the television industry apart from that it often rewards mediocrity, which is not so different from so many other industries, and I won’t be coming from a fan’s point of view, either, because I can’t remember the last time I sat down and watched a late-night chat show from start to finish.
No, I’m examining this as someone who half-watches fifteen or twenty minutes of a talk show in bed before falling asleep, but who does like comedy and therefore finds this stuff sort of weirdly, tangentially fascinating.
From that perspective, I was pretty happy when Conan O’Brien got the Tonight Show gig, because Conan is clearly the funniest and most inventive of the major network latenight hosts, yet I rarely saw his 12:30 show during the week, because I try to go to bed well before then. I do enjoy Letterman’s crankiness and idiosyncrasies, but Conan is the guy for my generation, which is kind of odd because I’m not even sure if we’re in the same generation, but dude wrote for SNL and The Simpsons when I was first watching SNL and The Simpsons, so he’s got the comedy bona fides for anyone my age. On the Simpsons twentieth anniversary special the other night, Conan said that if he was offered a job to sit in a remote field and think of weird stuff for Mr. Burns to say or do for the annual salary of a dollar and some cheap wine, he would do it. Though I don’t literally believe this, that sentiment is why Conan is my horse in this race.
However, I had to admit when Conan got The Tonight Show that it seemed premature. Not because he hadn’t made his bones, but because from a purely financial point of view, Jay Leno is a big deal. People like him. Especially people with unsophisticated taste and a yen for cheap shots at all the dumb non-news news that they get from the Today show in the morning. He’s been beating Letterman soundly for years now. I guess the idea was that NBC wanted to sew up Conan for the foreseeable future, so they figured, hey, by 2009 Leno will probably be looking to retire or waning in the ratings anyway, so let’s lock up his replacement.
When those things didn’t happen, they still had a deal to replace him, so they gave Leno that primetime talk show. To be honest, I kinda dig the idea of a primetime talk show in the sense that I like anything to shake up the pointlessly stodgy network-TV format. But a daily hour is probably too much, and I never watched Leno’s show because Leno isn’t funny.
I’m actually a little surprised Leno’s primetime chat show hasn’t gotten better ratings, though it should probably be noted that four or five million viewers a night in latenight is just fine, while in primetime it makes you the biggest hit on the CW and/or one of the lowest-rated shows anywhere else. Still, NBC was apparently making money off of this deal; they were just squandering a lot of audience and affiliate goodwill in the process by getting the actual late-night lineup off to a slower start than a show that could garner, say, ten million reviewers from 10-11PM.
So regardless of profits, NBC is nixing The Jay Leno Show. Their plan, subject to the approval of both Leno and Conan, is to do a half-hour Jay Leno bit at 11:35, followed by The Tonight Show at 12:05, and finally Jimmy Fallon’s Late Show at 1:05. Everything gets bumped back half an hour; Leno essentially functions as the late-night warm-up act, easing viewers into the “new” line-up. The Tonight Show has dipped in ratings under Conan – owing to him being less of a people-pleasing hack – but presumably with a Leno lead-in, and up against the second half of Letterman’s show, it’ll bump back up.
As quick fixes go, this actually seems logical to me, but I’m not a programmer or a semi-spurned late-night host, so what do I know. This, if it actually goes through, might also repair what seems to me like a big problem with the Conan Tonight Show: they’ve been booking sub-Late Show guests. NBC and whoever else swore up and down that there wouldn’t be booking problems with both The Jay Leno Show and The Tonight Show competing for guests, but have you actually checked out the guests for the latter this season? It’s kind of embarrassing. With Leno siphoning off the Los Angeles crowd and Jimmy Fallon taking care of anyone in New York, Conan often has the lowest-wattage guests on any given night, which is kind of sad for the freaking Tonight Show. I mean, dude has had Norm MacDonald as lead guest like three times since taking over. Don’t get me wrong: I love Norm, and it’s fun to see him come on Conan with absolutely nothing to promote, do some bits with Conan and Andy, and just basically screw around. In some ways, this makes for better TV.
But not every low-rent guest is Norm MacDonald. Many of them are reality TV players, or sports stars. It’s an unpleasant feeling to be falling asleep watching Conan and hear that someone you’d actually like to watch – Amy Adams, say, or the reunited Monty Python survivors – will be coming up… on Jimmy Fallon’s show well after you should be asleep. I remember Leno said in a Rolling Stone interview over the summer that numbers-wise, only a handful of guests really make a demonstrable difference in ratings, but it can’t help Conan that his Tonight Show has such lame bookings. If Leno only does half an hour, you figure with his horrible monologue and horrible recurring bits, he’ll only have time for one guest a night, if that, and Conan will start talking to some actual stars, not just the NBC stable players and third leads in movies that wouldn’t look so shabby at 1AM. Tuesday night’s guests, for example, per the Tonight Show website, are “TBA” and former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. For serious.
