Saturday Night Live

imaging having that come up on your google alerts

https://www.theautopian.com/snl-perfectly-nails-dealership-commercials-raising-canes-drive-thrus-and-texas/

I have to say, this bit is a note-perfect send-up down to the library music (which Ford dealers actually use to this day) and the little detail about the one guy's daughter being named "Hailey".

Hardly ever watch this now, but I was at my sister's last week, and she and her husband PVR it to watch it the next day. So I was a captive audience for the Michael B. Jordan episode. Outside of the opening, a classified document-related press conference where Keenan Thompson and Bowen Yang were funny, I thought the rest was stupefyingly awful. I know I shouldn't feel bad for Michael B. Jordan, he was there to promote a movie, but I did--he was giving it the old college try, but the material was, as the expression goes, rock bottom.

agreed the show is pretty much unwatchable but the dealership/raising cane's thing was great, a cane's moved into the neighborhood this past summer and it's calmed down now but for a while it was creating these massive traffic problems (was the first cane's in minneapolis proper not the burbs)

caniacs will stop at nothing

lol I knew nothing about Raising Cane's but one opened near where I work and there were people lined up around the block to get in every day for three weeks. wtf?

i maintain the quality of this show has been basically consistent for ages, if not its entire stretch. it's always been about a 20% hit to miss ratio for me. Some years go as high as maybe 45% (like, the Ebersol year).

I think it's clear that JAJ and Sarah Sherman are the breakout stars from the featured players.

agree with consistency more or less. Some episodes are more dire than others. Occasionally I go huh, that was an ok episode, no real stinkers, and occasionally there are hilarious things.

akm otm

The trope of "SNL isn't as good as it used to be" is only slightly younger than the show itself. Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

Also the trope of "Ugh, I don't even watch it anymore, it's gotten so bad." Probably someone said that about the drop in quality from the first episode to the second. And the first season to the second, and so on. Yawn.

It's a live show with an ensemble cast, where the whole thing needs to be created and rehearsed and performed in a constrained time period. And they throw in chaos factors of an uninitiated guest cast member (who have wildly varying abilities to learn and perform and improvise). Some skits are going to work and some not. Some jokes are going to land, and some not. Some cast members are going to shine and others will fizzle. Some writers will bring consistently good material, others will be more scattershot. Some weeks, the news will provide a ripe target for satire, some weeks it won't.

We can just accept that every time the opening credits roll, it's a crapshoot as to whether you get crap or something surprisingly adequate. That hit-or-miss nature is precisely why and how the show has survived and still has an audience.

Perhaps compare it to NASCAR. Sometimes there will be a wreck. It's a part of the appeal.

I'd like to see an anthology of the best skits from the past 15 or so years.

here's one of the worst

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/rear-window/2751114

there's alway been a lot of hit and miss stuff and yes nostalgia involved but there are certainly certain casts or eras that are better than others. that's not arguable.

i've watched every season since i was old enough.

The Internet makes it easy to enjoy SNL, you just wait for a good skit to blow up on social media and watch it online. And I thought it was Chick-Fil-As that cause horrible traffic backups on feeder roads with their drive-thru lines; never seen it happen at a Raising Cane's.

that's exactly how I enjoy SNL these days. don't watch the eps, wait for sketches to show up online, particularly ones that have any buzz, and watch em that way.

when the show is at its worst is when the writers get up their own ass with coming up with an absurdist premise that seems funny on its face, but don't tailor it to the talent they have on the show.

no matter how good or bad the material is, the cast has to commit to it and sell it

whereas "Maine Justice" on paper is about the dumbest thing imaginable but everybody leans into it and has so much fun with it, it's one of my favs (the original and followup!)

I probably shouldn't have used the phrase "rock bottom," because that does suggest I'm comparing the show I saw last week to some unspecified period of greatness. I've watched the show intermittently since it debuted, but don't harbor nostalgia for any one cast or period. Certain sketches, maybe. When I think of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, I immediately start laughing inside.

So my reaction to the Michael B. Jordan show was more in a vacuum: this is just terrible, in and of itself. (The real-life equivalent of the Raising Cane sketch went past me, being Canadian. I got the joke, though, and personally just didn't find it that funny. It reminded a bit of Tex and Edna Boils's Organ Emporium from SCTV.)

SNL peak era was probably the Hartman years for me, it was just a cast of true pros. Not always hitting their targets but so much good shit.

the january jones episode was terrible across the board. the John Hamm episodes were pretty great.

I'll also admit that, entering my 60s, the cultural references to TikTok and Tidal and whatnot increasingly lose me. I'm sure that makes some difference.

I recently tracked down a sketch I've been looking for for ages, Ricky Nelson in a Twilight Zone episode ending up in the homes of Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best, Danny Thomas, and I Love Lucy. Great use of the entire cast, some playing multiple roles (Dan Aykroyd as Rod Serling, George Burns, and Alfred Hitchcock.) While not as hilarious as I remembered, it was way more complex than "Grace Kelly farting for five minutes."

Sounds great. Can you provide a link?

https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-04-e-12-rick-nelson-judy-collins-02-17-1979

Starts at 13:45.

