SNL kicked off Season 46 in a changed world with the same self-satisfied mediocrity - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

TMC · 10-05-2020, 02:35 AM

https://tv.avclub.com/saturday-night...ing-1845267213

"As it turns out, Season 46 SNL looks a whole lot like Season 45 SNL," says Dennis Perkins of Saturday Night Live's first in-studio show since the coronavirus shutdown. Sure, there were some signs of the pandemic, but SNL was mostly the same. "It’s a different world even than the one the show confronted back in March, when SNL wisely fled Studio 8H for hand-drawn backdrops and Zoom sketches, and we all hoped that this 46th season would see the show—and the world—creeping back toward something like normal. Whatever that could possibly mean," says Perkins. "But the comedy cruise ship that is Saturday Night Live doesn’t change course much these, well, decades, and this first episode delivered exactly the sort of down-the-middle lounge act it’s settled into in recent memory. A cameo-happy bid for isolated YouTube views and Sunday morning roundtable show references, a ludicrously underserved and over-full cast rushing through some indifferent sketches, a few standout performance pops—in a TV world (and, you know, world) calling out for innovative ways of making comedy out of chaos, pain, and a democracy at a perilous tipping point, Saturday Night Live was, in its first outing, satisfied to steam ahead as if self-satisfied mediocrity were enough. It is—and I cannot state this forcefully enough—not." As for the debate cold open, Perkins says: "While Carrey’s Biden was a more restrained and lived-in character performance than I was expecting (mid-debate bit with Biden chasing Trump’s laser pointer aside), the whole show-topping spectacle lived down to SNL’s standards when it comes to direct Trump depictions. Carrey (wig, makeup, teeth, and nicely tuned hoarseness all in place) turns out to be in things for the long haul, acting-wise. He could have come out matching Baldwin’s simultaneously hammy and sluggish Trump (sort of an impressive combination, in truth), but, instead, gave us a Biden the show can grow into. (Which, again, here’s hoping.) From the jump, this premiere’s technical jitters and growing (or shrinking, crew-wise) pains were in enervating evidence, with repeated dead spots in the actors’ transitions and deliveries, and the camera movements. Still, Carrey’s impersonation/performance was intriguing, playing up the expected traits (age, the tendency to ramble), while laying the groundwork for a simmering rage that the always-grinning Biden is going to work overtime to tamp down."

ALSO:

