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The second decade of SNL begins, and by god does it begin with a doozy! Of all of the infamous years of SNL, Season 11 is one of the more intimidating ones to me. While it has the same hypothetical freshness as Season 6, attempting to introduce skeptical audiences to the next iteration of the show, that season at least offers the potential exhilaration of an entire staff flying by the seat of their pants, week by week. Season 11, on the other hand, marks the grand return of Lorne Michaels to his show, which quashes that sense that we're gonna be learning as we go along. Lorne, by and large, is too stubborn a producer for there to be much of a sense of recalibration or finetuning; that, by next season premiere, he'd posit all of these episodes were "all a dream, a horrible, horrible dream" doesn't give me too much hope that this season will have any interesting arc, either, beyond seeing who swims and who sinks. (Knowing who stays on after this season, though... I could guess.) Realistically, I think this season will mostly amount to an annoying hurdle before I'm able to get into what will likely be the best era of the entire show's run.
Among the new cast members who have been brought on to define the next era of the show are the show's first openly-gay cast member, Terry Sweeney; the first black female repertory player, Danitra Vance; two up-and-coming stand-ups by the names of Damon Wayans and Dennis Miller; a very young Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Jr., and Joan Cusack culled from the Brat Pack; Academy Award-nominated actor and one-time New Show host Randy Quaid; and lastly, Jon Lovitz and Nora Dunn, two semi-obscure hires who quickly ascended the heap with their handy sketch comedy backgrounds. Dennis, regrettably, helmed Weekend Update.
The writers' room is also fully-stocked with a mix of key talent from the first five years (Franken, Davis, Downey, Novello) and startling new voices towards the beginning of their careers (Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch of eventual Kids in the Hall fame, Robert Smigel, John Swartzwelder), including some writers who previously worked on The New Show (Jack Handey, George Meyer)—like the cast, a clearly talented bunch, though one which would struggle to see their skills recognized on the stage.
Will the season be able to triumph its negative reputation? Or will it be as bad as they say? As your intrepid tour guide through such a strange chapter in the show's history, here's my (pseudo-)professional opinion!
For my reviews of the previous season, Season 10, CLICK HERE!
11/09/85: Madonna / Simple Minds (S11E01)
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In a lot of ways, having Madonna host the premiere of this new era of SNL is a pretty solid pull. What more extravagant way to accompany the return of Lorne Michaels and a lofty facelift to the entire cast and studio than bringing in the biggest pop star in the universe? It's like a huge morale boost for the fledgling cast: "We made it! We're doing comedy with Madonna!" But perhaps it only takes a moment with that sentence to realize that it's not necessarily... the greatest idea of all time.
Not that I can blame Madonna exclusively for the very limp foot this season puts forward—she's not great, but no one person can torpedo this operation (however much someone whose name rhymes with Schmal Schmanken tries... more on that later). This season premiere is greatly concerning because there's so little to it that confirms that the right decisions about the show's direction have been made creatively. While there are plenty of interesting names who've cut their teeth on the underground comedy circuit, the only cast members that feel like they have the sort of coherence that the original era benefitted from are the ones who were pulled from the Brat Pack, all of whom are vastly inexperienced in the world of sketch comedy or even comedy in general. If SNL has often thrived on a need to capture attention, it's surreal to see such a strong reset that has so little of a sense of urgency to prove itself. Everything just feels... self-approving.
If there was a lesson that Lorne should've taken away from his previous, aborted project from just a year before, though—The New Show, ironically his attempt to capture his original vision for SNL—it's that the quality of a show is determined by far more than its star power and its own self-confidence. Comedy is nothing without its audience; it's a democratic medium, and while there will always be margin for error, at a baseline it awards the funny and devastates the unfunny. That every episode of Season 11 would be thoroughly revised in reruns with a healthy serving of piped-in fake audience laughter says everything, really: no amount of trickery can make unabashedly weak comedy seem stronger. This premiere—so intoxicated by its own fumes—absolutely blows. Let's get into that.