Cool, thanks! Have you seen the video linked here? Film noir: your favourites

The trope of "SNL isn't as good as it used to be" is only slightly younger than the show itself. Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

There’s certainly some truth to this, but the first season I was able to watch every week was the cast of ringers in ‘84-‘85 — Ed Grimley! “I Hate When That Happens!” Eddie Murphy hosting! The film about the magic door-opening mat! Ringo Starr not getting any bids at an auction of Beatles memorabilia! The Question Is Moot! — but the next season was the return of Lorne, where it fell off a cliff and nearly got cancelled. So yeah, in this instance, from one season to the next, “it wasn’t as good as it used to be” definitely applied.

Love the ending of that season:

In the final sketch, Billy Martin is shown dumping gasoline around the studio and then setting it on fire. The entire cast is shown to be trapped in a room as a parody of TV show cliffhangers. Credits rolled with question marks on each name, signaling that the viewer didn't know which cast members would be returning the next season. Cast members were reportedly angered by an ending added to the sketch, in which Michaels has the opportunity to rescue the cast from the fire, but chooses to save only Lovitz.

Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

I loved the show when I was 12-14, then rarely watched it for the next 15 years. When I started watching again regularly, it was in the late 2000s, and it seemed surprisingly solid, but then it started to sour on me again a few years ago. It occurred to me recently that maybe I liked it during that stetch because the cast was mostly around my age.

Sarah Sherman is not funny on SNL

^co-sign. her material and her delivery both 'read' as zany humor, a bit like kiddie cartoon show host on meth, but the material is really weak. the weak material may not be her fault, but her delivery can't fix it.

Her delivery on SNL in other people's skits definitely scans as "look at me! look at how absolutely WACKY I am", but I do think she's brought some pretty solid material - her Meatballs skit was great and I wish she could get more like that on the air.

Starts at 13:45.

The trope of "SNL isn't as good as it used to be" is only slightly younger than the show itself. Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

nah, the late '80s Phil Hartman era was the peak and most of that came before my adolescence (and certainly young adulthood), he bleeds over a bit I guess but the Chris Farley era was not good

I guess I wouldn't say it isn't as good as it used to be, though, I'd say it was only good from like 1986-1990.

its more for babies now and little kids and has paid sketches for things like street fighter 6

i watched a sketch a few weeks ago and thought to myself that social media has ruined snl bc i’ve already seen all of these jokes as tweets

that's definitely an issue.

comedians have been recycling jokes forever. using unoriginal material is their bread and butter.

but SNL doesn't have the guts to say "stop me if you've heard this one"

I think that's a good point, though. SNL now competes with hundreds of thousands of versions of itself on social media; people who grew up with the show, absorbed the way it handled the absurd side of politics (they weren't the first, obviously, but they had their own style), and replicate that all over Twitter and Facebook.

iow, thanks to social media now everyone's a comedian

Comedians are like opinions: everybody has one.

I keep two comedians in my closet

(xxpost) More or less, yeah. Maybe always true, but absent social media, you never heard the other 100,000 versions before SNL got to it. Even with Tina Fey and Sarah Palin, when the internet wasn't quite the swamp in 2008 that it is today, I don't remember being exposed to much about Palin (relatively speaking) before Fey took her on.

The trope of "SNL isn't as good as it used to be" is only slightly younger than the show itself. Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

I'm British and never really saw any snl until I was in my 30s when a digital channel over here repeated the first couple of seasons from the 70s, and the I started watching sketches on youtube, so without the bias of youthful affection I can say that the funniest era of the show is the mid 2000s to early 2010s period, otherwise agree the hit to miss ratio is fairly consistent throughout the whole run, and that any 'current affairs'/topical reference stuff is now always the worst part of the show because all the jokes have already been flogged to death on twitter well before saturday night

That’s a pretty solid era, definitely top three. I’d probably put them second behind the late 80s cast, one spot ahead of the original cast. that first iteration of the show wasn’t really amazingly funny all the time, but that was just a solid gold cast with A+ ringers.

xp That Hader, Armisen, Forte, Wiig, Samberg, Meyers-helmed era was pretty classic imo, not something I realized until after it was over.

This was a pretty bad year (95)

Repertory players

Morwenna Banks (first episode: April 8, 1995)
Ellen Cleghorne
Chris Elliott
Chris Farley
Janeane Garofalo (final episode: February 25, 1995)
Norm Macdonald
Michael McKean
Mark McKinney (first episode: January 14, 1995)
Tim Meadows
Mike Myers (final episode: January 21, 1995)
Kevin Nealon
Adam Sandler
David Spade
Featured players

Al Franken (final episode: May 6, 1995)
Laura Kightlinger
Jay Mohr
Molly Shannon (first episode: February 25, 1995)

Oof

I love that lost-in-the-sauce year between Bad Boys of Comedy era and screaming Will Ferrell era

Just lots of screaming Farley and weird little Chris Elliott bits

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xtzmxr

the only thing I recall seeing from that season is this sketch with Mark McKinney (as DaRYL from KITH), Chris Elliott and Janeane Garofalo about internet chatrooms, and it's funny but I never would have guessed it was from snl