I also hope the move to midnight – if Conan goes for it, which he may not – will allow him to make the Tonight Show more his own. He still does a lot of signature bits, and I love that Andy Richter has been returning to the couch, now sidekick as much as announcer, and, as I’ve said, I’d still rather watch Conan do a slightly hackier version of his schtick than just about any of the other hosts in top form, because Conan’s just a funny, goofy, smart guy. But it pains me to see Conan having to go after, like, Octomom jokes, Leno-style, in the monologues, because Conan’s strength has never really been the opening monologue. He’s not a stand-up comedian; he’s a writer-performer. I hope that the producers will consider Leno’s opening thirty minutes a get-out-of-monologue-free card of sorts; no one expects it to be eliminated entirely, but maybe Conan can slip away from that yuk-yukkiness that can feel so stale. Or, by the way, kinda hateful: did anyone catch that nasty and unfunny joke Conan made about Ellen DeGeneres and Tim Gunn the other night? I confess I didn’t, but someone repeated it on Facebook, and it’s the kind of ignorance-based humor that Leno traffics in; Conan should know better.
It’s too bad that Conan and Fallon may have to bump back an hour, too, because they both sort of get a timeslot demotion even though Conan is funnier than Leno and Fallon’s show has been shaping up nicely. Fallon cleverly sidesteps the fact that he’s not as natural a writer as Conan (nor as comfortable an interviewer, despite the decade of performing experience he racked up prior to hosting a talk show) by making his show a loose, vaguely spontaneous, whimsical affair that doesn’t necessarily depend on huge laugh lines. It’s too bad that I’ll catch the show even less often with a proposed 1AM start-time.
Of fact, in purely selfish terms, moving Conan to 12:05AM is a pain in the ass. I try to go to bed around 11:30. With Conan on the Tonight Show, I had an easy go-to viewing option if I want to watch a little TV in bed before drifting off, and I never had to even think about Jay Leno. Now with Leno back in that slot, there’s a dead zone that can only be filled by the first half-hour of Letterman or my Fox affiliate’s 11:30 rerun of Seinfeld. When I heard rumors that Conan could make a jump to Fox – NBC has apparently said that if he does want to walk off Tonight, they won’t sue him or whatever – I was amused at the prospect of him returning to the home of The Simpsons, but also wondered: would Fox affiliates be willing to replace Seinfed reruns with anything?
I mean, for serious: Seinfeld has been off the year for almost a dozen years, has only 180 episodes or so, and it still gets several prime syndication spots. That’s kind of insane. That’s like if when Seinfeld was finishing its run, some of the most popular syndicated reruns had been The Cosby Show. But by 1998, Cosby Show was turning up on Nick at Nite. I love Seinfeld dearly, but I don’t particularly want to watch it anymore; I’d rather see a Simpsons rerun, even from a lesser Simpsons season, because there are over 400 of those. You could run them all year and not show the same one twice.
In summary: Fox, if you really want to capture my viewing attention, sign Conan. And start his show after a Simpsons repeat.
Expectations for sports-star hosts of Saturday Night Live are already low, but SNL threw a curve ball of sorts by booking for their year/decade kickoff not just a sports star, but a sports star who no longer plays sports and, indeed, remains in the national consciousness primarily due to, in descending order, (1.) his unlawful transgressions, (2.) the goofy stuff he says, and (3.) Kenan Thompson’s occasional and hilarious impersonation of him on, hey, Saturday Night Live. The choice of Barkley
It also made me about any number of inauspicious records, such as: when was the last time a long-retired sports star hosted, if ever? (I am too lazy slash sports illiterate to look this up and say for sure, but every sportsman or sportslady I can recall hosting since I began watching the show circa 1992 has been pretty current.) Was this also the greatest amount of time lapsed between a first hosting gig and a second, with sixteen-plus years passing after Barkley’s first shot back in 1993? (Trivia: Phil Hartman and Mike Myers were still in the cast; Nirvana was the musical guest; Barney jokes were still sort of amusing; “Office Space” was still a cartoon — and, to be fair to the carping that’s about to commence, at least four of the sketches were recurring bits.) If so, Buck Henry ought to turn up and smash that record to pieces.
Perhaps in a Christmas/rerun/rehash state of mind after working around that “Very Gilly Christmas” special on Thursday, perhaps exhausted after a rare three-week December run, perhaps just laziness as usual, Saturday Night Live brought out the recurring characters in full force on this week’s show. Not counting Update or the Digital Short, eight sketches made to air; six of these were reprisals, many representing third or fourth go-rounds, mostly with a Christmas slant.
When you’re doing six recurring sketches in a single night, you’re bound to be using at least a few that don’t work, but you’re also likely to hit upon at least a few good ones, assuming the existence of the latter (and I do: as much as I complain about them, plenty of recurring characters on SNL have worked just fine). This batch half-dozen had just about every combination, save, thankfully, the Sketch That Should’ve Never Made It to Air in the First Place Nevermind Several Times. Here’s the breakdown:
Saturday Night Live is supposed to pretty much function regardless of the host, but it’s been difficult not to notice how ill-timed its guests have been for much of this season. Megan Fox and Drew Barrymore appeared after the movies they were promoting had already bombed; Joseph Gordon-Levitt would’ve made a natural early-fall host to capitalize on his summer heat but instead came on in late November; and now Taylor Lautner shows up to host nearly a month after Twilight fever reached its peak.
Superficial/promotional considerations aside, I had other reasons to be apprehensive about Lautner’s gig, namely Lautner himself; he seems like a nice kid, but nothing in New Moon hinted at a talent for (intentional) comedy. But much like his special lady giant Taylor Swift, Lautner proved a surprisingly adept host, although his work fell more on the “didn’t screw things up” side of things than T-Swift’s “actually pretty funny on her own” triumph-relative-to-expectations. And for whatever reason, Lautner actually had better material than Swift, so his episode was a nice surprise.