Saturday Night Live, Ranked and Reviewed: Season 10

"Hey, you! I know you! I know you!"

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With the loss of Eddie Murphy, Ebersol found himself in a nerve-wracking predicament. How could he maintain SNL as cool, appointment television without one of the greatest stars the show ever had? The solution: bring in some of the biggest names in comedy that he could and hoping for the best. Do the additions of Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Christopher Guest, Rich Hall, Harry Shearer, and Pamela Stephenson end Ebersol's era on a high note, or does the spirit of the show get lost in the shuffle? 

For my reviews of the previous season, Season 9, CLICK HERE! Otherwise, it's time to wrap up the Ebersol era—let's roll.

10/06/84: (no host) / Thompson Twins (S10E01)

Well, this episode certainly feels like a shock. After the past three seasons have quietly inched forward with a few slick, carefully-integrated hires and departures, Ebersol took a sharp turn, slimming the veterans of his era down to the bare essentials and filling the empty seats with pre-established, triple-A comedy talent. It's the bizarre pageantry of a self-proclaimed numbers guy, less concerned with the show's longevity than its notability, and as far as being a fight-or-flight response to the loss of his biggest stars, it at least tracks with his character. The idea of having one big, bombastic season of the show with absolutely zero long-term plans is still weird to consider, though, and while that gives me a lot of excitement over the sort of extravagance it entails—look at all of this amazing comedy talent, and also Billy Crystal!—this premiere feels like a complicated summation of all of my fears. It's a pretty great episode... but it's certainly got some broader issues.

Beyond all the new faces, this episode also feels immediately unusual because of how bizarrely it's organized. We start with a pretape, roll into eight minutes of Billy Crystal standup (no immediate comment), don't hit the first commercial break until literally 24 minutes in, and over half of the material in the show is pre-recorded or has pre-recorded segments. Perhaps it's no surprise that new hire Martin Short, on a recent podcast, recalled this episode being a complete disaster at dress that had to be heavily retooled into this strange final product. For all of its slickness, it feels like we're no closer to understanding how well this arrangement will work, and in that overwhelming uncertainty I was looking for anything that felt vaguely familiar which, coincidentally, this episode also fails to find for the most part either. 

You'd think that Ebersol would lean on his veterans to help carry this episode across, but that's the night's biggest weakness: he places all of his confidence in his new talent, leaving everyone else to scrounge up whatever screentime they can get despite being the most qualified to conduct the show. The weird stratification of this season's cast members is already all too clear; for all that the "newbies" get, they only ever seem to interact with themselves 90% of the time. It's so bad that it almost feels like a shock to see Jim Belushi's entrance into "First Draft Theater," as if he's walking into an entirely different show; it creates an uneasy sort of convergence, even though he slots perfectly well into the scene, because this episode treats the new and returning cast members like oil and water. 

Jim definitely fares the best of the returning class, a testament to the fact that he's certainly Ebersol's most valuable hold-over. In addition to his aforementioned role, he also scores a particularly fun pretape as a man who shoves the entire contents of a janitor's closet down his pants in hopes of enhancing his natural endowment and picking up some women at a bar. It's not new for Jim—hell, this is basically just that "Shoplifting" sketch from last season but more amorphously phallic—but it's the kind of thing that he sells all the same with his Belushi charms, and the production value grants the idea some scope. Everyone else struggles; Julia's three roles tonight are introducing other cast members, while Gary's reward for submitting the great "Needleman" sketch from the last season finale is getting to appear in the musical guest introduction as Walter Mondale and make verbless cameos in the pretapes. Poor Mary gets even less.

At their expense, the episode makes ample room for the season's new talent, and all of them at least get some strong opportunities to shine in their respective territories. Harry Shearer makes his short-lived return to the show and shines with his meticulous characterizations in the pretapes, while Martin Short shines as a physical performer, earning laughs merely by the ways that he moves about and carries himself. (His Ed Grimley debut is one of the night's most coherent live sketches, fueled by something of an adorable, childish enthusiasm, and I look forward to how he continues to sculpt the universe of the character.) Their pairing scores the night's most celebrated piece, and rightfully so: "Synchronized Swimming" is nothing short of a goofy triumph that finds both performers in their absolute prime, cast as two men staking out their corner of the female-dominated world of synchronized swimming. While Harry sets the scene and lends the idea realism, droning on self-seriously in the way that a Harry Shearer does, it's Martin who goes in for the kill as his naive, dumbly-smiling brother pitching in from time to time ("I don't swim.") that really sends the piece over, as if the visual of the two dancing to the Indiana Jones theme in a pool wasn't amazing enough.

Rich Hall gets quite a bit less to do, and it feels like the show isn't quite sure how to use him. He's a political comedian, to my knowledge, joining a notoriously apolitical era of the show. His "Election Report" segment, finding him trailing Walter Mondale around through various fundraising dinners in Washington D.C., at least gives me hope that he'll be able to establish his own little niche, however much his voice needs to be declawed. Pamela Stephenson is, likewise, not a particularly known commodity by this point; for as well as she slots into her sketches tonight, I'm not quite aware of what her skillset or voice is as a performer. Out of everyone, though, Christopher Guest emerges as the premiere's MVP. I was skeptical of his inclusion in Season 10 because I didn't know much about him as a live performer, but he acquits himself perfectly to a wide range of sketches and ultimately demonstrates a stunning versatility that primes him as this season's most promising new talent. There's not a second where he struggles with the format of the show, playing his straight role in the Ed Grimley sketch perfectly (hilarious boom mic gaff aside), threatening to steal "Synchronized Swimming" from Martin and Harry as their flamboyant choreographer, and anchoring Andy Breckman's latest "Book Beat" sketch spectacularly as a man with an iron pipe through his head, slipping in and out of reality while attempting to interview an author. My absolute favorite performance of his was in the aforementioned "First Draft Theater" sketch opposite Pamela and Jim, playing a gritty noir detective beholden to the lazy analogies and poor writing choices of his author. A few choice quotes: "Los Angeles, how do you describe it? A big city... with a Spanish name." "She had the kind of figure that made you wanna have sex with her." And of course, "AIYEEEE, he's got a gun!" 

Oh yeah, and Billy Crystal is also here. It's astonishing how well he connects with the audience, especially given how much I found that he dragged the episode down every time he resurfaced. I suppose that's something I'll have to learn to reconcile with; he's an objectively good and comfortable live performer, and that makes me hope that we'll get some stuff out of him that I can enjoy, but his predilections for indulgent, mind-numbing material (Fernando, or the interminable Howard Cosell sketch which I only survived because his vocal impression is a dead ringer for John Mulaney) ensure that he'll grant every episode this season at least some pause. It's just a matter of how much...

In the end, this is a season premiere that does work, filled to the brim with spectacles and successes, but at what cost? It's unclear how sustainable this model for the show will be on a week-by-week basis, and for as promising as some of the new hires are, the exclusion of those who've worked diligently to keep the Ebersol years afloat all this time makes for a frustrating byproduct. Hopefully the next few episodes will be able to strike more of a balance. (Penned 7/26/22)

GRADE: B+.

10/13/84: Bob Uecker / Peter Wolf (S10E02)

Welp, my concerns for the season have substantially magnified. Whereas the premiere worked in spite of itself, this episode gets let down in every way I feared the season could struggle. For all of the great talent on Ebersol's hands, he can't just rely on them to carry the show through and make it spectacular; they have ebbs and flows but get shoved to the front whether or not they're at their best, all at the expense of the solid base of veterans who he should be leaning more on. Subsequently, we end up with an episode like this, stunted by cast imbalances, indulgence, and an overwhelming lethargy. While I'll choose to accept it for the time being as a big fluke, I can't say that having the second episode of the season be this poor is doing much to fuel my hope. 

Of course, I'd be remiss not to mention that part of the night's problems have to do with Bob Uecker, who's simply not fit a fit host for SNL. I don't have my doubts that he's a funny guy good for making witty, off-the-cuff remarks in the realm of sports, and there's something satisfying about his voice, but it's a conduit for extreme dryness that only gets exacerbated when he's forced out of his comfort zone to do live sketch comedy. A sketch like the one where he's a baseball manager trading his own son away like a player because of his disappointing little league performance should work, and he's given some real hard-hitting dialogue, but his energy is so low-key that nothing can snap into place. There are definitely ways to work with someone as dry as he is, but doing things like joining him in his monologue with Harry as Ronald Reagan and proceeding to have the dry-off of the century only accomplishes the goal of opening this live comedy show with a stretch of desert. His demeanor is only channeled very successfully into one piece: "The Mamie Eisenhower Center For The Dull," a pretape advertising a community center for the most mind-numbing members of society that, at one point, inexplicably features him droning on about the exact same things he featured in his monologue verbatim.

All of that strange lack of energy then serves to create a certain, overwhelming deadness, the likes of which I haven't felt from the show in a long, long time. Less than bringing to mind the struggles of Season 7 at its most trying, this episode reminded me of Season 5: there's no shortage of talent, but it's being deployed so listlessly that whatever excitement there is to be had of the cast we get to watch loses its luster almost immediately. I was under the impression that Ebersol organized his shows to put the best, most satisfying material upfront, but strangely enough, his own idea of how to organize a fool-proof running order explodes in his face; this episode is so dull and so trying that even when it's gifted by legitimately fun material, it fails to build any momentum. Maybe a part of that is, for instance, the fact that it slams the episode's best piece against its absolute worst. "7x4" is the latest Andy Breckman masterpiece, a mathematics-themed game show where every contestant knows the answer and is so aggressively desperate to answer it as fast as possible, much to the disdain of its beleaguered host (Gary!). It's simple, succinct, and gifts this season's neglected veteran cast, as well as the currently-underused Rich Hall, a chance to show just how much the show still needs them. To follow that up immediately with the brutal "Negro Baseball" sketch is to stare into the nightmarish abyss that is the worst this season could offer: an eight minute long pretape casting Christopher and Billy as old black baseball players, their faces caked in prosthetics and blackface to a degree of queasy unrecognizability. Perhaps there is something to it, and it touts some nice cameos from Yogi Berra and baseballer Dave Winfield, but the whole piece is ill-conceited and interminable. Billy would go on to declare it his favorite piece that he ever did at SNL and defend it on the ground that "times were different," to absolutely nobody's surprise. Go to bed, Billy, it's late for you. Feh.

I barely wanna mention much of the other middling material because it's not worth further consideration. The post-monologue sketch, a reunion tour of the Rice Krispies mascot elves (Christopher, Billy, and Martin) who have since gone on to live complicated adult lives, has a sound premise for some goofiness, but the awkwardness of its construction holds it back; every time it feels like it's perking up, it hits you with some real hacky shit (one of them has a child wife, one of them almost being replaced by a black elf named "Thud") that immediately stomps out whatever fun was starting to percolate. There's also a piece where Martin's higher-up tries to console Harry's Tom Brokaw about his speech impediment, an idea that's cute for a few minutes but which ends up being executed in such a droll manner that even the audience stops giving it anything after a certain point. The back-half offered a few fun little things, like the sketch where Christopher outsmarts a lost and found by tricking Bob's police officer into giving him nebulously-described valuables or the silly ad for freshly-squeezed baseball juice, but they're the sort of things that should make for respectable B-material in an episode and not the top-shelf product.

How much more is there to say about this one that hasn't already been said? Even someone as risk-averse as Ebersol couldn't stop it from feeling like an overwrought disaster. All I can say is that while I'll approach the next few episodes with an expectation that the show will take some time to finetune, I hope that they'll at least resemble last week more than this one. TL;DR: Uecker's was yuckers. (Penned 7/27/22)

GRADE: D+.

10/20/84: The Reverend Jesse Jackson / Andrae Crouch and Wintley Phipps (S10E03)

I gotta be honest: after that "Negro Baseball" sketch last week, I was absolutely terrified that the next episode would be hosted by a predominant black politician; it risks serving to hammer in just how bad it is that there are absolutely no black people in the cast or writer's room. While I'm no less sold on Season 10's ability to sustain itself or be good by its own merits, though, this is an incredibly solid episode, in no small part due to Jesse. That's not to dismiss whatever material this week submitted—even in Jesse's absence, the material feels far more energetic—but there really is a sense that the show had to work to get at his level. Considering how much of a goddamn mayonnaise sandwich this season is, it's miraculous that endeavor even paid off at all.