One of the biggest issues with this premiere, I think, is that it feels enveloped by a needlessly provocative atmosphere. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy SNL embracing the grittiness that it spawned out of, and there are moments of this episode which really punctuate that in fleetingly exciting ways, but by and large, the grit that feels most defining in the writing is all bark, no bite. I recall that Michael O'Donoghue famously attracted ire for his potential involvement in some of the episode's nastiest material, only for him to rebuke it in a characteristically misanthropic way (to put it lightly) and place the blame more squarely on Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Jim Downey for almost all of the night's material, which fully tracks. There's no denying that the three are talented writers, but they're also insanely complicated, with Franken especially being the king of edgy, toothless provocation. And either way, bad taste and knee-jerk reactions are a poor substitute for earning legitimate laughter, as "National Enquirer Theater," our first big sketch of the season, immediately proves. It's potentially one of the slimiest things I've ever seen on the show, an ostensive satire on sensationalistic rags that doesn't attempt to rise above the sleaziness of what it's trying to disparage; instead, we get a long-winded dramatization where Madonna's Marilyn Monroe is suffocated to death by Randy's JFK, among other complicit figures. That's pretty much the entire joke, because what's better than seeing a murdered president that's been dead for 20 years suffocate an actress that's been dead and exploited by the media throughout her entire existence and non-existence in your hip comedy show? Oh, the audience isn't laughing hardly at all? We'll just fix that in post.
That sketch feels like the centerpiece of the night, and certainly the easiest sketch to cull from the herd and use as damning evidence of the general weakness, but things don't really improve; by virtue of being the very first sketch, it sets the tone. Following it up with the equally-harrowing "Pinklisting" sketch doesn't do much for the episode either. I don't think the premise is bad necessarily, and perhaps it's even a bit meaningful, taking on the hysteria surrounding AIDS and the accompanying homophobia through the lens of a new wave of blacklisting in Hollywood, forcing gay actors into the closet; that we have Terry Sweeney in the cast, too, the first openly-gay cast member in the show's history mining comedy from his own experiences, increases the potency. The issue is that it feels like those layers of personal connection filtered through a shoddy Al Franken framework, one unafraid to aim for cheap laughs that wield the same prejudices the sketch is supposed to be deconstructing. Terry shines through it all, a testament to how captivating of a performer he is, though one hopes the show will find a way to utilize his magnetism for something far stronger.
On that note, I do think it's worth acknowledging that there are some silver linings to this episode, and they present the things which I look forward to from this season the most. Even though the cast feels disconnected and lacking in clear chemistry, I'm excited about a fair number of them. Jon Lovitz probably emerges as the most dynamic performer, which is no great surprise considering his future with the show; he's able to wring laughs out of what he's offered even in his infancy, perhaps most memorably in the "Critic" pretape, casting him as a stuffy, aloof critic who's willing to put everything on the line to maintain his integrity in a world gone mad. Randy Quaid is also decent, the closest the season has to a utility player, allowing him to move through different sketches and different sorts of roles with relative ease, even if he hasn't landed any truly solid material yet. (All three of the people I just doled out praise for—Terry, Jon, and Randy—take charge of the Royal Family/Reagans sketch, and despite their clear abilities and earned laughs, it's a reminder that charisma alone can't get a rocky piece off the ground.) Lastly, I thought that both Danitra Vance and Damon Wayans demonstrated what they can bring to the show quite well in their two short segments, debuting teen mother Cabrini Green Jackson and doing a riff on what would eventually become In Living Color's "Homeboy Shopping Network" respectively. SNL always benefits from having black performers pierce through its overbearing whiteness, and both Danitra and Damon bear fully-formed instincts that the show would benefit from making the room for. While I know both don't really get what they want (and Damon, rightfully fed up, would willingly let himself get fired), I'm looking forward to the occasional chances the show gives them use their voices.
Oh, and I've heard some people like Dennis Miller, too, considering him one of the few beacons of consistency in this season. I'm happy for them, and I'm concerned for myself.
As far as the rest of the night's sketches go, there's only really one win: the brief riff on a popular Michelob beer ad that sentences all of the commercial's yuppie pleasure-seekers to hell for their life of "false values, empty ambition, and raw greed." The next best thing might be the farcical, Spanish-language variety show sketch, "El Spectaculare De Marika," which also grants Madonna her only decent role of the night as the program's diva host; the jokes and wild antics graze perpetually against hackiness, but in a night that trudges along so slowly, it offers a necessary boost of pure energy with some vibrant, supporting performances from the cast. Whatever else comprises this episode is marred by issues even at their most benign, perhaps none more confounding than the debut of the season's recurring Twilight Zone spoof, "The Limits of the Imagination." It feels like a perfect representation of the bizarre stumbling blocks of this season: you can see the humor and the absurdity of the riff they're playing with, but it feels overwritten and too glossy for its own good, and the performers aren't operating at the level they have to be at for it to feel as frenetic as it needs to be. The audience, in turn, has no idea how exactly to respond to it for the umpteenth time.