SNL misunderstands its role right now -- amid extraordinary national uncertainty, the season premiere offered up normalcy: Michael Che "inadvertently underlined SNL’s lack of nimbleness in the face of a constantly changing election story," says David Sims. "The show will have a five-week run straight through to the November election, but all that hard work won’t mean much if the best it can offer is the kind of genial, lightweight winks to the audience that filled the opening debate sketch. The rest of the show’s pandemic humor felt warmed-over. A sketch about the NBA bubble in which teams drafted women to stay with them in quarantine was baffling and offensive in equal measure, oddly mocking the permeability of a system that actually proved to work over the summer. A faux news report about a super-spreader event was simply a vehicle for a procession of characters with silly double-entendre names. A pretaped sketch, titled 'Stunt Performers,' had a premise so convoluted, it would take me an entire paragraph to explain it, but it was largely lacking in actual jokes. Saturday Night Live is often rickety in its first week back, as writers settle into the strange rhythms of producing such an elaborate show. The transition must have been stranger than ever this year because of COVID-19; that the show can be produced at all feels miraculous and tenuous, down to the socially distanced, masked audience (which, for the premiere, was made up of first responders). The circumstances of Trump’s hospitalization surely only made the execution of this week’s episode that much harder. But the biggest problem I had with SNL’s return was how normal everything felt despite all the chaos. I understand the desire for comfort television right now, but this is not the time for SNL to feel safe."
The season premiere was toothless as SNL struggled to keep up with the dizzying news cycle: "Why bother carefully crafting a debate sketch when five days later, we barely even remember why we were so worked up about the debate? Just go broad and lazy, says I!" says Daniel Fienberg. "Why bother crafting an approach to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden when you can just fall back on, 'They're both old and unfit to lead...' and know that that level of satire is going to be evergreen for at least the next few weeks? Sigh. It's hard to exactly pinpoint the targets of the season-opening debate sketch, which introduced Jim Carrey playing Joe Biden as if he were Joe Biden from 2008 (or maybe 1988) or possibly just Fire Marshal Bill after skin grafts and a hair piece. The bizarre thing is that Joe Biden is a tough figure to lampoon — at this point he's almost self-lampooned in the same way that nobody can make a bigger caricature of Donald Trump than Donald Trump — but SNL has done reasonably well with him in the very recent past as played by either Jason Sudeikis or Woody Harrelson. Jim Carrey brought a wiry energy to his impersonation, an energy that has absolutely no connection to the guy running for president currently. The idea that Joe Biden spent Tuesday's debate at perpetual war with himself trying to keep from attacking Trump is projection and little more, completely unconnected to what audiences watched Biden doing. I guess 'half-addled/half-enraged' is an interpretation for Biden and remains more than the autopilot that Alec Baldwin has been on for several years now...The softness of the show's political prism — Michael Che and Colin Jost, able to concentrate exclusively on Trump's COVID diagnosis, were actually much sharper on 'Weekend Update' — was exposed by musical guest Megan Thee Stallion transitioning from a rousing performance of 'Savage' to harsh condemnation of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron. She had a sense of the stakes."
It's unfair to judge SNL after a chaotic week, but the show stumbled: "After its COVID sheltering from home and a summer hiatus, Saturday Night Live tried to tackle the impossible in Saturday’s season premiere," says Karen Valby. "Blessings and fruit baskets to the writer’s room for the number of jokes they must have scrapped and rewritten with each of the past 48 hours’ ground-shifting news development. Our president is at Walter Reade; Alec Baldwin is back in Studio 8H. Live from New York, it’s Saturday night." Valby adds: "Host Chris Rock is forever a welcome presence, in both tense situations and ridiculous ones. But the power of his SNL monologue was undercut by the magnitude of his task: how to get laughs out of an absurdly chaotic, ever-changing moment. 'President Trump is in the hospital from COVID, and I just want to say my heart goes out to COVID,' Rock said in his strongest line. He riffed about there being more rules to being on a game show than apparently are to being President, and the bonkers truth that one gets a guaranteed four years to do the most important job in the world badly. But for the most part, his words lacked sting or gravitas. It was too brutal a weekend for a comedian to kill—though damn, one hopes the blessed first responders who made up the studio audience had the f***ing night of their lives."
For better or worse, it was very much like a typical SNL, half an entertainment, half a duty: "Players performed side by side, if not at particularly close quarters, unmasked," says Robert Lloyd. "The band was masked where practical, and behind Plexiglass. Most significant, there was an audience, masked, but not distanced; first responders occupied the prime seats on the floor, close to the stage."
Ranking SNL's Joe Bidens: Jim Carrey is the show's second-worst Biden after Kevin Nealon (Woody Harrelson was the best): "So far, Jim Carrey’s Biden is not an impression of Joe Biden, it’s a reminder that Jim Carrey’s rubber-faced mugging is funniest when the sole point of the joke is 'Jim Carrey’s rubber-faced mugging,'" says Matthew Dessem. "To be fair to Carrey, it’s not clear how anyone could have pulled comedy out of the horror show that was this week’s presidential debate, especially in light of subsequent COVID-19 diagnoses, but this was nearly unwatchable. Carrey slightly redeemed himself toward the end, presiding over what is probably the first time SNL has invited its audience to fantasize about the death (or at least the serious illness) of a sitting president. That’s just enough edge to edge out Kevin Nealon, but not enough to make it out of the bottom tier of Saturday Night Live Bidens. Fortunately, Carrey will have the chance to improve, since he’ll be playing the role all season."
Jim Carrey was doing an imitation of Jim Carrey as Fire Marshal Bill doing an imitation of Joe Biden: "The problem with Carrey is his brand of comedy sucks all the other comedy out of the room. It stops any flow & demand the focus on him. It’s the opposite of collaborative," says Peter Hartlaub. "Great when he’s a villain in a family film or an Ace Ventura-style centerpiece. Horrible for SNL."
Where was "Creepy Uncle Joe"?: "What happened to the Joe who mixes up words like a Shakespearean clown?" says Johnny Oleksinski. "Carrey wore Top Gun sunglasses and tried to make the guy as cool as Danny Zuko. Huh? We know SNL wants Biden to win, but that doesn’t mean his lines can’t still be biting and hilarious."
"Weekend Update" did absolutely nothing with the bounty of news it was handed: "Out of all the headline figures they could have used for Update guests – Melania Trump, Chris Christie, Amy Coney Barrett – they instead fall back on rote regulars Chen Biao (Bowne Yang), the sassy Chinese Trade Minister, and Carrie Crumb (Aidy Bryant), the bubbly tween travel expert," says Zach Vasquez. "Anyone hoping for a final appearance of Kate McKinnon’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg will have to settle for a short and wordless cut away to her sitting in the audience, before a quick title card the reads: Rest in Power. At least we’re spared another cringeworthy rendition of 'Hallelujah.'"
Kate McKinnon paid tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the end of "Weekend Update"
Chloe Fineman spoofed The Drew Barrymore Show by referencing The Ellen DeGeneres Show scandal

Megan Thee Stallion delivered a powerful "Protect Black Women" statement on SNL

During her performance of her hit single "Savage,” Megan took time out to lash out at Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron over his handling of Breonna Taylor’s death at the hands of Louisville police. “Daniel Cameron is no different than the sell-out negroes who sold our people into slavery" was projected behind Megan and her dancers as they stood at attention during the middle of her song.

Will SNL's lazy approach to mocking Trump ever change?