In a lot of ways, Jesse reminds me of his colleague and fellow unlikely SNL host, Julian Bond. Both are clearly people unaccustomed to the live comedy format, but they acquit themselves remarkably well to the process and, indebted to their viewpoints, give the show a unique identity. The one key difference between the two is how much Julian was willing to play characters and indulge in the show's cruder, more irreverent whims (recall the famous sketch where he criticizes Garrett's intelligence as a darker-skinned man, even if he would later rebuke his involvement). Jesse, on the other hand, is completely uncompromising, and while that sort of staunchness has led to rather difficult outings from the show, his presence is one which SNL is wise to amplify. A sketch like "The Question is Moot" feels like it shouldn't work, arising from Jesse's stipulation that at least one piece in the show allowed him to espouse his political views, yet it ends up being the night's most memorable and fun sketch. Perhaps some of that has to do with the magic touch Andy Breckman (co-writing with Martin Short, surprisingly) lends the piece, but it's Jesse who carries it, hosting a quiz show where he cuts off all of the contestant's answers by repeatedly declaring "The question is moot!" and spiraling into impassioned anti-Reagan rants. Throw in a few more great little moments that further deconstruct Jesse's aversion to questions ("Who gets the car?" "I get the car!" "Why?" "The question is moot!") and you've got a surprisingly fiery little piece.

Jesse's uncompromising voice also yields one of the episode's most compelling moments: a straight-to-camera address criticizing the show for its lack of black cast or staff members. It's not uproariously funny but it feels remarkably scathing, most certainly addressing a topic that he wanted to champion, and the fact that Jesse lures the elusive Dick Ebersol directly in front of the camera while poking holes in his operation makes it even more shocking that the show allowed itself to be so deeply criticized. Although Jesse lets the show make fun of its overwhelming lack of diversity throughout the night—most famously, his monologue features a behind-the-scenes segment where all the white control room operators scurry out, replaced by black equivalents when Jesse approaches—it feels raw for the show, in any era, to not even wink at its problems so much as own up to them. It's no big surprise that the segment would end up being removed from all repeat airings.

Elsewhere, Jesse helps the show maintain a shockingly pointed tone that feels as atypical as it does gratifying for Ebersol's politics-averse era. Perhaps most excitingly, Jesse anchors an iteration of Saturday Night News that actually works, superseding the usual watery material with sharp barbs at Reagan while maintaining a thoughtful, playful tone. Both guest correspondents feel especially worthwhile, too; one casts Martin as a young Republican attempting to fill equal time demands before breaking down in cowardly tears as Jesse looms over him, while the usually cringeworthy Rappin' Jimmy B has his best possible outing, getting shut down by Jesse while Jim gets rightfully served for his cultural appropriation. (Whatever nastiness there might be to that self-reflection is also washed down nicely by just how much Jim beams at Jesse's rebuttal rap. It's cute!) I suppose it's no great surprise that the segment of the show that caters most to Jesse's abilities as a public speaker would be a high point for the show, but really, seeing any SNN installment that works feels surreal.

The rest of the show keeps pace with Jesse's energetic presence, even if the material he doesn't pilot is the usual, apolitical fare. The debut of Willie and Frankie is the necessary proof I've needed that Billy can work this season, partnering him with Christopher as they exchange nonchalant pleasantries about their disturbing, masochistic tendencies. It's the rare sketch whose recurring status excites me; this first installment has an enjoyable, low-key undercurrent that makes its dark humor jump out at you, and I look forward to seeing how much more twisted these get. (There's also another Billy sketch that works, casting him as a jokester who repeatedly alternates between melodramatically telling Jim and Pamela that their child died and admitting he's busting their chops, though the greatest delight is just seeing Jim shoot him point-blank as atonement.) Meanwhile, Rich gets another great, brief pretape that further demonstrates his deadpan, absurdist abilities—a PSA about children eating refrigerator magnets, and the warning signs to keep an eye out for (a tendency to point towards the north, or the hassle of getting stuck to a delivery truck)—and Martin gets to do another silly Ed Grimley piece aboard an airplane, devolving into a Twilight Zone riff as he runs up and down the aisle, ranting, raving, and wildly gesticulating as an Ed Grimley does.

The episode starts to become a bit more disorganized in its second half, giving way to a series of shorter, looser segments, but the energy never falters, nor does the material miss. As a whole, this is a remarkably solid outing of the show, and Jesse gives things the extra kick they need. Here's hoping that even without as defiant of an anchor, this season will be able to chart some upwards momentum; if nothing else, this episode proves that the cast is capable of true success. (Penned 8/02/22)

GRADE: B+. 

11/03/84: Michael McKean / Chaka Khan (S10E04)

It feels bizarre, given how much the show has been passed over to inexperienced live performers who might need some basic accommodation, that it's taken the season a full month for there to be a host who naturally clicks with the show's format. All of the past three episodes have failed to really point towards what an episode this season will look like: the premiere was a last-minute save following a horrible dress rehearsal, Bob Uecker's episode was horrible, and Jesse Jackson's episode, as great as it was, felt like a massive anomaly. With this Michael McKean episode, I feel like I can finally get a glimpse at how this version of the show looks with things at full operation, and rather delightfully, it's a pretty solid outing! 

I'd be remiss to mention, of course, that Michael is more than just a merely competent host. He's someone with a compelling, personal history with both Harry and Christopher, and in spite of his sitcom success, he's a cult comedy figure with a distinguished pedigree. It feels like we perhaps don't see as much of him as we should, but his status does offer him some rousing little opportunities that wouldn't befall most other hosts. Perhaps most famously, he teams up with his two buddies and forms a  Spinal Tap-esque folk trio, The Folksmen; while they would flourish in a film two decades later, their introduction here is as meticulous and filled with subtle, hilarious little details as their work always is. (My biggest laugh of the night was probably Christopher, with his ridiculous wig and froggy affectation, disclosing that he would wake up wrenching and screaming every night over the death of folk music.) Culminating their little "reunion" pretape with a full-fledged performance of "Old Joe's Place" in front of the SNL audience, too, is such a blast, and while there's no immediately obvious joke to it, the pastiche is both silly and remarkably well-performed—a clear labor of love.

Michael doesn't get any other real spotlight moments, though he slots himself in well with the cast to a degree that it's kind of easy to forget that he's the night's host. (Maybe it's not surprising that he'd eventually become a full-fledged SNL cast member several years later. Gotta be a great time, right!?) Either way, too, it feels like his presence offers the show a bit more ease and confidence, and all of the material has a fun sense of spirit compared to some of the the more strained output of previous weeks. A sketch like Billy and Martin's rabbi piece feels like the perfect example of that; it really shouldn't work, just as any Billy sketch shouldn't work, but the thrill of watching two comedy professionals playing at the top of their game with some sharp, absurdist writing to support them makes it feel like a thrill. While Billy scores all the biggest laughs as a confounding rabbi who gives Martin advice to kill his wife for her infidelity, brandishing a customized version of the Bible that insists that all of Earth is just God's dream ("He dreams, we suffer. For all we know, WWII might've been just something he ate that didn't agree with him! A bad piece of fish!"), Martin is just as good, maybe even more compelling, as the straight man who can do little more than give Billy a perplexed, thousand-yard stare.

The rest of the material delights, or if nothing else intrigues. Our second installment of "First Draft Theater" isn't as great as the first, but I love how it ups the ante by having the manuscript of Twelve Angry Men become increasingly incoherent as its writer gets further into a bottle of booze. More escalation could've come out of that solid premise, but it's a fine little exercise in absurdity with some good surprises and a worthy enough successor. Fernando also makes his spectacular return to the show after a delightful, two-episode reprieve with the debut of "Fernando's Hideaway," but against all odds, it's a pretty fun debut. While Billy is as annoying as usual, he's smart to cede all of the real humor to the random cameraman he's interviewing under the guise of being a last-minute replacement for Barry Manilow; while these segments will probably seldom work as well as this first one, I think sidelining Fernando in favor of a bizarre guest could result in some more solid installments in the future and I'll be cautiously optimistic. It was probably Rich's gloriously stupid SNL Fashion Report as David Byrne, though, twitching around in the singer's trademark massive suit while screeching about whether or not he got a bad deal on his outfit, that gave me the most joy. Rich is no impressionist, but I love the weird little corner he's holding down in this season's cast as a deadpan goofball; if Ebersol's gonna water down his political comedy output, it's a pretty damn good alternative.

Apropos of Rich's minimization, there's also some surprising political bite here for an Ebersol episode (weird saying that for the second episode in a row, I know), though I suppose this is the episode right before Reagan's overwhelming victory over Mondale which even Ebersol can't really neglect. Maybe it's also indicative of the return of Jim Downey to the show's writer's room, or the presence of someone as archly political as Harry; both submit interesting pieces, even if they're perhaps more thoughtful than chuckle-worthy. Jim contributes this episode's big Mondale piece, with Gary's impression of the doomed presidential candidate being coached by his staffers on their tireless plan to secure Minnesota and Minnesota alone, and while there's a certain flatness, Gary's performance (at once both pathetic and ebullient, truly a Kroeger specialty) and a few choice turns (at one point, some Reagan campaigners ask if Mondale will vote for Reagan to ensure a unanimous victory) keep it together. Meanwhile, Harry claws at Reagan more ferociously than we've seen from the show in years, playing the president and giving an address about how he wants to bring prayers back to schools while antagonizing little kids who disagreed with blackmail and armbands. One has to wonder how Harry was able to push such a nasty little piece past his boss, though it's also another reminder of how unsurprising it is that he'd depart halfway through the season for creative differences.

The only things that don't really work in this episode at all feel short and quick, to their credit, though Saturday Night News does its darnedest to sink this episode to the point of no return. (How could they do Edwin Newman like this after all his great service to the show, relegating him to reading fictitious state songs for four minutes?) Fortunately, the episode jumps back, relatively unscathed, and some kick-ass performances from Chaka Khan keep the ball rolling. This episode is the standard that this season should be striving for, and I hope that it can serve as a model and not just an exception to the rule. (Penned 8/03/22)

GRADE: B+.

11/10/84: George Carlin / Frankie Goes To Hollywood (S10E05)

What a power move this episode is. I've been looking forward to seeing this episode for the longest time for a fairly obvious reason: George Carlin, as the first ever host of Saturday Night Live, is permanently baked into the show's history, even if ironically enough he's more of a feature of the pilot than a host. (He was also apparently "full of cocaine" per his own assessment and denied being in sketches because he feared stepping outside of his comfort zone.) To see him back now, riding the next wave of his popularity and being a more active participant in the show, is an exciting proposition. For a show where hype so often serves as a death knell, I gotta give it to Ebersol, too, that this episode is absolutely delightful.

I can never be too sure what the secret ingredient is to this season's success, because it always sort of feels like the show could drop the ball at any moment. Season 10 has the appearance of a well-oiled machine, but the cast is so incoherent and perpetually at risk of being squandered or exploited that a solid outcome doesn't feel like a real guarantee. Nevertheless, there's a sense here that the show wants to give George a second chance at hosting a proper, solid episode of SNL, and he certainly gets it; he's all over this episode and always doing a damned good job. While his monologue frames him as a jaded, indignant truth-teller—the Carlin I'm more familiar with, and less into—he approaches most of his sketch roles tonight with a shocking humility, always grounding himself in the scenes in surprisingly endearing ways. A sketch as simple as "Ted's Book of World Records" feels unassuming, casting George as a random guy who's compiled a book of all of his personal "world" records, but it's the fact that George imbues his character with an adorable oddball energy that makes the piece really excel; he's just so goddamn sweet as he shares all of his mundane, non-informational factoids, and it makes me smile. (Most eggs ever eaten in one sitting: "Two! I'm not much on breakfast!" Most rattlesnakes ever milked: "None!") There's a similar earnestness he gives to the cop family sketch, portraying a cop who has to reconcile with his son Billy's ineptitude at trying to carry the family tradition. It's another Nate Herman sketch chock full of bizarre, wordy flourishes, but unlike his contributions last season ("Boy's Life On the Mississippi"; "How High The Noon"), it aims for a more slice-of-life angle and gives both actors a chance to deploy some legitimate, dramatic chops. It's a bit slow but it has a story to tell, and it tells that story with surprising sweetness in spite of its gut-busting final punchline.

In terms of the episode itself, I also loved how much variety it felt like we got, both in cast utilization and in the medley of differing tones across the night's material. Whereas one of my main issues with the preceding Michael McKean episode was how much it seemed to minimize the show's veteran cast members (a difficulty all the more felt by Jim's complete absence), this episode feels like it strikes a satisfying balance. Gary gets to helm the cold open, a delightfully meta piece where he rants about how much of a waste it was to spend the summer perfecting his impression of Walter Mondale ("Mister 13 Electoral Votes!"), as well as starring alongside Julia in the sharp fake ad for a radar, missile-shooting contraceptive; meanwhile, Julia and Mary imbue life into the debuts of Chi-Chi and Consuela, a hacky bit that they're able to shine through all the same with some good lines ("[Ghostbusters] made Chi-Chi cry." "A card trick could make me cry..."), however much I wish they could be served better. Jim gets the episode's greatest highlight, though, and another spectacular highlight for Ebersol's pretape department as a violently-determined high school chess coach who treats the game like it's a nail-biting athletic competition. Jim's wheelhouse may veer limited at times, but he finds the exact right way to use his abilities; his performance is both manic at all the right moments, screaming and kicking chairs over poor chess moves, and refreshingly human.