I've said a lot about this episode, and yet I feel like I haven't said nearly enough; trying to dissect an episode as confused as this one is like trying to reassemble a busted piñata. Even the existence of a handful of bright spots offer little promise—it feels more like they set a precedent for the degree that this season will repeatedly squander them. I would greatly love for Season 11 to prove me wrong in my reservations towards it, but if the season premiere is to be taken as an introduction to a concept, it's something to be feared rather than something worthy of all that much optimism. (Penned 10/06/22)
GRADE: D+.
11/16/85: Chevy Chase / Sheila E. (S11E02)
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Well, after eviscerating the last episode, I wasn't expecting to enjoy this next one a decent bit more... so perhaps it's a decent time to walk things back a little bit. I'll admit that my hopes of this episode weren't the highest, and it's not an episode with a particularly good reputation, either. It's an episode famous for bad vibes, as Chevy Chase episodes are wont to carry, and it also features one of the most harrowing stories of Chevy's vile, antagonistic backstage nature—he famously pitched a sketch to Terry where he played an AIDS patient who gets weighed every week, before telling Terry to lick his balls. Sufficed to say, this had to have been another particularly demoralizing week, and I have no idea what Lorne's insistence is on bringing Chevy to the show as a legacy host, let alone as someone to grant validity to new casts like some sort of elder statesmen. Upon watching the episode, though, I was surprised that there are a lot of ways that it improved upon last week, apropos of those negative vibes; even if the final outcome is still lacking, I'm detecting far more promise that this season could churn out some decent material in spite of everything it has to work against.
First, though, I of course have to talk about Chevy's performance on the episode proper, which... is not great. I'll give Chevy that he feels a lot more himself than he did in S5, mainly because he isn't sweating bullets in the midst of a monstrous cocaine high, but he's not a particularly strong or versatile host here, either. The best you could say about him is that he doesn't derail anything, though every time he's tasked with regurgitating a part of his beloved act from a decade before, it just feels a bit sad. The Chevy shtick gets less and less charming the older Chevy gets, and I think we've finally hit the impasse where it stops working as intended—the "garden slug" years, as O'Donoghue would put it. Whereas the sketch where Chevy's Gerald Ford meets with Randy's Reagan to discuss an upcoming summit with Gorbachev should be a very silly "passing of the torch" sketch, for instance, all it does is end up exposing the increasing hollowness of Chevy's bag of tricks. He fumbles, he stumbles, he knocks some pictures over... it's stuff we've all seen countless times before, and it certainly doesn't provide enough of a spark to counteract the very sluggish writing he's supposed to uplift. The monologue and cold open similarly bank on Chevy as Chevy being enough of a joy when it simply isn't; it's actually sort of shocking how little he can key into the audience in the former, which makes things him come across as even more ill at ease.
Fortunately, the less intent the episode is to serve Chevy, the more it works. He still feels poorly-integrated, but then, that's a broad issue with the season in general; it's strange to consider how much better sketches would feel with a cast that feels more coherent. Enough back-handed comments, though. The best part about this episode is how much it feels like this season's most capable performers are already establishing their places, and how much the new, valuable voices in the writer's room are able to fight their way into the proceedings.
It's funny how Nora Dunn and Jon Lovitz have already demonstrated their worth as commodities, with both debuting two of their biggest characters here. "The Pat Stevens Show" makes an especially solid first impression given how much it felt like Nora didn't factor into the premiere; here, she's a force of nature as the show's host, a vapid and blithely-condescending former model who fails to align with the guest she's supposed to be interviewing. I'd be remiss not to mention, too, that it's a particularly great showcase for Danitra, who (like Nora) brings one of her own pre-established characters into the mix—Harriett DeLafayette, a feminist stripper who sets staunch personal boundaries surrounding key parts of her occupation. ("I go onstage, and I stand there, and I don't take off nothin'.") Meanwhile, Jon strikes a similarly impressive hit with the "Pathological Liars Anonymous" sketch, introducing his compulsive liar character, Tommy Flanagan. Whereas Jon still hasn't quite established his trademark pomposity, he's already getting keyed into some fun sliminess; Flanagan is like a shifty-eyed child seeing how far he can take his fanciful tall tales. (Of course, it's not very far: "I tried to kill myself... yeah, I DID kill myself! Sure, I was medically dead for a week and a half!") Knowing how much Season 11 will rely on both of these recurring segments, I'd say they made very promising debuts that offer plenty of room for their formats to be enjoyably reconfigured.