"If you want to make fun of the president, it’s not that hard," says Emily VanDerWerff. "Just have a famous actor — Alec Baldwin, let’s say — pop up on TV and repeat some of the things the president has said in a big, brash New York accent, then have him pout a little bit as the audience roars its approval. But this approach is also incredibly lazy, and it turns Trump into something vaguely approachable, a video game boss who can be defeated if we can just string together the magic combination of words that will cause him to explode in fury. The 'let’s make Trump angry!' mode of comedy isn’t exclusive to SNL. It is present, to some degree, in the late-night monologues of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers — and it’s all over social media, perhaps most famously in a wildly popular series of Trump lip sync videos by comedian Sarah Cooper. Reimagining Trump as a goon to be stomped on and defeated has its value. He is, after all, just a man. He won’t be the president forever, and will perhaps leave office as soon as January if enough people vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in November’s election. But that 'perhaps' underlines just how complicated making fun of Trump really is — because if you don’t find a way to satirize not just Trump but Trumpism, you run the risk of normalizing what the man stands for while trying desperately to trigger him." VanDerWerff adds: "SNL, especially in the Trump era, has consistently mistaken flashy but over-obvious satire — satire that will win it plaudits among the pundit class for its bravery in taking on Trump by making fun of the most buffoonish things about him — for anything meaningful. It’s possible I’m being unfair to a show that, by its very nature, is uneven, thanks to having exactly one week to pull each episode together. But the show is capable of incisive political satire. As overhyped as it was in terms of tanking Sarah Palin’s image with voters, Tina Fey’s portrayal of Palin was devastating at digging into just how oblivious she was...But the Trump administration is so obviously cartoonish, while also working to achieve such obviously horrific ends, that it becomes all but impossible to make fun of via SNL’s usual techniques of ridiculousness and over-the-top impersonations."

ALSO:

SNL needs to ditch celebrity cameos and trust its cast to play prominent politicians: "SNL has gotten the most mileage from enlisting famous people to make splashy cameos that drown out half the comedy with delighted audience applause," says Caroline Framke. "So by the time the show cast Jim Carrey to play Biden for this final stretch of the presidential election, it wasn’t a surprise. But for a show that has such a wide reach and direct line to the White House’s own television screens, it’s disappointing, frustrating and deeply unimaginative. On the most superficial level, casting the most plum roles on the show outside its own cast just isn’t a smart way to develop the promising talent it already has...If SNL just wants to grab the most attention possible, well, mission accomplished. But if it wants to be as piercing, relevant and unsparing as it could be, it needs to ditch the cheap plays for instinctive applause and go back to its own basics."
Was Will Ferrell's first season on SNL in the mid-1990s a bomb or breakthrough?

SNL taps Bill Burr and Issa Rae for their hosting debuts

Burr will be joined by first-time musical guest Morgan Wallen on Oct. 10. On Oct. 17, Rae will host Saturday Night Live with returning musical guest Justin Bieber. The last time Bieber performed on SNL was back in February.

Michael Che and Colin Jost: SNL's table read now has so many cast members, who have to socially distance, it's like listening to a podcast

“We have 20 cast members in our show right now, and they have to be six feet apart. So 20 times six is, uh, probably like 1,000? I don’t know. So you’re in a table read and you’re hearing voices and you’re like ‘Who said that?!’” Jost said on The Tonight Show. “Yeah, it feels like you’re listening to a podcast. You don’t see anybody! It’s great,” Che added.

SNL shares the first look at Jim Carrey's Joe Biden

Check out Carrey's Biden with Maya Rudolph's Kamala Harris. ALSO: Chris Rock and Megan Thee Stallion mask up for their SNL promo.

Is SNL breaking New York coronavirus rules by having a live audience?

New York Department of Health spokesperson Gary Holmes said Wednesday that the state banned ticketed events on March 16 and "that restriction has not changed." New York's COVID-19 rules state that television shows and other media productions are prohibited from having a live audience unless it is made up entirely of paid employees, cast or crew. "Offering tickets to the general public without the appropriate casting and screening process is not allowed," Holmes wrote in an email Wednesday to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. "We have communicated that to SNL and expect them to follow the rules like every other business that has reopened during this global pandemic." SNL has been accepting ticket requests for Saturday's show through an audience casting agency. The show is requiring all audience members to submit to a coronavirus test and a temperature check. An SNL spokesperson says the show is working with the department and following all guidelines.

Is SNL equipped to parody the disastrous first Trump-Biden debate?

Throughout Tuesday's debate, Twitter users predicted that Saturday Night Live would have a field day with the first debate when it returns this week for Season 46, featuring the return of Alec Baldwin as President Trump and Jim Carrey's debut as Joe Biden. As Shawn Cooke notes, however, Saturday Night Live has struggled to parody the chaos and cruelty of Trump for the past 5+ years. "Although major media outlets tried to reduce the debate to a both-sidesy stew of sparring, barbs, and insults — which wasn’t completely untrue, with Biden calling Trump a 'clown,' the 'worst president in American history,' and 'Putin’s puppy' — it rather deliberately misses the forest for the trees," says Cooke. "Rudeness and leaky-brained crosstalk are considerably different from empowering white supremacist militia groups, but a media apparatus so tailored to presenting a view from nowhere that alienates no one couldn’t acknowledge this. Despite its caricatured, squinty, purse-lipped portrayal of the president, SNL is in no better position to reckon with this distinction. The Proud Boys heard the president’s message to 'stand back and standby' loud and clear, lending the group a marketable slogan and making them an immediate household name if they weren’t already. Trump was given an opportunity to further spread mail-in voting conspiracies, which he ably ran with, and tacitly called on his militia boys to keep an eye on the polls in November. Where’s the punchline in all of this, exactly?...SNL’s been especially unequipped to confront tangible fascist threats in the past five years, by more or less reenacting the news with slight exaggerations. This is really all that can be expected of a major network sketch comedy series that infamously brought then-candidate Trump onboard to host in 2015, and has always been the playbook even before Trump. Its gaze is channeled directly through cheeto man bad liberalism as much as middle-ground political tourists, but it’s uniformly after a viewership that’s isolated from the most harmful elements of the administration."