Ebersol's A-team submits some surprising gems as well, despite some early reservations. "The Joe Franklin Show" on-paper should be my worst nightmare, presenting Billy a chance to do his hyper-specific idea of what comedy should be while deploying an incredibly esoteric impression, but the sketch works perfectly all the same. Billy's at his best when he gets to play more low-key and cede laughs to his scene partners, and both of his traits enable the piece's success: Martin gets to debut his loopy Jackie Rogers Jr. impression, Christopher gets good laughs as a ventriloquist very particular about his puppet's Castilian accent, and George walks away with the sketch as a quietly befuddled fireman who's just trying his best to make sense of the oddities he's surrounded by. (Seriously, George is so good in this episode.) The later, Harry-led "In Thickeness And In Health" sketch flashed similar, overly-specific warning signs, but the introduction of Martin as his curmudgeonly Irving Cohen character causes the sketch to shoot into the stratosphere. I swear, Martin is one of the absolute funniest people to ever exist, and watching him struggle against a treadmill like some sort of human ragdoll while puffing a cigar in his mouth is the kind of thing you have to see to believe. (There's also another installment of Willie and Frankie, even better than the first. I wonder at what point I'm gonna turn on these sketches but I hope I never do.)

As I mentioned a bit above, all of these different sketches go together perfectly, creating a night full of variation, sometimes preposterous and sometimes restrained. It's the sort of breadth that makes even the night's weakest material (George as a Revolutionary War-era stand-up telling slight, period-specific jokes) feel like it's part of something bigger. That's the sort of vibe I love the most from these early SNL episodes, and against all odds, in an era so frequently insistent on following the easiest path to victory up top before dying painful deaths in the back-half, this feels like a quintessential example of how great that variety can be. (Penned 8/04/22)

GRADE: A-.

11/17/84: Ed Asner / The Kinks (S10E06)

Good god is this season on a roll! I went into Season 10 with a lot of fears, and while I don't wanna discount the risk that it could slip at any moment, it's astonishing just how well things have gone; barring Uecker's episode, which now feels like an uncharacteristic misstep, this might be one of my favorite stretches of SNL episodes in all of the show's history. Perhaps it won't last much longer, but Ed Asner's hosting gig is a splendid continuation of that upwards trend.

As with last week, in addition to being tied together by a very strong host, this episode feels perpetually inspired, and everyone (aside from Billy, but alas) brings their A-game to some truly compelling, original material. Hell, for an era so reliant on beating material intro the ground, there's only one retread sketch in this episode, the famous Ed Grimley Thanksgiving sketch, and even then it teems with as much originality as it can. These pieces are recurring sketches done right, each new installment continuing to craft the strange word of Grimley's character—this time, a glance into his homelife—while thrusting him into stranger and stranger circumstances. Of course Grimley gets entertainment from watching his neighbors with a telescope, equal parts voyeuristic and childish, and having the low-key nature of the scenario immediately intensify as he bears witness to his neighbor (Asner) strangling his wife is the perfect launching point for Ed to anxiously rant and rave and bounce around. (Christopher coming in as Grimley's similarly-personified father and saving him from Asner's attempt to murder him, too, is a perfect, goofy button.)

Elsewhere, the material veers into deeply conceptual, rewarding territory. Rich anchors (and co-writes) Andy Breckman's latest masterpiece, "Walking After Midnight," casting him as a glum, overworked grocery store employee who discovers the automatic door mat at the grocery store possesses magical powers to open anything within its vicinity. It's a fantastic piece, charmingly imaginative and teeming with wild possibilities in the way that Breckman does best, and having the piece take a turn as Rich harnesses his insane powers to get sweet vengeance against his shitty boss (Jim) allows the piece to pivot towards a swift and satisfying finale. Meanwhile, while Billy secures a merciless dead spot in the middle of the episode with his godawful one-man show bit, he finds yet another solid partnership with Christopher in the 60 Minutes sketch as two proud novelty gag business owners being interviewed by Harry's Mike Wallace, decrying the cheap Chinese knock-offs of their products. I don't know what it is about Christopher who can tap into Billy's best impulses as a performer but they're a perfect pair here, all simpering and smug. It's Martin's debut of his great Nathan Thurm character, though, nervously sweating, stuttering, and puffing a cigarette as Harry questions him about the incriminating knock-off company he's trapped having to defend, which shines the brightest. ("Is it me? It's him, right?", he pleads with the camera.)

While it's no surprise that Ebersol's most valued performers get some solid work, it's a wonderful surprise that some of the season's most neglected cast members walk away with some great highlights, too. Unfortunate facepaint aside, the "Me and Julio" sketch gives Gary a fun, energetic showcase as Julio Iglesias, running across the stage and maintaining several improbable duets at the same time, and he joins Julia and Rich for the clever "You Can't Put Too Much" sketch as nuclear technicians who struggle to interpret their retired boss' semantically-confounding advice. Best of all, the perpetually-misused Mary has one of the best nights of her tenure, trotting back her great Mary Tyler Moore impression for the crowd-pleasing cold open (a fun time, even if I'm largely out of the loop there) and scoring a particularly touching 10-to-1 as Wendy opposite of Ed's aged Peter Pan. While Ed has largely folded into the show as a consummate professional, he's at the top of his game here, trapped between his boyish, nostalgic yearnings for Wendy and the despair of his advanced aging; moments like him talking about Tinkerbell's death could easily play for shock, but the low-key nature of the piece and Mary's flawless dramatic acting work give it more of a pitiful, bittersweet edge that ends the episode in an affecting place. (Also: Billy Crystal wrote that sketch?? Credit where credit's due.)

There are still some issues with the season that feel like they could use finessing—Harry, once again, is almost entirely shut out of the episode, and the divide between Ebersol's A and B-team still feels too wide for the cast to feel like a proper collective—but all in all, this episode is another home run. There's always a lot to contend with this season, but the fact that it's conjured up some of the best material and episodes of Ebersol's entire run certainly speaks to something. (Penned 8/15/22)

GRADE: A-.

12/01/84: Ed Begley Jr. / Billy Squier (S10E07)

By the time this episode threw me its second rerun pretape, it felt like it was official: the streak of great episodes this season, sadly, has come to an end. I suppose it's no great surprise that the insane momentum we've had lately would prove hard to maintain. That's not to say this is a bad episode, but it feels like an episode where the show is finally starting to settle into a slightly less audacious state. Perhaps it's on the search for a bit more sustainability, or perhaps it's something else entirely; there's a strange, slightly-dead energy to the episode whose exact origin feels a bit difficult to grasp, and it's an energy that eludes some of the more obvious culprits for weakness. Let's just chalk it up to an off week rather than active fatigue, as well as a few poor choices.

Ed Begley, Jr., to his credit, is not one of the episode's issues. Even though I wasn't as confident in his hosting abilities going in as a lot of other hosts we've had this season, he definitely feels on-par with them; there's a playfulness and gameness which he exudes that helps hold this episode together even when it threatens to explode into a string of loose ends. His monologue, which is packed full of random odds and ends—roller-skating, riffing on Mr. Rogers, doing a frenzied St. Elsewhere retake, and removing the "Jr." from his name—is a big testament to his watchability. When he's given strong material, too, he doesn't fail the show, and occasionally he even feels like a key to its success. My favorite piece cast him as Death, knocking on the door of Martin's choking victim before being challenged to a game of chance for Martin's life—Trivial Pursuit. It's a writerly premise packed with great little details (he refuses to play chess to bargain for his victim's lives because "We've been trying to kill Bobby Fischer for 12 years now"), and his characterization of Death, at once both grim and casual, helps the sketch maintain its humorously low-key feel and tell more of a story than most.

As with a lot of other episodes this season, though, Ed isn't really placed at the forefront as much as the cast is, so I'd like to take the moment to examine how S10's cast dynamics have solidified. Perhaps most notably, it feels like a testament to how hard-working Billy is (as well as the favoritism towards him) that you can see his fingerprints in three of the night's sketches, all to varying degrees of effectiveness. While we don't get anything as aggressively indulgent as last week's one-man show monologue, we do get "Kate and Ali," letting him do his Muhammad Ali impression against Martin's Katherine Hepburn for the sake of a strange pun; their second team-up for the vaudeville funeral bit further serves to solidify that Martin is an immensely watchable sketch virtuoso, while Billy is only as good as the material is. He does score a great little piece with Jim, though, casting them as two old pals stuck in the vicious loop of trying to figure out what to do with their night that's seemingly defined their entire relationship. As with the Death sketch, it's a conceptual piece whose greatest strength is its nonchalant approach to absurdity; Billy's suggestions start strange and become stranger (e.g. becoming masters of space and time through initiation into shamanistic rights) while Jim hesitates at the impracticality of his pitches more than their insanity ("Nah, I don't think I can leave my mom that long..."). 

While Billy and Martin bask in the spotlight, though, others wilt. Most tragically, this episode marks the start of Christopher's infamously disappointing tenure as the new, permanent anchor of SNN. I love Christopher as a character actor, and there's no denying that he's a brilliant comedic mind, but he also strikes me as someone ill at ease with the prospect of being himself in front of camera. Subsequently, everything about putting him at the news desk feels like a horrid misuse of his abilities, and his deadpan, despite being a great asset, takes all of the already-lousy jokes and makes whatever comedy they were supposed to have feel imperceptible. It's baffling to me that Ebersol would land on him instead of people like Rich or Pamela, who literally left news parody shows to be on SNL, though I'd also say Gary could've been a strong contender, too. Of course, Gary probably wasn't even on Ebersol's mind, and indeed never is; his screentime this episode is as frustratingly invisible as usual, yet he emerges as the second most victorious member of Ebersol's "B-squad" after Jim. Mary and Julia, meanwhile, toil away in another hacky Chi-Chi and Consuela sketch, as if the earlier sketch where Julia is sexually-harassed by a time traveler wasn't a big enough reminder that Ebersol has no idea what to do with his female cast.

All of that brings the episode to its 10-to-1, one of the most notorious pieces of the entire season: Larry David's sole sketch contribution as a writer to make it into a live show, casting Ed as an architect who gets in a fight with a property owner (Harry) about the elevator stool he's drawn into his blueprint. It's a great little bit of cerebral, escalating weirdness—starting from a place of confusion and ending with the two wrestling on the ground and telling one another to "go to hell!"—and while it's no forgotten classic, it's a fun glimmer into the mind of someone who's clearly found himself in the wrong room for his sort of ideas. Ebersol's relationship with Larry was famously acrimonious, but the fact that this idea (among others that Ebersol rejected) would go on to fuel a beloved Seinfeld episode, despite being met with curious silence from the studio audience, is a reminder that for all of the brilliant successes of Ebersol's reign, there's at least twice as much squandered potential. 

Honestly, that vibe feels like it persists throughout the episode in a rather unfortunate way. Even the sketches I highlighted as successes, all more heady and conceptual than Ebersol's usual fare, were marred by how little the audience responded. It's a shame, because even if this episode doesn't flourish, it does a lot of things I really respect and admire... most of which Ebersol would probably interpret as a failure. As we approach the halfway point for the season, it'll be interesting to see how S10 continues to develop, and ultimately, whether SNL will lean more on repetitive audience favorites or continue to broaden its horizons. One hopes for the latter, but I fear for the former. (Penned 8/08/22)

GRADE: B-.

12/08/84: Ringo Starr / Herbie Hancock (S10E08)

Goddammit, they wasted a Beatle. And not just any Beatle, either! How does someone waste Ringo? He attracts the most slack as "the worst Beatle," sure, but against all odds, he also has the greatest comedy pedigree; he's no stranger to the world of acting, and he has a strange, dopey sort of charm that feels borderline infallible. Unsurprisingly, whenever Ringo is allowed to deploy his charms, the episode works, but too often it drags him into the back, if he's onstage at all, and the tragic result is a painfully rough episode in sore need of inspiration. There's a reason for this, of course; by all accounts, everyone was so fatigued from the past two months of hard work that by this week's tepid read-through, Ebersol forced them to scrap all of their material, dredge up the recurring fare (recency be damned), and build an entirely new show. I don't wanna do too much to vilify the way Ebersol runs SNL, but it's telling that he recalls this episode being "pretty good" while it came across to me like a mix of some of my greatest fears for the season: the same characters ad nauseum, a strange mix of lethargy and indulgence, and some hacky junk to fill in the cracks.