The best of the episode, though, were its more delightfully conceptual pieces, so writerly and refreshingly odd that they feel like they light up a pathway for this season to take where things could end up being okay. Perhaps it's most unsurprising that Jack Handey, a soon-to-be legendary SNL writer at the very start of his career at the show, scores the episode's most lauded piece, "The Life of Vlad the Impaler." Even in Handey's infancy, the heady playfulness of it all makes his writing feel instantly identifiable. Randy's performance as a very nonchalant Vlad the Impaler does a particularly excellent job of capturing the tone of the material, circumventing the noise complaints of Chevy's neighboring prince and getting into a moralistic debate over what it means for someone to deserve to be impaled: "Well that's very subjective, isn't it?... I think my way is infinitely fairer, just impaling everyone I can get my hands on." For my money, though, "The Unlucky Andersons" is just as good. Whereas Handey would continue to cement his place on the show, this is one of the only sketches by future Simpsons writer and recluse John Swartzwelder, and it feels like a window into the potential of this season's killer, underserved writer's room. It's impossible for me not to love this sketch's unabashed silliness, envisioning a sitcom about a family perpetually cursed to endure the cruelest twists of fate that the universe can deal out to them: the cat ate their umpteenth winning lottery ticket before wandering into their freezer, the daughter has been impregnated by the devil, and the son has been forcibly drafted in a personal letter from the president. ("I thought the army was all voluntary now!" "Well it is, but according to this, the Pentagon decided they needed one more guy.") As I acknowledged earlier, it's sort of strange to think about how much better this sketch could work if it was carried out by a more well-rounded cast, but as it stands, this sketch is the very definition of an underrated delight.
The rest of the episode is about as listless as the premiere, though I can't begrudge it anywhere near as much considering that some solid material was able to come to the surface. Still, the more lackluster content holds the night back. Considering that Anthony and Chevy worked together in National Lampoon's Vacation, it feels like he gets pushed to the forefront of this episode, which will always be a pretty bad thing. His Civil War brothers sketch opposite Robert, who mugs to hell and back like there's a gun to his head, and the debut of "Craig Sundberg, Idiot Savant" (full joke in title), are the absolute worst sketches that the night has to offer, and they end the night on an unfortunate whimper. Beyond those, though, this episode never truly bottoms out, and the fantastic, electrifying performances from Sheila E. (that percussion! those aggressive horns!) help reignite the energy whenever the night threatens to drop off. For an episode that I went into with such low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised, and at times even enthralled; here's hoping that Season 11 can take the good in stride. (Penned 10/08/22)
GRADE: C.
11/16/85: Pee-Wee Herman / Queen Ida & The Bon Temps Zydeco Band (S11E03)
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Pee-Wee Herman! Who doesn't love Pee-Wee Herman?! Well... okay, full disclosure, I didn't love Pee-Wee Herman before last week. But that's just because I didn't really understand him! Having recently cultivated a newfound love for the character after watching his then-recent movie, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, I wound up just as excited as the audience in 1985 would've been for him to have a go at hosting SNL. It's a pretty bold experiment for this season considering that nothing has really solidified about the show's new identity, but it's an exciting stunt nonetheless; the only other time an episode's been hosted by someone in-character was Father Guido Sarducci in Season 9, which was about half as committed to the concept as this episode would prove itself to be. Either way, I had pretty much no idea where to place my expectations, which was probably for the best—this is an enjoyable if occasionally slight evening full of the sort of good spirits that this season was in dire need of.
Although Season 11 is no closer to meaningfully figuring itself out, a part of me wonders if that lack of a strong identity serves to this episode's benefit. It gloms onto Pee-Wee's presence so strongly, ensuring that the written material keys into his idiosyncrasies, and while that does serve as a bit of a security blanket at the expense of learning how to navigate a regular episode, it also gives the show more boldness. It helps, too, that Paul Reubens is such a natural at bringing Pee-Wee into a live comedy setting, no great surprise given his history at The Groundlings—it's really nice to finally see a host who doesn't struggle with the show's format. I can't really say enough about just how magnetic of a performer Reubens is, and how brilliantly he inhibits Pee-Wee in every way; his monologue, unsurprisingly, is a flawlessly tight five minutes of gleeful silliness as he plays with the audience, lunges at the studio camera, and whips the audience into a frenzy over some variations on his legendary "Tequila" shoe-dance routine. The episode is wise to accommodate for his presence rather than ever shoehorn him into miscellaneous scenes, and while none of the pieces presented to him are incredibly strong, they forward the carefree and silly vibe that this season benefits from digging into.