ALSO:

Chris Rock says he watched the debate with Jim Carrey as they prepared for SNL: "I hadn’t spent that much time with Jim in like 20 years,” Rock told Ellen DeGeneres. “And he is Jim Carrey. He is the most energetic, funniest guy probably we’ve ever seen. To watch him watch Joe Biden, and then do Joe Biden, and then maybe do a little Trump and then do a little Clint Eastwood, and he’s very political at the same time. It was a ride just watching the debates with Jim Carrey.”
Colin Jost says Donald Trump was "way into" doing his 2015 SNL porn star sketch: "I think the last sketch of the show ends with Cecily and Vanessa as porn stars endorsing Donald Trump for president and then Donald Trump turns to Cecily who’s blonde and says, 'Didn’t you used to be a brunette?'" Jost said on The Deciding Decade With Pete Buttigieg podcast. "And I’m pretty sure that's the last line of the show. Watching it again in retrospect is so complicated to look at given everything that’s happened."
Maya Rudolph hopes Kamala Harris is around for a long time: “I got to meet her, and she is so fantastic. She is so incredible, she is so energizing and I just feel so good to be associated with someone so positive,” says Rudolph. “I just want to do her proud — just do a good job, no pressure!”
Chloe Fineman doesn't think of herself as primarily an impressionist: "No, I think that’s a more recent realization that I could do that," Fineman says of her many dead-on impressions. "I probably started doing them four years ago. And definitely in quarantine I feel like I’ve leaned into impressions. But when I’m doing an impression I’m trying to turn that person into a character, if that makes any sense."
Bowen Yang says he was stunned by the diversity behind the scenes at SNL: "Everyone's being very honest, I think, and transparent about how things work there, which I think is great. I mean, I was kind of surprised to go into SNL and sort of be just genuinely surprised and comforted by - internally, like, just going in and seeing like, oh, there are Asians in every department," he says. "There are people of color in every department. We've had this, like, legacy of queer writers who've been at the show since its beginning."
Chris Redd talks conspiracy theories, Halloween costumes and why he'd love to live in London
Friends keep texting Alex Moffat photos of Eric Trump

Check out Chris Rock and SNL cast and crew social distancing in their first table read of Season 46

Instead of using Saturday Night Live's cramped offices for this week's table read, the show used Studio 8H, with each cast member getting their own table.

Alec Baldwin defends playing Trump on SNL coronavirus hospitalization: We wouldn't have mocked him if he was "truly, gravely ill"

In a lengthy Instagram video Sunday, Baldwin said that Saturday Night Live wouldn't have poked fun at Trump's diagnosis if the show thought he was "truly, gravely ill." "If there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill, and people said, 'Trump is really in trouble,' then I would bet you everything I have that we wouldn't even get near that, in terms of content of the show," Baldwin said, according to EW. "They would have done something else. I've seen that happen before...We only have the words of the White House itself and the people who work there themselves to go on, and all of them have all been saying he isn’t in any danger. We only have their word to go by. And if their word was that he was in serious trouble, then we probably wouldn't have done it." Baldwin also defended SNL opening with a debate sketch, even though the Biden-Trump debate was old news by Saturday night. "We thought the debate was something topical, and we didn't have anything with him in a hospital bed, but we had the debate," Baldwin added. "You'd have to have a very good reason to avoid that, topicality-wise, and nobody thought that they were mocking somebody's illness by doing that."

ALSO:

Jim Carrey delivered SNL's best Joe Biden: "Saturday Night Live has had a few different cast members play Joe Biden in the past, but none has quite stuck," says Allegra Frank. "Biden’s persona is not as immediately defined as Barack Obama’s or Donald Trump’s, which may be why he’s been a bit of a challenge. Instead of asking someone like Jason Sudeikis to come back and reprise the role, SNL went with a much bigger name to take a stab at a Biden impression: Jim Carrey. This may seem like an odd choice to some viewers, considering that Carrey is both one of Hollywood’s greatest hams and Canadian. But Carrey walked on stage all lanky and finger-guns ablaze, his teeth as shiny as the real Biden’s. He exuded the same kind of intrinsic chill that Biden often does, the sense of coolness that was a large part of his persona during his vice-presidential years."
Maya Rudolph's cameo as Kamala Harris was one of the most baffling parts of SNL's much-criticized debate cold open: "Eventually, Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris enters the fray, in a deus ex machin–huh? moment, immediately coded as a mommy figure to the two equally misbehaving childish debaters," says Joe Berkowitz. "No premise is offered to justify Harris’s appearance here, other than that Maya Rudolph, like Carrey, has a contract this season. Her arrival cements the sentiment that both sides are responsible for this debate’s descent into unwatchability, an idea that some major media outlets ran with this week, but filtered through pandering gender dynamics."
SNL ran into a problem that has plagued it for a few years now: The discourse on Twitter was far more entertaining than the show
SNL scores its most-watched season premiere in four years and second-most-watched in 12 years
Drew Barrymore reacts to Chloe Fineman parodying her talk show on SNL
Here's the list of SNL writers, including the four head writers Michael Che, Colin Jost, Kent Sublette and Anna Drezen
On Watch What Happens Live, Bowen Yang recalled his SNL audition: "I just threw everything against the wall … I was like, I don’t think it’s gonna happen, so I’m just gonna have fun with it."