At the very least, the episode starts in an alright place, front-loading with material that Ebersol had a wise level of confidence in. Ringo's put to good use in the cold open, even if all he has to do is be wheeled out and silently stand onstage at a Beatles memorabilia auction as the bidders slowly start to leave the room in disinterest; a later sketch follows up on how his life has gone post-auction, taking up residence with Pamela and a very beleaguered Jim, his daily activities now largely consisting of popping bubble wrap and rocking out to the Jeffersons theme song. They're pretty unelaborate pieces, but Ringo has an endearing presence onstage that the show, in those instances, finds the exact right way to deploy. He's put to work a bit more in this week's Ed Grimley sketch, casting him as an unlucky man most accustomed to random lightning strikes, and it works out alright, too; it takes a strange character to match Ed, and he lends his role the exact deadpan it needs to counteract Ed's hyperactive cheerfulness. (There's a brilliant bit of physical comedy after Martin holds Ringo's hand to feel a lightning strike, convulsing and flailing about bizarrely as he tries to shake the electricity out of his system.) We also get some more Sammy, duetting tunes with Ringo, and some more Willie and Frankie, perpetually hurting. Both are as they've always been.

Things start to drop off of pretty damn quickly, though, as the fatigue rolls in; if it wasn't for how actively frustrating a lot of the material feels, it could easily put you to sleep. Harry reprises his bone-dry Richard Blackwell impression for some public access weirdness, though Harry's intense specificity feels as indecipherable to me as usual, and the focus it lends to the debut of Christopher's brownface Rajeev Vindaloo character, chirping sassily about cheap wine, is even more of a drag. The journey across the globe continues into the next terrible sketch, granting Billy (and sadly Gary) some horrifying Japanese caricatures that immediately take whatever vague promise the sketch has—something about using reverse psychology on imprisoned British soldiers?—and render it completely intolerable. (Billy randomly breaking out into "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from Song of the South in the middle of it all is one too many flavors of "oh, fuck off" for a single sketch to have.) The night rounds itself out with the second "Fernando's Hideaway" sketch, which feels like our first look at how they'll usually play out —pretty boringly, and with twelve utterances of "Mahvelous"—and the final sketch about Jim being called out as a draft-dodger during his job interview, despite being something of a reprieve from the hackiness of the past half hour, is a dead-on-arrival capper to this gassed-out night. Jim and Christopher are in decent form and doing their thing, but the writing fails to connect, and the fact that it randomly ends with Christopher calling up a woman to his office to sexually harass ends the episode with a horrible taste in your mouth.

As the triumphant hosting return of Eddie looms near, it feels like Season 10 has hit a strange point where all of its issues have caught up to it. It's depleted its well of brilliant pretapes, Billy's negatively affecting the show with his dominance, and behind-the-scenes hostility is splitting the cast and writer's room. (Hell, right after this episode, Ebersol would briefly fire Jim for his out-of-control, impulsive behavior.) The wear and tear is finally beginning to show, and while I'm sure Eddie will hold the next episode together by the power of his charisma, I wonder how much the season can heal and mend itself as it rolls into its second half... or if the prospects of healing are simply untenable for the model that SNL is currently using. Only time will tell. All I know for now is that Ringo deserved far, far better than this. (Penned 8/09/22)

GRADE: C-.

12/15/84: Eddie Murphy / The Honeydrippers (S10E09)

It's strange how familiar this episode feels. Even though I'm just coming out of watching the full show for the second time (I watch episodes twice for most of my reviews), it feels like an episode I've already seen countless times throughout my life. The familiarity isn't really a benefit, nor a slight; it just leaves the episode occupying a strange space between "something we've seen before" and "the epitome", its greatest moments certainly earning their place in our collective memories and its lesser moments at least feeling amicable enough that they leave us happy. It's not as bombastic as one might hope, but bringing Eddie Murphy back to SNL at the height of his powers is an exciting affair, and the episode delivers about as frequently as it placates.

Of course, this episode's legacy is inseparable from its greatest segment, but when you have a sketch like "White Like Me," how could it ever go any other way? It's a sketch so classic that it could never really feel new to me, but it's so goddamn great and timelessly incisive that it manages to transcend its recognizability and endure, decades later, as one of the greatest comedy sketches of all time. Eddie's preposterous white guy caricature, Mr. White, is a visual that'll never stop being funny no matter how many crude imitators tried to dethrone it; even Eddie himself could never put on enough make-up, however hard he tries, to surpass the simple joy of his tight-butted walk or his stone-faced incomprehension of being gifted a newspaper for free. (While the crescendo of the sketch will always be Eddie's light-hearted delivery of "What a silly Negro!" to a white loan officer who shoos away his black co-worker for questioning Eddie's intentions of randomly borrowing $50,000 from a bank, Jim Downey's perfectly dry delivery of "Go ahead, take it. Take it." is the quote that lives rent-free in my brain.) Elsewhere, the Christmas-themed Mister Robinson's sketch from this episode has gone on to become perhaps the most famous installment of the sketch in modern times due to its inclusions in holiday specials, though it mostly just delivers the same reliable sketch beats without taking the basic conceit to a new place. The short "Black History Minute" also makes its rounds, and it works better if not simply for the spectacle of Eddie fumbling his lines and chastising the audience for delighting in his sloppiness. (After a woman in the audience repeats one of his mistakes to herself—"soul/soil"—he instantly quips, "So I messed up! SHUT IT!", proving that charisma flows out of Eddie even when he's barely trying.)

Aside from those obvious, predictable highlights, there were two other things I was particularly interested in with regards to this episode: seeing Eddie's interactions with the new cast, and seeing him working with the players from his own era again. While we sadly don't see as much of the latter as the former—another reminder of the bizarre chasm that separates the two groups—they get their nice moments in the spotlight, and Eddie's more plentiful contributions with the new cast feel fairly novel all the same. Rather than standing alongside Piscopo as the obvious star when he was a cast member, he's just another hard-hitter amongst a star-studded ensemble, which lets him feel like more of a team player in their midst. With that being said, the results aren't always the greatest. This episode's Gumby sketch is one I wish I could've liked more, constructing a cinematic universe for all of this season's Jewish characters—Lew Golden, Irving Cohen, and a new addition from Christopher—to intersect with Gumby, but the end result feels indulgent and meandering with only the occasional bursts of energy (Gumby's argument with Rich, Irving's bizarre showtunes) renewing my attention. "Milestones" is a little better, casting Eddie as Desmond Tutu opposite of Rich's Doug Flutie, but the fun idea of the show's host (Christopher) trying to distract Doug as Desmond frantically tries repairing Doug's broken Heisman trophy doesn't have enough escalation or drive, solid ending aside.

Comparatively, there's only one time where Eddie's really going toe-to-toe with one of his old friends, but it's also one of the episode's better moments: the triumphant, if unprompted return of Buckwheat. It's tough to assess the need for another installment after the "Buckwheat is Dead" arc made for an insurmountable finale, but there's enough great little surprises in what this episode brings that we end up with a pretty fun epilogue. Buckwheat's in hiding after faking his death, disguised by a horrendous yellow beard and with the ability to recite a single line clearly ("I'm sorry, I can't allow any visitors. I've been quite ill."), but things come to a head when Mary's Alfalfa discovers and interrogates him. There's a lot of reasons the sketch works—Eddie will never not be funny as Buckwheat, and the attention paid to the character's narrative and continuity makes it feel like far more than a cheap revival—but it's Mary who ends up being the greatest spectacle, her Alfalfa gaining some dark, legitimately menacing shades as he reveals his intentions to kill Buckwheat, once and for all, as vengeance for a childhood prank that ruined his life. A few other moments in the episode point to Eddie's bond with his old castmates and his willingness to stand up for them getting in the show, like recasting Gary as Mr. Landlord in the Mr. Robinson sketch or the piece helmed by Julia and Mary as two communists who keep jinxing each other, though it's a shame he could only do so much to vie for the interests of those who he shared the screen with a season before.

The rest of the episode, in true S10, is filled in by some hostless sketches, though that feels like a bizarre fail-safe given Eddie's capabilities. (Perhaps it has more to do with how reportedly difficult he was to work with this week.) Nevertheless, none do much to hinder the evening. The aforementioned communists sketch feels more akin to weird black box theater than the SNL stage, but it works as well as it can and offers Julia and Mary a chance to have fun; the "Lifestyles of the Relatives of the Rich and Famous" sequel serves a similar purpose for Martin, cast as the great-niece of Jerry Lewis and doing pretty much exactly what you think that would entail. The best of the hostless portion of the night is Martin's surprise reprisal of Lawrence Orback from the "Synchronized Swimming" piece, now grasping ineptly at the notion of climbing stairs during WWII. ("I was raised in the Midwest and everything's pretty flat... we had a bit of an incline but I mean, nothing like this!") Your mileage will probably vary because it's a profoundly stupid sketch, but I just love that random insertion of his character into such a different context; it helps, too, that Martin is such a physical comedy master that he turns the mere act of approaching a staircase into a feast.

If this perhaps isn't the classic that one would hope an Eddie Murphy Christmas episode to be, it's a nice, festive boost of energy and morale to take the season into the holiday break. Eddie, unsurprisingly, does some serious heavy-lifting, willing some samey material into working a bit better, but there are signs that the show can still deliver quality product—the underused cast can still knock things out of the park, Martin is at the height of his powers, and I mean hell, there would be no "White Like Me" if there was no Andy Breckman to write it. There's still a lot to theoretically look forward to from SNL and I hope that the season will continue to live up to its potential, even if there will be some stumbles here and there. (Penned 8/23/22)

GRADE: B.

1/12/85: Kathleen Turner / John Waite (S10E10)

What better way to welcome in the new year than with Fernando, Nazis, subway shooters, and midget transvestites!? You'd think an episode starting off with three of those things would be absolutely buck wild and yet... 1985 kicks off with a minor dirge. It's a shame, really; there's a pretty solid if low-key show buried in what we got this episode, but it fails to come to fruition. Perhaps SNL is a bit perplexed by its host, Kathleen Turner—bizarrely, as she calls out in her monologue, the first female host since Jamie Lee Curtis almost a year before (excluding Betty Thomas in the five host episode). Of course, this is probably among the worst times in the show's history for a female host to endure the gauntlet; on top of SNL being horribly male-dominated, there's not a single women in the writer's room barring occasional visits from guest writers. For that, I can applaud Kathleen's gameness and how much she commits herself to the material, but she just can't do much to energize the listless and lethargic nature of the material she's routinely presented.

A good SNL episode is one that has ebbs and flows, that lets energy travel through its ups and downs to keep things from ever feeling too uniform; for however much SNL has left the variety show roots of its predecessors, a good package of sketches is one defined by variety and alternation. Taken in isolation, there's plenty of decent material here, and very little bottoms out, but it's the fact that none of it ignites different sorts of sparks which dooms the enterprise as a whole. It doesn't matter how good everyone does in this episode—nobody's forcing energy into it, and in those moments, I started to realize just how desperately someone like Jim Belushi is needed. His firing was graciously very brief and he returns next episode, but whereas Eddie's energy buoyed last show, there's nobody here who can really electrify the audience with something goofy, amicable, or broad. Instead, we get people like Harry and Gary filling in those cracks in the show, and while it's nice to see them being more of an active element than they've been allowed to be recently, they're in a position to enhance the show rather than save it, if even that. (Indeed, Harry, in his last episode as a cast member, submits a painfully sleepy final "Strictly From Blackwell" sketch to close out the night, as if proceedings weren't dry enough; his short pitchman sketch is a bit better, but I reiterate, he's no Aykroyd.)

We also get a hell of a lot of Billy, and while there's only one point in the night where he's an absolute disaster, his star power feels like Ebersol's safety blanket. The guy appears in every major piece in the show all the way up to the 40-minute mark, and it's absolutely unrelenting even if most of the pieces would be acceptable enough in isolation. The latest Joe Franklin Show sketch isn't bad, though it doesn't feel as solid as the first installment because of a more lacking character roster (though Martin's nonsensical Doug Henning is great) nor as enjoyable of a strange, looping nature to the characters' rapport; the latest Willie and Frankie sketch, meanwhile, finds the two past their prime, only succeeding to get a few smirks from the audience with their tales of casual body horror. What's far more horrifying is Billy's inexplicable second one-man show segment, spieling about his tough, white-knuckled life as a retired boxer and my god, it's a particularly torturous ego stroke. My goodwill for him is draining fast...

