In the short history of SNL running episodes on four successive weekends — this week’s show capped only the third time they’ve done this — the fourth installment has rarely been much good. Usually, predicting SNL episode quality based on logical scheduling patterns proves fruitless; returns after long breaks, which you might assume would result in a build up of decent material, are sometimes disappointing (perhaps because even after a long break, the show is still more or less written and produced in a single week), and often a good episode will turn up during a dismal run, or vice versa. But there was a clear sense of burnout running through this episode that it would be difficult not to attribute to this being the seventh SNL production in five weeks (counting the three Weekend Update Thursday installments).

Gerard Butler was the nominal host, but for some reason the first chunk of the show consisted of reprising bits from last season’s standout Dwayne The Rock Johnson-hosted episode. Johnson himself actually reappeared to play The Rock Obama, a clever riff on the Incredible Hulk that had little to say in its second go-round. Curiously, Johnson wasn’t on hand for a reprisal of the sketch where Bill Hader plays a sportscaster who is clearly a malevolent alien beast; he originally appeared as Hader’s human co-anchor inexplicably attempting to cover up the alien’s nature.  It was one of last season’s most inspired moments, and although there’s still fun in watching Hader’s brilliant physical and vocal work as the alien, no one provided a real reason for essentially remaking the sketch without a sense of surprise.

That was a weird bit of trivia that Drew Barrymore laid on us Saturday night: Apparently, she is the woman who has hosted SNL the most number of times, passing Candice Bergen’s five with her latest appearance. This, naturally, got me looking over the SNL hosts info over at Wikipedia. You know who hasn’t hosted in awhile who should? John Goodman. Also Bill Murray. You know who doesn’t have much representation in the five-timers club? Women.

Barrymore is sort of an odd figure to rack up so many hosting gigs. She’s not really a comedienne by trade, yet isn’t much of a serious actor, either; one of her greatest skills as a movie actor is her ability, unmatched by any number of more accomplished famous actresses, to work on Adam Sandler’s wavelength as a believable love interest. Even in a funny movie like The Wedding Singer, her job isn’t really being funny.

Ryan Reynolds seemed to be on board for providing male eye candy on par with Megan Fox’s season opener last week, until Reynolds turned out to appear in surprising little of this week’s SNL episode, overshadowed by Lady Gaga, who contributed not just two long performances, but two sketch appearances, including one pitting her against Madonna — whose lack of close-ups led me to take several minutes to figure out whether it was her, Abby Elliott, or an extremely fast-changing Kristen Wiig.

Jesse has already covered the news that Jenny Slate said “fucking” on SNL this weekend. As soon as the sketch started, Maggie and I got scared. An f-bomb seemed inevitable. And it certainly was. But don’t feel bad for anyone on this one. Nobody is getting fined or fired over this. Today I’m going to give everyone an education in the nature of dirty stuff on television in recent years.

For television networks, the first arbiter of decency is not the government. It is the advertisers who pay them to put their silly little shows on the air. If you can get a sponsor to pay for your filthy smut, you can do almost anything you want. Most advertisers, however, are a skittish bunch, and want to avoid controversy. That simple fact goes a long way towards explaining why television has a history of being extremely tame. But as advertisers have become less concerned with the naughty content in the broadcasts they sponsor, the government has stepped in more often.

As you may be aware, there is a rather popular amendment to our constitution that says “Congress shall make no law …  abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” etc. Unfortunately, over the years the Supreme Court has found exceptions to that clear and rather plainly worded bit of lawmaking. One of these exceptions grants the FCC the power to regulate over-the-air broadcast networks to prevent them from broadcasting indecent material between the hours of 6am and 10pm; what I refer to as the “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children Zone.” In a wonderful bit of irony, this policy was first solidified in 1978 after someone broadcast George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” on the radio. The Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s right to protect children by putting indecent content on late at night, which seems to indicate that someone could actually perform Carlin’s monologue on SNL if the sponsors were willing.

Since the Jenny Slate incident occurred well outside of the Zone, the FCC has no authority to fine anyone for broadcasting the potentially indecent material. According to the FCC “indecent material contains sexual or excretory material that does not rise to the level of obscenity. Now, saying “I fucking respect you for that” clearly does not rise to the level of obscenity (I’ll cover obscenity in a moment) but what is not immediately clear is whether using “fucking” as an intensifier actually refers to sexual material. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court offered distinctly mixed signals on this issue. In 2003, Bono (who was coincidentally featured on this weekend’s SNL) said winning a Golden Globe was “really, really fucking brilliant” during a live broadcast during the Won’t Somebody Think of the Children Zone and television stations were assessed some hefty fines for letting that through (on the East Coast of course. The West Coast never gets to hear the dirty words). The case made its way to the Supreme Court and they punted on the big issue of whether fleeting expletives of that type could be considered protected by the First Amendment. But they did rule in favor of the FCC in this particular case, which puts a bit of a cramp on live broadcasts in the Zone. Beeping out words on a seven-second broadcast delay is not as easy as people think.

Welcome to this TV season’s Monday Morning Quarterback series, in which I review each new episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live with the relatively unique perspective that the show isn’t a horrible embarrassment. Theoretically, SNL should be riding high off of a highly rated 34th season, in which their election-season forays into prime-time produced some of NBC’s highest-rated scripted content all year. This is most clearly visible with this fall’s return of Weekend Update Thursday, that makeshift SNL appetizer that performed so well after The Office last year.

