SNL premiere (9/30)

Oh come on... Brian Williams as himself sitting down to do Update, saying "don't patronize me, Seth" and then saying dad's gotta go home and tell the wife and two kids why daddy won't be on TV tonight. THAT was priceless.

I thought Clinton/Condi was pretty good... the Hugo Chavez talk show (although it was a retread of McLaughlin Group)... the Killers were great...

Overall, ya, hit and miss.

 

Brian Williams is a superstar.

What a terrific, natural, comedic turn that was.

 

That was all over the news a few weeks ago. Lorne Michaels said budget cuts meant he either had to reduce the staff or reduce the number of episodes. So he reduced the staff. It was too big anyway. Most of those featured players weren't getting much airtime before.

 

That made me laugh. "Bush fumbling around with this, because he doesn't understand it!" "No, how about Bush screwing this up because he's an idiot?"

 

the folks who got cut were done a tremendous favor.

 

Update had some good moments, mainly because of Brian Williams. I thought the Clinton-Condi thing was painful to watch. They did get a laugh out of me on the final update item, though it must not have been that great because I can't remember it now. Al Pacino checks his balance was funny. The water bottle sketch -- even they said at the end that it stopped being funny looooooong ago. (Yeah, so why did it keep going on, huh?) As for the Killers -- I kept thinking 'when did they get Jason Lee (as Earl) as their drummer?'

All told, MADtv is still much, much funnier on their worst day than SNL is on its best.

 

Brian Williams is a very funny man. The cast of SNL are not very funny people. Every time I see this show, which is maybe twice a year, I think "Terri Schiavo"

 

Have you noticed the trend in the past of couple years that the better material shows up after Update? You get the more experimental stuff - some of it bites, but some of the best sketches have come in the last half-hour of the show, where they try to stretch beyond the political and celebrity-driven material.

 

I thought the Al Pacino sketch was hilarious.

Unfortunately, that was about it.

 

To paraphrase Studio 60: "Do you think The Killers can play for an hour and a half?"

 

WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE --- Instead of yet another lame-ass Bush sketch, SNL shoulda opened with a parody of the Studio 60 opening. Coulda cracked wise about the departed castmates, about Lorne Michaels and the show being dead. That could have been f'in funny, and a little ballsy.

And, please, no more Dane Cook. Someone on another thread recently said he's comedy's "Dave Matthews Band" -- frat boys love him, but he's not really that good. Very aptly put.

 

Agreed. Williams is one of the all-too-uncommon true effing studs left in journalism.