A few curiosities in the episode provide more interest, but they don't reach any dizzying heights. Gary does well with everything he gets, especially. I'm always happy to see him reprise Walter, perfectly balancing the silliness of his nose hair-trimming service against his character's crotchety pride, and his SNN correspondent piece, responding to the glut of beefcake calendars with a sexy calendar of his own, is the sort of goofy and endearing material that's helped him continue to stand out even at the margins of this season's cast. Meanwhile, Martin's sketch, casting him as an overpossessive father who hypnotizes people with his fireplace to reveal their innermost secrets, offers an interesting conceptual hook but ends up lingering far too long, though at least it has a pretty wonderful blooper. I preferred his sketch opposite of Kathleen as a mousy, single man being forcefully pursued by Kathleen's desperate man-eater, even if it sadly doesn't end up as great as it should be. It feels like a throwback to the original era, and guest writer Rosie Shuster's penmanship lends it a strong female perspective that benefits this episode, but it ends up becoming an unfortunate victim of the episode's sluggish atmosphere despite the pair's solid performances.

In the end, the listless nature of this episode feels tragic. I want to vouch for this evening's best interests, and I think in a lot of ways it does things that this season should be pushing for more, but there's a need for energy that nobody in this episode is able to conjure, and instead of being savored, it just feels like it lingers. Hopefully, if nothing else, swapping Harry out for Jim can offer the right sort of adjustments and bring the vitality back. (Penned 8/26/22)

GRADE: C.

1/19/85: Roy Scheider  / Billy Ocean (S10E11)

After taking a dip last episode, SNL seems to snap back into place a little thanks to some careful adjustments. This isn't a particularly great episode of the show, but it's one that suggests, perhaps, what the second chapter of this season will be like. We've burned through the pretapes, gone through some strange and quiet cast shuffling, and established everything that this season's big stars can do. There's nothing left to prove on Ebersol's part about the ability of his show to stay afloat, and the season can start to strive for a more reliable, stress-free tone. That sense of quiet confidence plays to this episode's benefit—a little unremarkable, sure, but with nice variety and some really great surprises.

Perhaps my favorite part about this episode is that it does such a nice job of balancing the cast out, and that lends to a really nice feel that we seldom get out of this season, or even the whole of the Ebersol era, really. It's a notably light show for the usual, most potent suspects especially: Billy only makes two appearances, and Christopher, excluding another sleepy SNN installment, ties with Martin at one. That gives a chance to other performers to rise up, with Gary and Mary feeling particularly well-represented, though perhaps the most joyful development after the past two episodes is that Jim Belushi's back! He immediately rectifies the energy disparity problems that plagued last week, offering his boisterous, everyman charms to all of his sketch appearances and helming a particularly fun guest correspondent spot at SNN with rant about blasting people with a foghorn (prop very loudly included!) for talking in the middle of movies—a strangely perfect metaphor for the extra kick he brings to this season.

This is also an episode with surprisingly pleasant material all the way through, and whatever misfires occur at least fade away pretty quickly. Roy Scheider isn't the most inspiring host, but he brings things a good energy and sells everything he's offered with a nice mix of pathos and commitment, perhaps no better than in the Jim Downey-penned scalper sketch. It's a bit slow, but Roy's pride as he dismisses any offer less than five million dollars for his Super Bowl tickets keeps his repetitious lines from becoming too exhausting. The surprise ending, too, where he comes home to his family and apologizes to his wife and family for his failings to sell the tickets at the value he truly believed in—before being smote by lightning from God, inexplicably—grants the sketch a strange, intriguing edge, with him and Mary perfectly selling the farcical, maudlin undertone. His best work comes in the form of two fantastic two-handers at the end of the episode, though. The return of Martin's underrated Lawrence Orbach, casting him against Roy's hardened cop as he struggles deeply to interpret their "good cop, bad cop" routine, is as solid as they come; I seriously think that he might be one of my favorite, underrated recurring characters. (At one point, in a failure to understand what "bad" means, he reveals he's handcuffed himself by accident to the person they're interrogating [Jim]: "I guess I'm a real bad cop, huh?") More than playing a dull, overexplanatory role, too, Roy's impatience mounts rather splendidly, creating a great turn at the end where he furiously plays both parts and scares the shit out of Jim.

The best piece of the night, however, in defiance with all imaginable odds, was "The Flaming Parrot," which—get ready—casts Billy Crystal as a drag queen lounge pianist. That's the sort of terrifying premise that, under any other circumstances, would send me running for the hills, but I think there's something to be said about how even though Billy's hack instincts can easily lend themselves to fraught outcomes, he's also a very good performer in the right circumstances. He's some who seems interested in finding the underlying humanity in lives dissimilar from his own, and while that can lead him to the grotesque indulgency of his one-man show bits or the negro baseballers pretape, it also has the capacity to create something legitimately striking. His personification of Penny Lane is precisely that, a drag queen interested in making conversation with her somewhat oblivious bar patron Lester (Roy), brassily teasing him as her job entails but keeping her dignity intact as he makes some misinformed advances. ("When you get off, you and I could have a nightcap together." "Les, do you like surprise parties?" "I hate 'em." "Then go home to your wife and kids.") In the same way Billy seems interested in unpacking his characters, he uses Penny to unpack Lester's, and the final outcome is a surprisingly sweet and empathetic portrait of two people from different walks of life sharing an unlikely moment together in the night. It's astonishingly perfect.

If there aren't any other sketches that can really reach those heights, they do a good job of maintaining the vigor and often have their own small wins. Gary retreads his Julio Iglesias impression in what's possibly SNL's first ever fake celebrity talk show, "In Praise of Women," and while it's not packed full of surprises, it's a good showcase for his abilities and natural charisma as he passionately lusts after his guests more than celebrating their great accomplishments. We also get another Chi-Chi and Consuela sketch, which manages to kind of work; removing them from the talk show format and letting us see them in a more natural environment (well, I guess as natural as a mental institution is) lends the writing the sort of slice-of-life quality that Julia and especially Mary really shine at. (If nothing else, the sketch also has some beautiful, erratic dancing from Gary as a patient who believes himself to be John Oates.) The lowest points are the cold open, though it's only a minute long, and Billy reprising his "unbelievable" guy from the earlier one-man show segment, though even that piece manages to get into some fun as he and Christopher—in rather good form here—competitively hurl insults at each other. Throw in some fantastic stand-up from Stephen Wright and you've got a pleasant, stable, and maybe even underappreciated outing of SNL. (Penned 8/29/22)

GRADE: B.

2/02/85: Alex Karras / Tina Turner (S10E12)

Gosh, how come Tina Turner couldn't just have hosted this episode? It's a question even the cold open seems to pose, though it balks at the opportunity to give much of an answer. She seems like such an obvious choice, and indeed, in her own charming sketch appearance as Ed Grimley's neighbor and the object of his unrequited affection at the very top of the episode, she slides into the scene with so much charisma that the rest of the show feels casually hurt by the lack of Tina that follows. Instead, we get Alex Karras, a pro football player turned actor who, indeed, gives off those vibes. If there's one thing I can say in his favor, it's that he looks like he's having an absolute blast hosting SNL... but he's not the sort of performer who the show seems able to find much of a grasp on, and the episode suffers for it.

It feels like the obligation to figure out ways to use Alex holds the episode back, which is unfortunate considering how much it seems to lurch forward when it's not saddled with him. I'll give him that he does a fun, silly enough two-hander with Jim as "A Couple of White Guys," even if it's sort of an indication of Alex's general presence that the best way SNL was able to nail him down was to observe, "Hey, you're incredibly white!" You work with what you're given, though, and while it's goofy and stupid, it's a pretty smart way to retool Jim's "Rappin' Jimmy B" persona and acknowledge the hokey nature of it with a rap about life in the suburbs, their loving families, and being Republicans. Elsewhere, Alex works okay when he's slotted into a more interchangeable role, as he is in the "Kelly Soda" sketch, though that isn't as big of a winner as it should be. Gary and Mary are in fine form, and Alex as their intimidating boss works well enough, but Billy is a horrible choice of an anchor as a co-worker who breaks out into excessive flop sweat when he's put on the spot. It's a fun Andy Breckman idea, and the sketch has a good ending, but Billy overacts so hammily that it becomes actively grating. Alex gets his biggest chance of the night as Lou Albano in the "Tuesday Night Titans" sketch, but the less said about it, the better—it's a garbled mess of an idea played out to a dead audience, and for a piece so generally inoffensive, it's shockingly one of the worst sketches I've seen all season.

The rest of the episode is split down the middle, packing some remarkably strong sketches and some odd whiffs in equal parts. There's definitely something of a political undertone to a surprising amount of the material (the aforementioned "Tuesday Night Titans" included), and as an Ebersol episode, it shouldn't be a big surprise that none of it works. Jim Downey lends the material some more bite in theory, but there's too much of a muddled nature to things like his bizarre potshots at Walter Mondale where it's unclear what side he's on or what statement he's trying to make; as with the brief, fake Time Magazine commercial earlier in the episode, it feels like nastiness for nastiness' sake. On a similar note, we also get Rich reprising his impression of the "subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz, a bit that questionably makes jokes about his peculiarity rather than really scrutinizing him—I guess Democratic politicians deserve to be eviscerated more than shooters do. On the plus side, though, the episode features Ed Grimley's best sketch yet, packing in some great, bizarre little revelations about Ed's life (he takes his triangle practicing very seriously, and his fridge is packed with hundreds of onions) alongside the joys of inducting Tina Turner into the sketch-verse, and the culminating, wild dance that the two do together is as goofy as it is sweet. Christopher also lands a particularly great sketch as an auctioneer who takes extreme measures to psychologically torture his bidders, shattering priceless china until the scarcity boosts its value and forcing bids on an aquarium filled with kittens and a depleting air supply; it's dark, wild, and couched perfectly in his unflinching dryness.

In the end, this episode certainly has its moments, but it fails to come together as a whole. Watch this one for Tina, if you watch it at all; if nothing else, there's three dynamite musical performances. (Penned 8/30/22)

GRADE: C.

2/09/85: Harry Anderson / Bryan Adams (S10E13)

I realize that, while Harry Anderson is someone I've become fairly familiar with over the past three seasons, he's not someone who I've mentioned all that frequently in my reviews themselves. Like Michael Davis or Stephen Wright, he's one of a rotation of guest performers during these seasons that are occasionally ceded time on a given episode to do a bit of their act and give SNL more of a variety show feel. In the case of Harry, that entails a comedic, magic act, or otherwise some performance that plays with the audience's suspension of disbelief in a very nonchalant way. While I'll frequently appreciate these efforts from SNL to include outside performers, it can be hard for me to quantify them into my reviews; after all, as I mentioned while covering the Barry Bostwick episode, I can't say how much outside material should speak to the strength of a show in a given week. Since this episode is so reliant on Harry, though, incorporating bits of his act, I'll let that account for the episode's quality more, and that serves its assessment well—Harry Anderson's hosting gig, really, is at its best when it lets him do his thing.

While I don't always have the most to say about his act, and while it doesn't connect with me as much as a few others who've made appearances on the show, I'm never mad to see Harry, and he submits a handful of fine little pieces in this episode. The monologue most resembles his classic act, even if much of it is prolonged build-up: after disavowing magic in favor of his new television career on Night Court, he brings out a guinea pig to do some tricks for some wholesome entertainment... only to stuff the "guinea pig" in his mouth for refusing to cooperate. ("You know the rules: you don't work, you don't live!") As with much of his best work, it's one that relies more on being visceral than conventional magic, using the audience's shock as wool over their eyes, though I found more appreciation in his more laid-back demonstration of chapeaugraphy, fashioning different sorts of hats out of a circle of felt while telling an anecdote about the street artist who taught him his ways. In the same way that Harry can use his charms to subvert, he's also very capable of using them to, well, charm, and this was a nice way to give an earnest nod to a long-forgotten art form. 

The night is a bit less successful when it tries to draw him into sketches with other performers, though, which is unfortunate considering that's what I was looking forward to the most—he's proven his gameness and could easily carry more than the sort of boilerplate host roles he was provided. Fortunately, that material is at least okay, even if there's nothing that'll end up in a best of. I liked the idea of the sketch where Jim shows up home twenty minutes late and discovers his wife, Mary, has taken a new husband (Harry), though it feels too relaxed for its absurdist premise to blossom; Jim, as usual, does a great job in this sort of baffled role at least, and Mary's delivery of "Life is for the prompt!" earns the piece's best laugh, but I just wish it were better. The Salem Witch Trial sketch similarly has a pretty fun idea to it, casting Martin as a very perky, modern-day defense lawyer for Gary's witchcraft-accused client, and it works just a touch better. There are definitely elements that hit (Jim's prosecutor simply shouting "WIIIITCH!" as his evidence), and the ending reveal that Gary is, in fact, a demon spices things up, but it's not quite snappy enough to take off despite everyone's best efforts. Both sketches, too, don't give Harry very much room to offer big laughs, which is a bit of a bummer. At the very least, he's far better-suited by the "Dueling Magi" segment, competing with Rich's Doug Henning with their displays of magic. Rich is far from an impressionist, but it's one of my favorite impressions of his ("Thank you!"), and the energy disparity between his goofiness and Harry's very deadpan, verbless responses keep things particularly fun.