For the most part, he's inserted into very simple two-handers, and while most of them aren't over-complex, they offer levity in their brevity. (Rhymes! I'm being cute.) The locker room sketch opposite Randy is the simplest, but also one of the more enjoyable moments in the episode, with Randy attempting to subtly express his desire to pay for a hooker to Pee-Wee. It creates a little game that's perfect for Pee-Wee's character, with him offering ridiculous, prompt-fitting guesses to every new detail Randy adds as he tries to make his point—"They do things in the dark." "Skeletons! AAAHH!" "No... they perform certain acts and you have to give them money." "An evil mailman."—and ending with Pee-Wee telling Randy that he should just get a hooker is such a blunt subversion to his naivete that things lands about as perfectly as a little piece like this should. His sketch with Joan is a bit less successful, casting her as a teacher who Pee-Wee's student falls madly in love with. I like that it has a strange meta-game to it of Reubens-as-Pee-Wee playing a character, but Joan isn't a seasoned enough performer to really sell the gushing melodrama of her part (even if it's, coincidentally, her best performance of the season so far). Lastly and most enjoyably, Jon's Tommy Flanagan meets Pee-Wee in a prison cell, where the two get stuck in a vicious cycle of one-upping each other with fictitious stories of criminal activity while corroborating each other's preposterous claims. It's a bit strange that we haven't established Tommy's baseline interactions with normal people before upping the ante with Pee-Wee, but I suppose it was to good of an opportunity to pass up; it certainly feels like the most natural and enjoyable recurring sketch to slot him into. (Also: hello prison guard Dan Vitale!)
There's also a few larger, ensemble pieces which are arguably more the night's centerpiece, but I'm not sure how to feel about either, however much I appreciate their efforts to insert Pee-Wee into something larger. "Pee-Wee's Thanksgiving Special" should have worked better than it did, but it ultimately felt like it reiterated my issues with the lack of chemistry within the show's cast. I guess it's not necessary in a sketch built around an improbable gathering of celebrities, but that lack of cohesion makes everything feel that much amalgamated: oh, here's Joan mugging up a storm as Brooke Shields! And Danitra as Cicely Tyson! And uh oh, Terry as Diana Ross?? I get the concept of squeezing everyone into a very inane parody Thanksgiving special, and Pee-Wee's strange touches offer some fun, but by and large it's too bloated and disconnected. "Dinosaur Town," meanwhile, is an ambitious and commendable effort on the show's part to vie for something tonally different and more in-line with the sort of scenario Pee-Wee would get himself wrapped up in, but it doesn't manage to blossom into anything all too special, either. The premise should be fun, with Pee-Wee determined to save a dinosaur theme park by finding a mouse in a Coca-Cola bottle, but the execution feels too straightforward as if its quirky premise is enough to fuel things. I still liked it, because I like the unique risk-taking of it, but specificity alone can't be all a sketch has.
The remaining cracks of the episode are filled in by Season 11 doing its darnedest, which is to say that things play out to mixed effect. Unsurprisingly, like Tommy Flanagan, this season is quick to capitalize on "The Pat Stevens Show" in its desperation to score material that will confidently stick. Fortunately, it still works well, and the template seems capable of withstanding overuse; whereas I liked Danitra's character more from the first installment, Randy's weary depression expert yields far more enjoyable interplay with Pat in the complete incompatibility of their energies. ("What are some of the symptoms of depression?" "Well... persistent feelings of sadness or anxiety, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite..." "Oh I wish I could lose my appetite, I look at a piece of cake and I gain three pounds!") Also returning, surprisingly: Father Guido Sarducci, now in some strange new phase as "Pope Maurice," attempting to sell his new laissez-faire religious sect to the viewer audience. Even though I'm not immune to Novello's charms as a writer, I've never gotten the full appeal of the character and this bit really drags; it feels like a reminder that this season regularly maintains a foot too firmly in the past even if that feels more momentarily comfortable. But then, I suppose when your visions of the future include sketches like the one that ends the night, with Randy dully boasting about the wonders of real estate as a new frontier for money-saving... I can understand the concern.