10-05-2020, 02:35 AM	#1
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 126,557	SNL kicked off Season 46 in a changed world with the same self-satisfied mediocrity https://tv.avclub.com/saturday-night...ing-1845267213 "As it turns out, Season 46 SNL looks a whole lot like Season 45 SNL," says Dennis Perkins of Saturday Night Live's first in-studio show since the coronavirus shutdown. Sure, there were some signs of the pandemic, but SNL was mostly the same. "It’s a different world even than the one the show confronted back in March, when SNL wisely fled Studio 8H for hand-drawn backdrops and Zoom sketches, and we all hoped that this 46th season would see the show—and the world—creeping back toward something like normal. Whatever that could possibly mean," says Perkins. "But the comedy cruise ship that is Saturday Night Live doesn’t change course much these, well, decades, and this first episode delivered exactly the sort of down-the-middle lounge act it’s settled into in recent memory. A cameo-happy bid for isolated YouTube views and Sunday morning roundtable show references, a ludicrously underserved and over-full cast rushing through some indifferent sketches, a few standout performance pops—in a TV world (and, you know, world) calling out for innovative ways of making comedy out of chaos, pain, and a democracy at a perilous tipping point, Saturday Night Live was, in its first outing, satisfied to steam ahead as if self-satisfied mediocrity were enough. It is—and I cannot state this forcefully enough—not." As for the debate cold open, Perkins says: "While Carrey’s Biden was a more restrained and lived-in character performance than I was expecting (mid-debate bit with Biden chasing Trump’s laser pointer aside), the whole show-topping spectacle lived down to SNL’s standards when it comes to direct Trump depictions. Carrey (wig, makeup, teeth, and nicely tuned hoarseness all in place) turns out to be in things for the long haul, acting-wise. He could have come out matching Baldwin’s simultaneously hammy and sluggish Trump (sort of an impressive combination, in truth), but, instead, gave us a Biden the show can grow into. (Which, again, here’s hoping.) From the jump, this premiere’s technical jitters and growing (or shrinking, crew-wise) pains were in enervating evidence, with repeated dead spots in the actors’ transitions and deliveries, and the camera movements. Still, Carrey’s impersonation/performance was intriguing, playing up the expected traits (age, the tendency to ramble), while laying the groundwork for a simmering rage that the always-grinning Biden is going to work overtime to tamp down." ALSO: SNL misunderstands its role right now -- amid extraordinary national uncertainty, the season premiere offered up normalcy: Michael Che "inadvertently underlined SNL’s lack of nimbleness in the face of a constantly changing election story," says David Sims. "The show will have a five-week run straight through to the November election, but all that hard work won’t mean much if the best it can offer is the kind of genial, lightweight winks to the audience that filled the opening debate sketch. The rest of the show’s pandemic humor felt warmed-over. A sketch about the NBA bubble in which teams drafted women to stay with them in quarantine was baffling and offensive in equal measure, oddly mocking the permeability of a system that actually proved to work over the summer. A faux news report about a super-spreader event was simply a vehicle for a procession of characters with silly double-entendre names. A pretaped sketch, titled 'Stunt Performers,' had a premise so convoluted, it would take me an entire paragraph to explain it, but it was largely lacking in actual jokes. Saturday Night Live is often rickety in its first week back, as writers settle into the strange rhythms of producing such an elaborate show. The transition must have been stranger than ever this year because of COVID-19; that the show can be produced at all feels miraculous and tenuous, down to the socially distanced, masked audience (which, for the premiere, was made up of first responders). The circumstances of Trump’s hospitalization surely only made the execution of this week’s episode that much harder. But the biggest problem I had with SNL’s return was how normal everything felt despite all the chaos. I understand the desire for comfort television right now, but this is not the time for SNL to feel safe." The season premiere was toothless as SNL struggled to keep up with the dizzying news cycle: "Why bother carefully crafting a debate sketch when five days later, we barely even remember why we were so worked up about the debate? Just go broad and lazy, says I!" says Daniel Fienberg. "Why bother crafting an approach to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden when you can just fall back on, 'They're both old and unfit to lead...' and know that that level of satire is going to be evergreen for at least the next few weeks? Sigh. It's hard to exactly pinpoint the targets of the season-opening debate sketch, which introduced Jim Carrey playing Joe Biden as if he were Joe Biden from 2008 (or maybe 1988) or possibly just Fire Marshal Bill after skin grafts and a hair piece. The bizarre thing is that Joe Biden is a tough figure to lampoon — at this point he's almost self-lampooned in the same way that nobody can make a bigger caricature of Donald Trump than Donald Trump — but SNL has done reasonably well with him in the very recent past as played by either Jason Sudeikis or Woody Harrelson. Jim Carrey brought a wiry energy to his impersonation, an energy that has absolutely no connection to the guy running for president currently. The idea that Joe Biden spent Tuesday's debate at perpetual war with himself trying to keep from attacking Trump is projection and little more, completely unconnected to what audiences watched Biden doing. I guess 'half-addled/half-enraged' is an interpretation for Biden and remains more than the autopilot that Alec Baldwin has been on for several years now...The softness of the show's political prism — Michael Che and Colin Jost, able to concentrate exclusively on Trump's COVID diagnosis, were actually much sharper on 'Weekend Update' — was