Elsewhere, the night really isn't up to very much. Like the Kathleen Turner episode, it's frustratingly awash with Billy material, who quite literally holds down all but one sketch in this episode that Harry isn't a part of. The return of the "unbelievable" guy only two episodes after his last sketch appearance was, well, surprising in a way that I'm sure the character could emphatically describe; while he and Christopher are a good double act, this is more of the same and doesn't deserve to be trotted back out so quickly. Billy, though, is a smart enough tactician to make his weaker material look better by bookending it with even more indulgent garbage, because this episode also has the completely unwarranted return of "Kate and Ali" (Martin is good as usual, Billy sours the screen with his umpteenth blackface role) and the reprisal of his insult comic, Buddy Rogers, Jr., doing a restaurant review at the SNN desk before walking out into the crowd and doing some burns at very deliberately-placed celebrity audience members. (I notice that I never mentioned his first appearance in a pretape from the McKean episode. Moving on.) The closest Billy scores to a victory is in the revival of his Minkman character alongside Christopher, with the two using their prankish ways to win a baseball game, and it's cute enough... it would just be cuter if Billy's presence in this episode wasn't so overwhelming. 

Sadly, despite Harry being a fun presence and a few interesting, conceptual sketches, this is just another episode in this season's second half that doesn't really work. This one in particular is too eager to play it safe, a shame given that there's definitely material here that shows a more intriguing version of Season 10 than we've been getting lately; hopefully that side of the show can assert itself more, but the precedents being set don't look too great. (Penned 9/02/22)

GRADE: C+.

2/16/85: Pamela Sue Martin / The Power Station (S10E14)

It's perpetually bizarre to me that there was ever a point in history where soap operas were so big that soap opera stars would actually host SNL, but that just speaks to how much the cultural landscape has changed; I mean hell, one of the current, biggest stars of the season garnered traction for his role in a soap opera spoof. One also ponders, perhaps, if the SNL hosting gig feels a bit less intimidating to performers in soap operas well-acquainted to hectic, time-pressed shooting schedules. Either way, Pamela Sue Martin feels surprisingly comfortable on the SNL stage even if she's no great revelation, and it makes me wish, especially as one of only two female hosts in this entire goddamn season, that she had gotten more of a chance. The failings of this particular episode, though, are incredibly bizarre.

Things start out pretty solidly, at least—you can always trust Ebersol to pack a top-heavy episode, and he conjures up a pretty nice mix of recurring crowd-pleasers and neat, original pieces. The latest installment of "The Joe Franklin Show" is an improvement over the last, packing in a particularly fun and well-rounded roster: in addition to Christopher's goofy Red Skelton and Martin's always-reliable Jackie Rogers Jr., Gary rounds out the couch as an impressionist with a dead-on Alan Alda impersonation, spitting off M*A*S*H quotes unsurely in response to Joe Franklin's befuddling questions, and Pamela gets a fun bit of business as a numerologist forced to fend off Jackie's advances. We also get the return of Jim's "White Guy", and Willie and Frankie; the latter is as they've always been, a bit better than last time but slightly fatigued from overuse, while the former offers the usual guilty amusement and gets a good assist from Pamela as "the White Guy's wife." 

The more notable victories of the episode's first half, though, is its unique, conceptual fare. Jim helms a complex, sprawling epic, "The Called Shot," where he sets out to fulfill a terminally ill child's Babe Ruth-esque promise that he'll score the biggest laugh ever on SNL. Queasy opening beat aside (Jim tells a young sick girl that he'll hire her as a secretary in a few years—whyyyy?), the whole thing is darn-near perfect: it's a great, mock-dramatic role for Jim, who channels far too much into his horrendously stupid sketch character, Aunt Willoughby, and the level of ambition that went into the sketch's production—a combination of live and pretaped elements featuring shots of a fake, unresponsive crowd and lots of fun, meta backstage antics—gives everything the sort of grandiose feel which feels exceedingly rare for SNL to tap into. Although an early symptom of how much this episode would careen off-course, Rich Hall also gets one of the best moments of his season here with his prop stand-up routine using multiple pieces of Plexiglas; while Rich might've made a name for himself before SNL for his political satire, I've fallen in love with the sort of whimsical, off-beat comic stylings he's deployed across his tenure, and it's gratifying as all hell to hear the audience roar in applause by the end of his set. 

Unfortunately, after SNN (a bit better than usual, at least), this episode bafflingly falls apart, not even in a quality control sort of way so much as one that eludes a simple answer. I'm tempted to place some of the blame on this episode's "First Draft Theater" segment, which features one of the most notorious, sketch-destroying blunders in the show's history: in the middle of the opening voice-over, Christopher drops his script and puts the entire sketch at a stand-still for twenty seconds as he scrambles to pick the script back up and find his place. This rendition of the concept is already pretty lesser compared to the first two—Billy as Moses isn't a particularly enjoyable anchor, and the repetitious gag of Jim calling him out for his vagueness and Moses shrugging desperately to camera wears thin quickly—but the early stumble kills the rest of the sketch's momentum, and perhaps due to how much screentime gets corroded, it might've even killed the rest of the night's momentum, too. Whether it's time constraints or not, though, the rest of the episode is a bizarre cobble of short bits and bobs that very much feels like SNL scrambling to pad its episode out in real time (as if the earlier, prolonged Fernando remote and Rich Hall's admittedly-great stand-up routine didn't already feel like padding). While that does mean we get treated to one of my favorite obscurities of the Ebersol era—a fantastic, hand-drawn experimental animation where two cowboys in a stand-off fire zeppelin bullets at each other—it's impossible for the night to recover.

On one hand, I find that bizarreness sort of riveting; while it's pretty common to see SNL episodes time out these days, it feels incredibly rare for the show to fall apart as much as this one does, so desperately stitching itself together that it barely fights its way to the finish line. This episode is nothing if not a great curiosity. Unfortunately, that also leaves it as a fairly disappointing outing for the show, touting some solid bits but failing to cohere as a whole and wasting its decent host. (Pamela actually vanishes for almost a full hour, only getting one more short, one-minute long piece alongside Pamela near the end; even for an Ebersol-era episode, that host misplacement feels particularly atrocious.) I'm always happy to see an episode that's particularly interesting to dissect, but it's a shame that it's not a more interesting one to watch. (Penned 9/14/22)

GRADE: C+.

3/30/85: Mr. T and Hulk Hogan / The Commodores (S10E15)

In the true spirit of this season's back-half, it's a gut punch that this episode was another bust. I blame myself, but in all fairness, it's hard not to look forward to seeing two people as ridiculous as Mr. T and Hulk Hogan hosting the show, and if nothing else, they'd bring heaps of energy, right? Well, as it turns out... not exactly. This episode feels like it's still dusting off the cobwebs of the writer's strike that created a month-long gulf between this episode and the last, and the end result is a strangely underwritten evening less intent to satisfy the expectations of its audience than to fill a mandatory programming slot.

The most immediate source of disappointment is the fact that Mr. T and Hulk Hogan barely even feel like hosts in this episode, and the show seems unable to figure out how to use them. I've seen some decent theories about why their hosting capacity was so limited, and I'm most inclined to believe in Bronwyn's hypothesis that the show was restricted by the WWF's policy of kayfabe—the careful maintaining of wrestler's public images so as to depict their on-stage personas and actions as genuine. Perhaps it's no surprise, too, that the best moment of the entire episode was the moment that found a way to sneakily hack away at that policy. "Fernando's Hideaway" is such an unreliable segment, because Fernando is such an unreliable character that Billy is intent to force down everyone's throats, but it can also be the perfect vehicle to force guests out of their sense of self-control and challenge their instincts; whether or not I found his comments particularly funny, Hulk and Mr. T certainly do, and seeing them both reduced to uncontrollable giggles and tears by the segment's end is undeniably the most joyous moment of the entire night. 

Unfortunately, they find surprisingly unexciting usage throughout the rest of the night, and even if kayfabe was in effect, that doesn't have to be as much of a roadblock as it ends up being. When Mr. T made his cameos two seasons before, he walked away with the biggest highlights of the night while reinforcing his wrestler persona—so how come we couldn't get anything to that effect here? Instead, both wrestlers mostly treat the night as an excuse for Wrestlemania promotion, doing bits that feel scripted for a crowd of rowdy WWF fans more than the very polite, comedy-expectant SNL audience. They do make a few more conventionally-scripted appearances, but no great shakes: they appear as themselves alongside Billy Crystal's horrible Prince impression, concussing guest singers who try to get in on his "I Am The World" rendition (it's okay, and Gary's Bruce Springsteen impression is a gut-buster at least), Hulk makes a sketch-ending appearance as Jason Voorhees in the "Camp Crystal Lake" sketch, and Mr. T awkwardly joins The Commodores on the tambourine before... walking off. It's a very bizarre moment, yet somehow not the most dead this episode gets.

As for everything else, it's a strange amalgamation of material, some pieces working better than others but none being a clear winner. On the "writer's strike holdover" front, Billy submits a long pretape of his brief, fictitious stint as a substitute teacher in the projects, and it's perhaps one of the more forgettable—albeit tolerable—vanity pieces from his tenure. If it's hard to be actively angry at, watching Billy posit himself as some sort of heroic teacher able to get through to some ne'er-do-well kids (one declares, "You look mah-velous!" as he leaves, so I hope he was paid well) feels too cloying and cutesy to be a functional comedy piece despite some decent moments. There's also a stand-up segment from some dude named Steve Landesburg, who was apparently supposed to host this episode but had to drop out which is another reason for this week's weird final product, perhaps? But he's rather awful and hacky while somehow bearing the demeanor of a college professor. (In one of the most accidentally funny moments of the night, they give him his own bumper as if to further make a point out of the fact that Hulk Hogan and Mr. T are barely hosting.)

Despite being substantially more written, the final "Joe Franklin Show" installment feels similarly bred from the weird circumstances, not as punchy as previous iterations and featuring an inexplicable appearance from the real Liberace (for some WWF cross-promotion actually, because of fucking course). I never hate these, but considering there was one of these last episode, it feels like too soon of a return. Nathan Thurm feels similarly played-out, even if this latest appearance recontextualizes him into a sketch; there's just nowhere else for him to go with how rigidly he's characterized, and the novelty wears off far too quickly when it becomes obvious that there's realistically no new additions to the game. It's rather slim pickings for the best of the night, comparatively. I wanted to like the gays in prison sketch, because Martin and Christopher perform the hell out of it, but it's the sort of sketch that perhaps felt more subversive then than it does now. It's hard not to wince at the fear of things devolving into a prison rape jokefest, and while that mercifully never happens—with Christopher's kingpin instead taking Martin's new fish on a tender date before politely asking if he could be his bitch—it's a premise that's unable to escape its dated and worrisome confines. Fortunately, Christopher gets to deploy his killer deadpan in a far less fraught piece tonight, too; the "Camp Crystal Lake" piece, where he fails to advertise the infamous murder-camp from the Halloween movies to a skeptical family, is the best written sketch the night has.

Perhaps this was a bit of a messy review, but it's hard as hell to do any better when I'm presented with such a messy episode. I hoped for a crazy, high-energy episode of SNL, and all I got was a Wrestlemania promo and a heavy dose of Billy Crystal. Comedy is always a welcome sight; hopefully, with more remove from the writer's strike, SNL will be able to return to a more stable and enjoyable place. (Penned 9/21/22)

GRADE: C-.

4/06/85: Christopher Reeve / Santana (S10E16)

Even though the second half of this season has been, to put it a bit generously, something of a struggle... I held out hope for this one. I knew this episode had a remarkable reputation of being one of the best of this season, and for some, one of the best of the entire Ebersol era. I know, too, that having expectations with SNL is probably the worst thing someone could ever have, but when everything's been so lackluster... they definitely can't hurt, right? I was pleasantly surprised, then, that while the Christopher Reeve episode doesn't quite live up to its sterling reputation, it's a particularly enjoyable evening in the Ebersol era's final hours that succeeds both on the host's charisma and the cast operating at full force.