Of course, this year it’s a little different: the Thursday editions started up more than a week before the show proper, are scheduled for six solid weeks, and, perhaps most importantly, are not happening in the middle of a hotly contested national election. This, as well as their 8PM leadoff slot away from The Office and the canceled ER, probably accounts for the Thursday editions performing at normal-or-worse NBC Thursday levels, averaging around five million viewers for their first two broadcasts – about half the audience of last year’s installments. What’s more, Lorne Michaels decided to fire two cast members, Casey Wilson and Michaela Watkins, over the summer – especially odd considering how much screen time Watkins got in her first year, with several recurring characters to call her own. Wilson’s departure is less surprising, though unfortunate, as she was funny (if underutilized). I’m far from immune to the charms of Abby Elliott, but it’s hard not to read her retention and the other ladies’ firing (and subsequent replacement with two younger women seemingly closer to the Abby Elliot mold) as a somewhat craven pandering for younger, prettier ladies.

So NBC may have been temporarily high on one of its most enduring properties, but even more secure seasons of SNL can’t escape that tumultuous, up-and-down, hot-and-cold variety show thing. For better or worse, and no matter how much they might actually want to, this show doesn’t really do victory laps. Coasting, maybe; victory laps just don’t get a chance.

SNL recently announced the addition of two new female cast members — a move that may or may not prevent them from stretching Kristen Wiig until she’s flat as a pancake. One of those cast members is none other than Jenny Slate, half of the comedy duo Gabe and Jenny.

Just to put it out there, we were paying attention to Gabe and Jenny back in December of 2007. Courtesy of the wonderful Best Week Ever blog, of course.

That’s okay, SNL.  We don’t expect a finder’s fee or anything.  But maybe if Jon Hamm hosts again you can arrange for me to meet him in his dressing room.

I’ll bring a stun gun and a wheelbarrow.

Here’s a clip of the kids in action as part of a Jim Beam video contest.

Earlier this week, New York Magazine’s Vulture blog ran a season-wrap up package for Saturday Night Live, including a fascinating (to me, anyway) statistical breakdown of cast member appearances, surprise guests, and frequent impersonations. As much as I appreciated the attention to the show, which gets ignored or dismissed in a lot of episode-by-episode TV-watching outlets, Vulture undermined their exhaustive research by putting out these pieces before the season actually ended which seems to me a bit like putting out a summer movie season recap in the second week in August. Actually, this probably will start happening soon or already has, but it doesn’t make it not stupid.

And yet, there was something odd about the Will Ferrell-hosted season finale this weekend. To Vulture’s extremely tiny credit, it felt more like a spirited encore than a parting shot. It’s been a longer-than-average season for SNL; following a strike-shortened 13-episode season, they came back earlier and wound up doing 22 episodes rather than the recent standard 20, plus a bunch of those Thursday extras. This whole episode felt like an extra, a Ferrell-led tribute to nothing much in particular.

Justin Timberlake has become sort of the Paul Simon of this decade on SNL — their go-to musician whose music would not necessarily imply an affinity for sketch comedy silliness. If future generations won’t quite assume he was an actual cast member, as many people do with Steve Martin, they may at least overestimate the number of times he hosted (three so far) based on his many non-hosting appearances, and the fanfare that accompanies his actual full-fledged episodes. He’s become one of the show’s big guns — like Alec Baldwin, but way more likely to attract and excite audiences who don’t necessarily watch SNL all that much. As the show winds down its thirty-fourth season, it’s only natural that Timberlake would be brought in for May sweeps. It’s less natural that this would be one of the worst episodes of the season.

But first, a brief history of Timberlake on SNL.

There are a couple of tired sketch formats Saturday Night Live writers never seem to tire of throughout the years, to the point where I wonder if they seem their mustiness and repetition as a challenge to somehow produce the well-written exception to the rule. That’s the only justification I can think of for a sketch like the one from this weekend’s episode where Fred Armisen (in drag) plays an actress who keeps screwing up takes on a commercial set by playing her scene as raving drama rather than inane comedy. I can’t remember the last time this oft-used formula actually worked. Typically, there are a few chuckles at whatever causes the first “cut!” and then a sharp decline as the sketch goes nowhere. The flubbed-takes format is inherently diminishing: reduction disguised as escalation.

Another favorite tactic: take a recurring character, and then have the host play more or less a copy of that character. This weekend, Zac Efron was given a particularly tricky assignment of that ilk: he had to play Cody Gifford, son of Kathie Lee Gifford, who is not just an overused SNL recurring character (in the fourth-hour-of-Today sketches, which I’m told by people who have actually seen the fourth hour of Today are, at least, pretty accurate) but an actual person. This gave Efron’s imitation of Kristen Wiig’s tics a particularly weak copy-of-a-copy effect.

You could say that the second Seth Rogen-hosted episode of SNL was lousy with recurring bits, both expected and not. But “lousy with” has negative connotations for a generally strong episode, so I’ll say this episode was delightful with recurring bits, and hope that phrase catches on in a totally non-confusing way.

Lots of familiar but enjoyable recurring characters turned up: Bill Hader’s guest-flummoxing Italian talk show host Vinny Vedecci, and a variety of Weekend Update players: Rod Blagojevich, Jean K. Jean, and Angelina Jolie. The Digital Short, “Like a Boss,” wasn’t technically a rerun, but I’m disappointed to see the Lonely Island going back and making videos for fresh material that debuted on their Incredibad album a few months back.