exposed by musical guest Megan Thee Stallion transitioning from a rousing performance of 'Savage' to harsh condemnation of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron. She had a sense of the stakes." It's unfair to judge SNL after a chaotic week, but the show stumbled: "After its COVID sheltering from home and a summer hiatus, Saturday Night Live tried to tackle the impossible in Saturday’s season premiere," says Karen Valby. "Blessings and fruit baskets to the writer’s room for the number of jokes they must have scrapped and rewritten with each of the past 48 hours’ ground-shifting news development. Our president is at Walter Reade; Alec Baldwin is back in Studio 8H. Live from New York, it’s Saturday night." Valby adds: "Host Chris Rock is forever a welcome presence, in both tense situations and ridiculous ones. But the power of his SNL monologue was undercut by the magnitude of his task: how to get laughs out of an absurdly chaotic, ever-changing moment. 'President Trump is in the hospital from COVID, and I just want to say my heart goes out to COVID,' Rock said in his strongest line. He riffed about there being more rules to being on a game show than apparently are to being President, and the bonkers truth that one gets a guaranteed four years to do the most important job in the world badly. But for the most part, his words lacked sting or gravitas. It was too brutal a weekend for a comedian to kill—though damn, one hopes the blessed first responders who made up the studio audience had the f*ing night of their lives." For better or worse, it was very much like a typical SNL, half an entertainment, half a duty: "Players performed side by side, if not at particularly close quarters, unmasked," says Robert Lloyd. "The band was masked where practical, and behind Plexiglass. Most significant, there was an audience, masked, but not distanced; first responders occupied the prime seats on the floor, close to the stage." Ranking SNL's Joe Bidens: Jim Carrey is the show's second-worst Biden after Kevin Nealon (Woody Harrelson was the best): "So far, Jim Carrey’s Biden is not an impression of Joe Biden, it’s a reminder that Jim Carrey’s rubber-faced mugging is funniest when the sole point of the joke is 'Jim Carrey’s rubber-faced mugging,'" says Matthew Dessem. "To be fair to Carrey, it’s not clear how anyone could have pulled comedy out of the horror show that was this week’s presidential debate, especially in light of subsequent COVID-19 diagnoses, but this was nearly unwatchable. Carrey slightly redeemed himself toward the end, presiding over what is probably the first time SNL has invited its audience to fantasize about the death (or at least the serious illness) of a sitting president. That’s just enough edge to edge out Kevin Nealon, but not enough to make it out of the bottom tier of Saturday Night Live Bidens. Fortunately, Carrey will have the chance to improve, since he’ll be playing the role all season." Jim Carrey was doing an imitation of Jim Carrey as Fire Marshal Bill doing an imitation of Joe Biden: "The problem with Carrey is his brand of comedy sucks all the other comedy out of the room. It stops any flow & demand the focus on him. It’s the opposite of collaborative," says Peter Hartlaub. "Great when he’s a villain in a family film or an Ace Ventura-style centerpiece. Horrible for SNL." Where was "Creepy Uncle Joe"?: "What happened to the Joe who mixes up words like a Shakespearean clown?" says Johnny Oleksinski. "Carrey wore Top Gun sunglasses and tried to make the guy as cool as Danny Zuko. Huh? We know SNL wants Biden to win, but that doesn’t mean his lines can’t still be biting and hilarious." "Weekend Update" did absolutely nothing with the bounty of news it was handed: "Out of all the headline figures they could have used for Update guests – Melania Trump, Chris Christie, Amy Coney Barrett – they instead fall back on rote regulars Chen Biao (Bowne Yang), the sassy Chinese Trade Minister, and Carrie Crumb (Aidy Bryant), the bubbly tween travel expert," says Zach Vasquez. "Anyone hoping for a final appearance of Kate McKinnon’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg will have to settle for a short and wordless cut away to her sitting in the audience, before a quick title card the reads: Rest in Power. At least we’re spared another cringeworthy rendition of 'Hallelujah.'" Kate McKinnon paid tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the end of "Weekend Update" Chloe Fineman spoofed The Drew Barrymore Show by referencing The Ellen DeGeneres Show scandal Megan Thee Stallion delivered a powerful "Protect Black Women" statement on SNL During her performance of her hit single "Savage,” Megan took time out to lash out at Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron over his handling of Breonna Taylor’s death at the hands of Louisville police. “Daniel Cameron is no different than the sell-out negroes who sold our people into slavery" was projected behind Megan and her dancers as they stood at attention during the middle of her song. Will SNL's lazy approach to mocking Trump ever change? "If you want to make fun of the president, it’s not that hard," says Emily VanDerWerff. "Just have a famous actor — Alec Baldwin, let’s say — pop up on TV and repeat some of the things the president has said in a big, brash New York accent, then have him pout a little bit as the audience roars its approval. But this approach is also incredibly lazy, and it turns Trump into something vaguely approachable, a video game boss who can be defeated if we can just string together the magic combination of words that will cause him to explode in fury. The 'let’s make Trump angry!' mode of comedy isn’t exclusive to SNL. It is present, to some degree, in the late-night monologues of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers — and it’s all over social media, perhaps most famously in a wildly popular series of Trump lip sync videos by comedian Sarah Cooper. Reimagining Trump as a goon to be stomped on and defeated has its value. He is, after all, just a man. He won’t be the president forever, and will perhaps leave office as soon as January if enough people vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in November’s