If the previous episode was an awkward week of settling back into the studio, this week feels like everyone's got a renewed sense of energy and the right sketches to showcase it. So often it feels like everyone on the show is bizarrely stratified, regularly wasting the talent the past few seasons have cultivated in favor of highlighting the new ringers; while there's no shortage of spotlight pieces for Ebersol's favorites (including one of the most famous of the season), I was excited to see practically everyone in the cast getting an opportunity to demonstrate their chops here, and many sketches had an appreciable, ensemble feel. "Superman Auditions" was probably my favorite, not only perfectly tailored for the host at hand but a wonderful sketch that gives everyone a chance at their own side-business. Reeve earns laughs by being the most inept of the actors who have made it to the final round of auditions and Rich is a lot of fun, too, as an actor who is just as awkward but more technically proficient at the superpowers they get tested on (catching bullets in their mouth, turning coal into a diamond); Gary runs away from this one, though, as an overconfident, cocky actor who brown-noses his way to the front with little self-awareness before facing an ignoble end from a stunt gone wrong. Oh, and the the piece even creates a great opportunity for Julia to dig into a character as a deadpan harshly New York-accented script reader! Seeing a Season 10 sketch which is both wonderfully-constructed and gives the most underrated cast members a chance to shine is like witnessing a shooting star—you gotta cherish it while it lasts.

"Superman Auditions" contrasts pretty strongly with the next sketch in the night, "Jackie Rogers' $100,000 Jackpot Wad," though they're both such high-quality pieces in spite of their differences that they feel like the opposite faces of a very pretty coin. Everything about "Jackpot Wad" should be scary—it's built for indulgent performances including Billy's Sammy Davis and Guest's Rajeev Vindaloo, who are both caked in far more face paint than ever before—and yet, framed by Martin-as-Jackie's preposterously garish game show, it simply works. Honestly, the one thing that hurts it is Jim and Mary's portions, which hurts to say (it's just not fun watching Mary get yelled at and strangled); the perfect run of Password clues and guesses between Guest and Billy, though, is some of the most high-density hilarity we've had all season, making perfect use of the pair's chemistry. (Rajeev immediately guessing "Chocolate Babies" before Sammy finishes setting him up is, rightfully, one of the the biggest laughs. Sometimes stellar writing trumps iffiness!) Billy would continue to push his luck this episode with that win under his belt, and while his latest appearance as Buddy Young Jr. is as annoying as his first, his piece alongside Reeve as an elderly man beguiled to encounter Reeve's past-his-prime Superman at the retirement home has some nice, bittersweet moments (and Reeve at the top of his acting game) that make the usual scene-chewing, phlegmy Billy performance a bit more tolerable.

There's not any other big winners scattered about the episode, but everything else is of a pleasant, enjoyable enough quality that there's never a loss of momentum. The cold open is a rare impression parade for the show, and while it's hit-and-miss as usual—good to see Gary's Alan Alda back and Guest's recurring James Mason is fun, but fuck Billy's awful Asian routine as Dr. Haing S. Ngor, a man who definitely does not deserve it—it's a breezy enough start and, as I said before, maintains the episode's strong ensemble feel. The WWII sketch is more enjoyable, if feeling a bit conventional; Jim is in great form as a meat-headed sergeant privy to the dumb ideas of his troop in their desperation to escape the Germans, though Billy's sarcastic and uncooperative soldier clashes with things a hair too much. The final sketch of the night offers the immediate surprise of being a two-hander carried out by Gary and Guest, who've never been meaningfully paired up before, and it's a fun opportunity for both of them to do their thing. Gary's become a bizarre muse for some pervy comedy from the show, though he always strikes the balance well, and he's great here as an Amish impostor spreading crude misinformation about the Amish community to Guest's disbelieving talk show host.

I'm sure this episode will be most remembered for it's two greatest successes, but honestly... that's pretty fair. And even if the rest of this episode isn't at that level, but there's still a lot of fun to be had, and Reeve is a charismatic presence every time he gets to participate; for such a tumultuous, ensemble-averse season too, I was elated to see the show feel like a true group effort. Here's hoping that even if the finale is a bit of a step down, it gives this rag-tag gang the send-off that they deserve. (Penned 9/26/22)

GRADE: B+. 

4/13/85: Howard Cosell / Greg Kihn (S10E17)

To quote Howard Cosell in his monologue, the fact that he's hosting the season finale might be a felicitous occasion, but it's certainly not a fortuitous one. Despite never setting foot anywhere near the studio, he's cosmically-linked to the show for the simple fact that, as he espouses in his monologue, he was the star of the original Saturday Night Live. It's a fun little bit of trivia for the diehards that SNL didn't always used to be SNL: it used to be NBC's Saturday Night, unable to choose the name it would eventually be known as because of the existence of Cosell's show, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. Even more ironically, that's pretty much the only reason Cosell's show is even remembered; it's otherwise wallowed away in obscurity, a legendary trash fire for which only a crude audio recording has been preserved, though a trash fire which at least served as a launching pad for a few exceptional talents—Bill and Brian-Doyle Murray, Christopher Guest, and Billy Crystal. (Unrelated: I'll let you guess which cast members seemed particularly activated this episode.)

I'm also sure that rounding out the Ebersol era with as beloved of a figure in sports as Cosell was an act of wish fulfillment on Ebersol's part to some degree, but I'll give it to him—Cosell does a hell of a job as host. Don't get me wrong, Cosell isn't an ace comic performer, but he's an unmistakable one; everything he appears in is tinged with Cosell-isms in the same way that hosts like Edwin Newman or Christopher Walken define their episodes' tone and, at times, make it more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Hell, against all odds, he's somehow a great neutralizer of Billy's worst tendencies: there's a sketch where Billy gets in moderately-horrific drag to play Cosell's real-life mother and in-sketch wife, all while deploying his Cosell impression, and yet Cosell makes the sketch fun! By simply doing what he does best, being as verbose as a human could possibly be, he creates a sense of strange joy. It's also interesting, and nice given the occasion, that for as much as Cosell is placed at the episode's center, this feels like a proper farewell to everyone in the cast; with the exception of poor Pamela, who toils away in bit roles as usual, this is an evening that lets everyone do what they're best at one last time, granting the proceedings a surprising sense of finality. 

I'd be remiss not to mention, of course, that in spite of the occasion, the episode is still as intent as always to shove Billy down our throat as ever. I wouldn't mind, perhaps, if he was more of a team player, but he's one of those performers whose presence frequently necessitates being the center of attention, and while I can forgive the aforementioned Cosell family bar mitzvah sketch—it at least places him toe-to-toe with Cosell, and Cosell is fun—I'm less forgiving of another installment of Fernando's Hideaway, nor his pretape as an elderly boxer staging a comeback, which is possibly one of the most insufferable vanity pieces he ever conceived. (It's just Billy wearing a horrific, prosthetic death mask, making lazy old person jokes while using one of his stock, nail-on-chalkboard voices... fun!) I get that, as an important part of this era—albeit one whose importance warrants an eye-roll at best—this episode needs to cater to the fact that it's his last, too, but it feels like a reminder of the season's problems more than anything else that we get three Billy-centered sketches sequenced in a row.

Fortunately, there's still plenty to enjoy here, and the episode as a whole presents some great, final opportunities to our departing cast. First, the unsurprising ones: in addition to Billy, both Christopher and Martin get obvious, "Give the audience what they want" spotlight moments, but they're the sort of consummate performers who never truly wore me down. Christopher, most notably, reprises the Willie and Frankie routine one last time with Billy, and it does one of my favorite little things the Ebersol era would do: bringing recurring characters into 8H for their final outings (see also: Dion, the Whiners). The bit is the same as it's always been, but having the two characters be working as camera operators at SNL makes for a fun, meta conclusion to their journey across varying occupations, and the warm crowd ensures it starts the episode off on a decent note. He also anchors his final SNN segment, and while it's still pretty lackluster (more on that later), he's thrown a few more decent jokes than usual, and I greatly enjoyed how it created a chance for the cast to reprise a few of their signature correspondent characters one more time: Martin's Nathan Thurm, Gary's projectionist Dwight MacNamara, and Rich's constantly-intruding Robert Latta. Thurm remains as Thurm-y as always, though Martin also gets to reprise Ed Grimley one final time, and it's a particularly memorable installment if not strictly for the inclusion of Howard Cosell as Ed's uncle, sparing him from Christopher's misinformed mafia hitman: "Unhand my nephew, I must say. Because what you're doing is far from decent, you know." Even down to his final episode, Martin can do no wrong.

It's everyone else who offers the best surprises. The ensemble "Run, Throw, & Catch Like a Girl Olympics" sketch is a guilty riot, and it's a perfect final demonstration of Gary, Jim, and Martin's physical comedy prowess as they showcase their most pathetic throws, run with their limbs flailing about, and throw tantrums for the highest marks. If it has a dumb premise, it's knowingly dumb, and it finds ways to poke fun at its absurd misogyny (Rich's role as the sleazy proprietor, Julia and Mary dropping nukes on the event in protest) instead of simply punching down. Gary and Jim also team up later in the night with a new twist on Jim's "White Guy" routine as two "Red Guys" who celebrate their defection from the Soviet Union. It's stupid as usual, but it's a good reminder of how much mileage both Gary and Jim get out of their very pure, screen-brightening likability. Mary, meanwhile, gets an unexpected, full-fledged sketch as her sex therapist character Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and while it's not my favorite Mary thing to see, I get that it's probably her most recognizable to the audience at this point and I'm always happy when she can anchor a sketch. It's a decent piece, too, all things considered; teaming her up with Rich's Dr. Seuss, offering absurd, rhyming tips to Howard Cosell about his lustful thoughts, takes the sketch into delightfully silly territory. The greatest surprise of this episode, though, is that on the final night of her tenure, after years of misuse, Julia helms possibly the most famous sketch of her run at the show as a talk show guest who cannot stop doing incredulous spit-takes on her poor guests. You could argue the premise is thin or childish, but it's thin or childish in that signature Andy Breckman way, finding all of the perfect nuances and variations in the idea to keep the audience on their toes. To Julia's credit, too, it's a masterful, gleeful comedic performance—no wonder she left a career-defining impression on Larry David.

I've said a lot about this episode, but it's hard not to. Even though there are still a few more closing thoughts I have about Season 10 as a whole, there's a natural poignancy in knowing that, for most of these people... this'll be the last time I really get to talk about their contributions to the show, episode by episode. It's true that Season 10 has ground to a screeching halt throughout its second half, often getting tripped up by its worst tendencies, but I don't feel as burned out as I did by the end of Season 5 because I don't feel like I've seen everything that all of these performers have to offer. Whereas people like Christopher and Martin feel like they've given everything they can and look forward to leaving, and whereas someone like Billy brings me joy simply in knowing I will never cover him on the show again... it's cast members like Jim, Mary, Rich, and especially Gary who I feel had so much more to offer. Their absence going forward will make me miss this era, even if it was an unfriendly era to most of their abilities. I suppose my relationship to the Ebersol years is a complicated one, but I at least feel comfortable saying that it deserves far more credit than it routinely gets in the present; in all of the era's ups and downs, inherent strengths, and debilitating weaknesses, though, there's perhaps no more representative episode to wrap things up. I'll miss these guys. We'll see how much Season 11 does to ease the transition, though a part of me thinks it'll make the transition worse... (Penned 9/29/22)

GRADE: B.

Cumulative Season Rankings:
1. George Carlin / Frankie Goes to Hollywood (A-)
2. Ed Asner / The Kinks (A-)
3. Christopher Reeve / Santana (B+)
4. (no host) / Thompson Twins (B+)
5. The Reverend Jesse Jackson / Andrae Crouch and Wintley Phipps (B+)
6. Michael McKean / Chaka Khan (B+)
7. Eddie Murphy / The Honeydrippers (B)
8. Roy Scheider / Billy Ocean (B)
9. Howard Cosell / Greg Kihn (B)
10. Ed Begley Jr. / Billy Squier (B-)
11. Pamela Sue Martin / The Power Station (C+)
12. Harry Anderson / Bryan Adams (C+)
13. Kathleen Turner / John Waite (C)
14. Alex Karras / Tina Turner (C)
15. Mr. T and Hulk Hogan / The Commodores (C-)
16. Ringo Starr / Herbie Hancock (C-)
17. Bob Uecker / Peter Wolf (D+)

FAVORITE SKETCHES:
10. "Superman Auditions" (S10E16 / Christopher Reeve)
9. "The Flaming Parrot" (S10E11 / Roy Scheider)
8. "Inside Out" (S10E17 / Howard Cosell)
7. "Ed Grimley: Miss Malone" (S10E12 / Alex Karras)
6. "Walking After Midnight"(S10E06 / Ed Asner)
5. "Rabbi" (S10E04 / Michael McKean) 
4. "First Draft Theater" (S10E01 / hostless)
3.  "Donald Ramp: Chess Coach" (S10E05 / George Carlin)
2. "White Like Me" (S10E09 / Eddie Murphy)
1. "Synchronized Swimming" (S10E01 / hostless)

Other great sketches: "The Bulge" (S10E01 / hostless); "7X4" (S10E02 / Bob Uecker); "The Question is Moot" (S10E03 / The Reverend Jesse Jackson); "The Folksmen" and "SNL Fashion Report" (S10E04 / Michael McKean); "Night Watch," "Ted's Book of World Records," and "Not a Cop" (S10E05 / George Carlin); "Old Peter Pan" (S10E06 / Ed Asner); "Seventh Wedge" (S10E07 / Ed Begley Jr.); "Climbing Upstairs" (S10E09 / Eddie Murphy); "New Auctioneer" (S10E12 / Alex Karras);  "Called Shot" (S10E14 / Pamela Sue Martin); "Jackie Roger Jr.'s $100,000 Jackpot Wad" (S10E16 / Christopher Reeve); "Inside Out" and "Run, Throw, & Catch Like a Girl Olympics" (S10E17 / Howard Cosell)

FAVORITE MUSICAL PERFORMANCES:
8. The Power Station (S10E14 / Pamela Sue Martin)*
7. The Commodores feat. Mr. T (S10E15 / Hulk Hogan and Mr. T)
6. Andrae Crouch (S10E03 / The Reverend Jesse Jackson)
5. Greg Kihn (S10E17 / Howard Cosell)
4. Santana (S10E16 / Christopher Reeve)
3. Chaka Khan (S10E04 / Michael McKean)
2. The Honeydrippers (S10E09 / Eddie Murphy)
1. Tina Turner (S10E12 / Alex Karras)

*It's annoying that everyone is apparently miming their instruments instead of actually playing them, because if they were just proper musical performances they'd rank much higher.

WEEKEND UPDATE: It's telling that pretty much all the conversations I've had about Saturday Night News this season are about whether or not Christopher Guest is the worst news anchor in SNL history. I'm hesitant to say that he is, but in no way that should that be interpreted as much of a defense—it's more a damnation of how awful Brian Doyle-Murray was, and I refuse to allow the badness of his never-ending Newsbreaks be surpassed. Either way, I think it's safe to say that the Ebersol era was, in general, a rough period for SNL's fake news segment.

Christopher, simply put, is a character actor. He had the same issues as Dan Aykroyd before him. He's brilliant at playing whatever smattering of weirdoes tickle his fancy, and he always finds a very believable, human quality within them which proved to be one of his greatest assets as a cast member. Unfortunately, he's also not a performer who feels comfortable in his own skin, and he doesn't have comic persona that he can deploy when he's playing himself on-camera. Whereas I think Dan's roughness as an anchor is a bit overstated (at least the zanier writing helped lift him up), Christopher is fully indefensible; he's given horrible jokes and, in his horrific dryness, has no absolutely no ability to get them over. Most of the joy that could be ascertained from SNN, as usual, are the correspondents, though they felt like something of a step down from last season. Gary continued to be one of the desk's most reliable haunts, and Pamela probably did her most meaningful work of the season here, too, but most of the rest was inconsistent, or simply worn down by overuse (Jim's airhorn commentaries, Rich's Paul Harvey). I certainly won't miss the Ebersol era's approach to the fake news at all, though I also hesitate to think that six seasons of Dennis Miller will fare all that much better.

SOME WORDS ON THE DEPARTING CAST: There's a whole cast to discuss. Let's start with Billy.

Would you believe that I won't miss Billy that much? It's true! Of all of the new people brought onboard for Season 10, he was by far the most frustrating, and at times actively suffocating. He's certainly not a bad performer, and there are a lot of things he did during his run on the show that I really do appreciate; the fact that two of his spotlight/vanity pieces ended up in my top ten list for the season speaks for itself. I also think that there is something noble in his attitude towards character work, which I wrote about in my Roy Scheider review; I believe that he's someone interested in the the lives of others, and his intentions in embodying them are sincere. Part of the issue with that, though, is that there are several boundaries that Billy is all too eager to cross when he shouldn't (the Negro baseballers, fuck), and his routine is one which so often flirts with austere hackiness. He was also never a team player; although he scored a fruitful partnership with Christopher, who frequently found a way to give Billy a better framework for success (the Minkmans, "Jackpot Wad"), Billy had no reservations about centering himself in multiple sketches every episode, suppressing the other talented voices in the show. Every once in a while I'll hear about his generosity behind the scenes, which brings Eddie Murphy's efforts to uplift his fellow castmates to mind—he did write the fantastic Peter Pan scene for Mary and Ed Asner, after all—but I get the sense that it comes more from a sense of vanity for Billy than selflessness or a desire to be part of the ensemble. He did some great stuff, but the bad makes his heavy presence feel like a chokehold. After all, it was often better for him to look good than to be good.

Christopher, despite being the second most visible cast member most of the time, was far more enjoyable as a performer. Saturday Night News was awful, so I don't want to belabor that any further, but it's unfortunate how much of a shadow it casts over his otherwise solid tenure at the show. He's like a less hacky version of Billy; he discovers different characters and imbues them with unique energies that make them pop. I don't think I'll really miss him, because as with Martin, he feels like a performer who gave everything that he could and was ready to leave, but his brief tenure feels quite underrated. For him, though, SNL was little more than a brief pit stop on his comic ascent.

Now Martin, though... it'll be hard not to miss seeing him every week. I have an ongoing theory that he may actually be one of the funniest people on the entire planet, and this season has done a lot to confirm that: he never missed, give or take a few Nathan Thurms. He's a performer in full control of all of the faculties of his body, and his ability to physically inhibit all of his characters—the excitable, wildly-gesticulating Ed Grimley, or the frail monkey man that is Lawrence Orbach, both of whom are some of the most underrated sketch characters of all time in my book—ensures that he can kill with so much as a single movement. Not to be outdone, though, his skills as a performer were far more than physical; he's also a damn good actor who can sell anything he's given, and one who knows how to earn his laughs without being the center of attention. (See his performance in the "Rabbi" sketch opposite Billy; the level of commitment he gives to his straight man role helps make the entire thing click.) I look forward to seeing him pop up in future hosting stints very much, I must say.

I also greatly enjoyed Rich as a performer, far more than I was anticipating. He's a bit of a strange one; while, like Pamela, he was hired based on his success as a satirist, it's a skillset that by and large proved itself to be useless against Ebersol's staunchly apolitical vision of the show. Whereas Pamela was never able to really find anything meaningful to do, though, Rich revealed another corner of his personality that proved to be one of the season's most sneakily enjoyable assets: he's just an insanely fun weirdo. He found the perfect intersection between gleeful stupidity and shocking celebreality, often scoring underrated highlights throughout the season—his Plexiglas stand-up, his collaboration with Breckman on the excellent "Walking After Midnight" pretape, and his crazed David Byrne impression are all sublime. But perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of him as a cast member was how much it felt like he gelled with Ebersol's B-tier. He felt like he was far more invested in being a team player than most of his other contemporaries, and as a result, he fit into the show far more comfortably than the likes of Billy, Christopher, Harry, or even Martin. Of all of Season 10's new hires, I would've loved to see him continue with the show the most.

That leaves us with Pamela and Harry (before we move on to the longer-tenured performers... this section is LONG). Pamela is perhaps the most disappointing casualty of the season, both because she's someone who excels in an arena that Ebersol had no use for (satire), and because she was a woman during one of the most male-driven periods in the show's history. Her highlights were few and far between, and it's tough to tell if she really connected with anyone behind the scenes. She had a run of solo sketches as different famous musicians at the top of the season (Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Billy Idol, etc.) which didn't really connect with me or the audience very much, but she fared a bit better as SNN's double-talking British correspondent, Angela Bradleigh. Perhaps it's telling, in a bit of a sad way, that the most memorable thing she got to do all season was appear as herself during SNN, battling against her wildly sentient puppet-boobs. 

As for Harry... he shouldn't have come back this season. I'm fairly ambivalent to his brief tenure in Season 5, though it was at least a far better fit then, and under Lorne's leadership, his contributions to the show felt more meaningful. In Season 10, he scores some massive highlights—his Reagan was solid, and of course, "Synchronized Swimming" is one of the greatest SNL sketches of all time—but his brand of comedy could also be insanely tiring in its low energy dryness (Richard Blackwell). His quote that he left because of creative differences—"I was creative, they were different"—is perhaps one of the most potent quotes regarding the Ebersol era, and while I can empathize with the remark considering how much he was shut out before quitting, most of his efforts simply do not work.

Now, onto the stalwarts! I think I've made my love for Gary fairly clear across the past few seasons, but just to reiterate: isn't Gary great? He's never been one of Ebersol's most frequent players, but he's one of the most reliable; across his three seasons at the show, he made himself useful as one of the cast's best utility players. Most of his success can be pinned to his affability; even if his characters straddled along the lowest rungs of the social ladder like Ira Needleman or El Dorko, he imbued them with such a sense of sincerity and passion that their victories felt like legitimate, rousing triumphs. While it's a somewhat unrecognized characteristic of his tenure, too, I greatly appreciate how much he maintained a place in the show as himself, Gary Kroeger; the meta, behind-the-scenes aspect of the show was in general decline throughout the Ebersol era, and Gary was one of the few performers intent to maintain a persona that connected him to the audience. Bits like his little arc about perpetually having this sketches cut throughout his first season, culminating in a suicide attempt, or his disgruntled Walter Mondale cold open where he vented about how dumb it was to hone his Walter Mondale impression all summer—and of course, all of his SNN guest spots—helped maintain Gary as one of the show's most unheralded but present voices. If he could never be properly recognized for his contributions in an era defined by star power, I'm glad that his reputation in recent years has improved amongst diehard fans, ever so slightly.

Similarly, I'll miss Jim a heck of a lot. I feel like he gets an outrageously unfair rep; I know that a lot of his more recent projects have poisoned the well, but it's hard to deny that Jim was an important member of this era of the show who was subject to unfair comparisons to his more famous brother. Truth be told, though... I think I like Jim more? If I can't deny John's legacy at the show, and the specific, "dangerous" energy that I brought, I much prefer Jim's approachability. His boisterousness funneled into more clever character work than "Belushi being Belushi," as in Jim's fantastic chess coach pretape, and he also has a far greater range when it comes to playing genial everyman characters; even a role as minor as his massive Ghostbusters fan in the first Chi-Chi and Consuela sketch has really stuck with me as an example of just how endearing of a presence he could be. It's true that Jim was prone to some of the same things that, as a Belushi, he's contractually obligated to do (he honked that airhorn a few too many times this season), but even through all of those iffy spots he was an excellent performer who Ebersol was smart to tout as one of the show's leading voices, however much some of this season's new hires threatened to ice him out. It's always a good sign for a cast member's significance if they get fired and promptly rehired once it becomes obvious that the show can't function nearly as well without them.

Lastly, there's Mary and Julia, two talented performers who, despite being present throughout the vast majority of Ebersol's run at SNL, were never used to their fullest capacity. Julia is one of those cast members who will forever live on in the most aggressively annoying listicles as one of those stars you will NOT believe was once on SNL. She was a far different performer in her earliest years than she would end up becoming, which is totally fair. Comedians take time to hone their voices, and most aren't given the sort of insane exposure that SNL offers them while they're still assembling their point of view. There were hints of Julia's greatness, like the wonderful "Inside Out" from this season, or "The Julia Show" from Season 9, but more often than not she did a lot of mugging and face-pulling if she got to be the focus of anything at all. She definitely deserved more from the show even if her craft wasn't as finely honed as it would eventually become; either way, it's satisfying to see her returns to SNL as host decades later, fully-formed and beloved as one of the most gifted comic actors of our time.

Mary fared better on the show, and she's probably the definitive female cast member of the era; despite being a bit green at the start of her tenure, she steadily worked her way into being the most versatile and reliable of the women at the show. She made some of her greatest bounds playing ditzy or mousy characters, and she made performing such characters an art form, but I'll always love her the most for her more shockingly acerbic, aggressive characterizations: her condescending, erudite date in "She's A Pig," or her psychotic yelling and shooting at Jim in trampolinist sketch. She seldom got the chances to go as big this season, though a few things stand out, and as in pieces like "Inside Out," she knew how to sell whatever she was given to maximum effect. It's revealing, though, that the best shot she got all season was getting to reprise Alfalfa opposite of Eddie Murphy's Buckwheat—a splendid reminder of the goodwill she'd built up over the previous three seasons despite Ebersol's present lack of interest in her capabilities. It's a shame that her career seems to have quieted down since leaving the show, mostly making minor and supporting roles in sitcom episodes; she could've been a gifted character actor.

SEASON GRADE AVERAGE: B-.

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