election. But that 'perhaps' underlines just how complicated making fun of Trump really is — because if you don’t find a way to satirize not just Trump but Trumpism, you run the risk of normalizing what the man stands for while trying desperately to trigger him." VanDerWerff adds: "SNL, especially in the Trump era, has consistently mistaken flashy but over-obvious satire — satire that will win it plaudits among the pundit class for its bravery in taking on Trump by making fun of the most buffoonish things about him — for anything meaningful. It’s possible I’m being unfair to a show that, by its very nature, is uneven, thanks to having exactly one week to pull each episode together. But the show is capable of incisive political satire. As overhyped as it was in terms of tanking Sarah Palin’s image with voters, Tina Fey’s portrayal of Palin was devastating at digging into just how oblivious she was...But the Trump administration is so obviously cartoonish, while also working to achieve such obviously horrific ends, that it becomes all but impossible to make fun of via SNL’s usual techniques of ridiculousness and over-the-top impersonations." ALSO: SNL needs to ditch celebrity cameos and trust its cast to play prominent politicians: "SNL has gotten the most mileage from enlisting famous people to make splashy cameos that drown out half the comedy with delighted audience applause," says Caroline Framke. "So by the time the show cast Jim Carrey to play Biden for this final stretch of the presidential election, it wasn’t a surprise. But for a show that has such a wide reach and direct line to the White House’s own television screens, it’s disappointing, frustrating and deeply unimaginative. On the most superficial level, casting the most plum roles on the show outside its own cast just isn’t a smart way to develop the promising talent it already has...If SNL just wants to grab the most attention possible, well, mission accomplished. But if it wants to be as piercing, relevant and unsparing as it could be, it needs to ditch the cheap plays for instinctive applause and go back to its own basics." Was Will Ferrell's first season on SNL in the mid-1990s a bomb or breakthrough? SNL taps Bill Burr and Issa Rae for their hosting debuts Burr will be joined by first-time musical guest Morgan Wallen on Oct. 10. On Oct. 17, Rae will host Saturday Night Live with returning musical guest Justin Bieber. The last time Bieber performed on SNL was back in February. Michael Che and Colin Jost: SNL's table read now has so many cast members, who have to socially distance, it's like listening to a podcast “We have 20 cast members in our show right now, and they have to be six feet apart. So 20 times six is, uh, probably like 1,000? I don’t know. So you’re in a table read and you’re hearing voices and you’re like ‘Who said that?!’” Jost said on The Tonight Show. “Yeah, it feels like you’re listening to a podcast. You don’t see anybody! It’s great,” Che added. SNL shares the first look at Jim Carrey's Joe Biden Check out Carrey's Biden with Maya Rudolph's Kamala Harris. ALSO: Chris Rock and Megan Thee Stallion mask up for their SNL promo. Is SNL breaking New York coronavirus rules by having a live audience? New York Department of Health spokesperson Gary Holmes said Wednesday that the state banned ticketed events on March 16 and "that restriction has not changed." New York's COVID-19 rules state that television shows and other media productions are prohibited from having a live audience unless it is made up entirely of paid employees, cast or crew. "Offering tickets to the general public without the appropriate casting and screening process is not allowed," Holmes wrote in an email Wednesday to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. "We have communicated that to SNL and expect them to follow the rules like every other business that has reopened during this global pandemic." SNL has been accepting ticket requests for Saturday's show through an audience casting agency. The show is requiring all audience members to submit to a coronavirus test and a temperature check. An SNL spokesperson says the show is working with the department and following all guidelines. Is SNL equipped to parody the disastrous first Trump-Biden debate? Throughout Tuesday's debate, Twitter users predicted that Saturday Night Live would have a field day with the first debate when it returns this week for Season 46, featuring the return of Alec Baldwin as President Trump and Jim Carrey's debut as Joe Biden. As Shawn Cooke notes, however, Saturday Night Live has struggled to parody the chaos and cruelty of Trump for the past 5+ years. "Although major media outlets tried to reduce the debate to a both-sidesy stew of sparring, barbs, and insults — which wasn’t completely untrue, with Biden calling Trump a 'clown,' the 'worst president in American history,' and 'Putin’s puppy' — it rather deliberately misses the forest for the trees," says Cooke. "Rudeness and leaky-brained crosstalk are considerably different from empowering white supremacist militia groups, but a media apparatus so tailored to presenting a view from nowhere that alienates no one couldn’t acknowledge this. Despite its caricatured, squinty, purse-lipped portrayal of the president, SNL is in no better position to reckon with this distinction. The Proud Boys heard the president’s message to 'stand back and standby' loud and clear, lending the group a marketable slogan and making them an immediate household name if they weren’t already. Trump was given an opportunity to further spread mail-in voting conspiracies, which he ably ran with, and tacitly called on his militia boys to keep an eye on the polls in November. Where’s the punchline in all of this, exactly?...SNL’s been especially unequipped to confront tangible fascist threats in the past five years, by more or less reenacting the news with slight exaggerations. This is really all that can be expected of a major network sketch comedy series that infamously brought then-candidate Trump onboard to host in 2015, and has always been the playbook even before Trump. Its gaze is channeled directly through cheeto man bad liberalism as much as middle-ground political tourists, but it’s uniformly after a viewership that’s isolated from the most harmful elements of the administration." ALSO: Chris Rock says he watched the debate with Jim Carrey as they prepared for SNL: "I hadn’t spent that much time with Jim in like 20 years,” Rock told Ellen DeGeneres. “And he is Jim Carrey. He is the most energetic, funniest guy probably we’ve ever seen. To watch him watch Joe Biden, and then do Joe Biden, and then maybe do a little Trump and then do a little Clint Eastwood, and he’s very political at the same time. It was a ride just watching the debates with Jim Carrey.” Colin Jost says Donald Trump was "way into" doing his 2015 SNL porn star sketch: "I think the last sketch of the show ends with Cecily and Vanessa as porn stars endorsing Donald Trump for president and then Donald Trump turns to Cecily who’s blonde and says, 'Didn’t you used to be a brunette?'" Jost said on The Deciding Decade With Pete Buttigieg podcast. "And I’m pretty sure that's the last line of the show. Watching it again in retrospect is so complicated to look at given everything that’s happened." Maya Rudolph hopes Kamala Harris is around for a long time: “I got to meet her, and she is so fantastic. She is so incredible, she is so energizing and I just feel so good to be associated with someone so positive,” says Rudolph. “I just want to do her proud — just do a good job, no pressure!” Chloe Fineman doesn't think of herself as primarily an impressionist: "No, I think that’s a more recent realization that I could do that," Fineman says of her many dead-on impressions. "I probably started doing them four years ago. And definitely in quarantine I feel like I’ve leaned into impressions. But when I’m doing an impression I’m trying to turn that person into a character, if that makes any sense." Bowen Yang says he was stunned by the diversity behind the scenes at SNL: "Everyone's being very honest, I think, and transparent about how things work there, which I think is great. I mean, I was kind of surprised to go into SNL and sort of be just genuinely surprised and comforted by - internally, like, just going in and seeing like, oh, there are Asians in every department," he says. "There are people of color in every department. We've had this, like, legacy of queer writers who've been at the show since its beginning." Chris Redd talks conspiracy theories, Halloween costumes and why he'd love to live in London Friends keep texting Alex Moffat photos of Eric Trump Check out Chris Rock and SNL cast and crew social distancing in their first table read of Season 46 Instead of using Saturday Night Live's cramped offices for this week's table read, the show used Studio 8H, with each cast member getting their own table. Alec Baldwin defends playing Trump on SNL coronavirus hospitalization: We wouldn't have mocked him if he was "truly, gravely ill"** In a lengthy Instagram video Sunday, Baldwin said that Saturday Night Live wouldn't have poked fun at Trump's diagnosis if the show thought he was "truly, gravely ill." "If there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill, and people said, 'Trump is really in trouble,' then I would bet you everything I have that we wouldn't even get near that, in terms of content of the show," Baldwin said, according to EW. "They would have done something else. I've seen that happen before...We only have the words of the White House itself and the people who work there themselves to go on, and all of them have all been saying he isn’t in any danger. We only have their word to go by. And if their word was that he was in serious trouble, then we probably wouldn't have done it." Baldwin also defended SNL opening with a debate sketch, even though the Biden-Trump debate was old news by Saturday night. "We thought the debate was something topical, and we didn't have anything with him in a hospital bed, but we had the debate," Baldwin added. "You'd have to have a very good reason to avoid that, topicality-wise, and nobody thought that they were mocking somebody's illness by doing that." ALSO: Jim Carrey delivered SNL's best Joe Biden: "Saturday Night Live has had a few different cast members play Joe Biden in the past, but none has quite stuck," says Allegra Frank. "Biden’s persona is not as immediately defined as Barack Obama’s or Donald Trump’s, which may be why he’s been a bit of a challenge. Instead of asking someone like Jason Sudeikis to come back and reprise the role, SNL went with a much bigger name to take a stab at a Biden impression: Jim Carrey. This may seem like an odd choice to some viewers, considering that Carrey is both one of Hollywood’s greatest hams and Canadian. But Carrey walked on stage all lanky and finger-guns ablaze, his teeth as shiny as the real Biden’s. He exuded the same kind of intrinsic chill that Biden often does, the sense of coolness that was a large part of his persona during his vice-presidential years." Maya Rudolph's cameo as Kamala Harris was one of the most baffling parts of SNL's much-criticized debate cold open: "Eventually, Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris enters the fray, in a deus ex machin–huh? moment, immediately coded as a mommy figure to the two equally misbehaving childish debaters," says Joe Berkowitz. "No premise is offered to justify Harris’s appearance here, other than that Maya Rudolph, like Carrey, has a contract this season. Her arrival cements the sentiment that both sides are responsible for this debate’s descent into unwatchability, an idea that some major media outlets ran with this week, but filtered through pandering gender dynamics." SNL ran into a problem that has plagued it for a few years now: The discourse on Twitter was far more entertaining than the show SNL scores its most-watched season premiere in four years and second-most-watched in 12 years Drew Barrymore reacts to Chloe Fineman parodying her talk show on SNL Here's the list of SNL writers, including the four head writers Michael Che, Colin Jost, Kent Sublette and Anna Drezen On Watch What Happens Live, Bowen Yang recalled his SNL audition: "I just threw everything against the wall … I was like, I don’t think it’s gonna happen, so I’m just gonna have fun with it."
	Last edited by TMC; 10-06-2020 at 01:56 AM.