Those moments feel like the most intrusive dead spots in this episode, and even if Pee-Wee is quick to bring the episode back to a watchable place, things ultimately veer far more towards being fun than strong. This week is a nice balm in light of the past two episodes, though, and I hope that it can help fuel some more momentum as this season lumbers its way into December. If nothing else, I'm glad that everyone in this episode seemed to be having the time of their lives—after the past two weeks in the trenches, I'm sure that grooving along to Pee-Wee's show-closing "Sex Machine" number felt like a moment of much-needed validation. (Penned 10/15/22)
GRADE: C+.
12/07/85: John Lithgow / Mr. Mister (S11E04)
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It's nice to know that an episode of SNL is in good hands, and John Lithgow proves his worth right from the very start. It's not that the cold open he anchors is all that great—it's honestly strange enough, with him cast as his Buckaroo Banzai scientist character in a scenery-chewing contest with Robert, that I wonder if I'm missing anything contextually—but it proves that Lithgow is as consummate as he is game, and the fact that he finds a way to fit snuggly into this nonsensical cast is nothing short of miraculous. It's no surprise that he'd end up becoming something of a perennial host for the era, one of the very select few for whom Season 11 was an entry point rather than a termination route. Even against the backdrop of a show that feels very confused about what it is, he lends the show so much confidence that things don't just turn out alright in the end: things are actually pretty damn good!
There's been a really solid upwards trajectory across the season so far, and while I suspect that things will eventually bottom out given the season's reputation, every episode has been better than the last, and closer to resembling a functioning model for the show. Part of that is obviously the host, since Lithgow is both the most flexible and dynamic one we've had so far, but there's something to be said about the quality of the material and performances across this episode, too; it feels like SNL is starting to better understand, if not how to assemble a successful show every week, how to use the cast members at its disposal. The writers from the original era can't use them as they used the original cast, and the new writers have to learn to filter their voice through everyone with similar difficulty, so it's miraculous that everyone actually seems in their element here, with material that plays to their inherent strengths.
The most glaring winner, of course, is the debut of Jon's Master Thespian, the sort of breakthrough character that declares that Jon Lovitz is officially here. He's arrogant, overinflated, childish, and all-around completely ridiculous, owning the character like nobody's business with the sort of panache that clearly establishes him as a performer in a class of his own. He's only half of the equation, though; for however much the character will be beat into the ground across the next season, I hesitate to think it'll be easy to top his pitch-perfect chemistry with Lithgow's Baudelaire, a character so popular that he'd be brought back in every one of Lithgow's subsequent hosting gigs. Watching the two of them play the most unsophisticated pranks on each other—taking turns deceiving each other by the power of their "ACTING!"—is some of the goofiest, sharpest fun I've had with this season so far.
He's not the only one to score some solid triumphs in the episode, though; for as seemingly underrated as it is among a lot of my peers, I'd say that Lithgow's sketch opposite of Joan Cusack is about as strong, casting him as a father who's only able to tend to his daughter's emotional needs by stringing together cliched, semi-appropriate idioms. ("It's like you haven't heard a word I've said!" "Hahaha, in one ear, out the other, huh? Like talking to a brick wall, spitting into the wind!") I don't think Joan is the best live performer ever, but she clearly has some acting chops if her career after the show is any indication; while her SNL tenure isn't very highly-regarded and while she submits generally green performances, this is a very good piece for her to use her then-limited skillset. Lithgow does all the heavy-lifting, and his legitimately adorable performance is the selling point, but it still says something that Joan is able to go toe-to-toe with him emotionally in the scene; she sells her increasing frustration without ever losing sight of the fact that Lithgow, her father, is someone she does love, and that allows the sketch, by its final beat, to reach a very sweet place. There's always room for slice-of-life material in the show, and while we're officially at a point where it starts to become more and more uncommon, I'm glad gems like this can still find their way in.
Last but certainly not least of the big highlights, Terry has a phenomenal showcase sketch here as his Nancy Reagan, dreaming up an extravagant alternate timeline where she's a Vegas headliner. Whereas those other two aforementioned sketches succeeded in no small part due to Lithgow's contributions, this one is all Terry, and it's a pretty strong case argument for how delightful he is when he's not being wasted by the writers. If it isn't laugh-out-loud funny, it's a tour de force physical performance, moving about the stage while belting "That Old Black Magic" with the sort of gusto that defined his pre-SNL drag revue work. (That's forgetting how wild it is to see a gay man getting felt up by beefy dudes on national television ever, but especially in 1985!) Not only is it a certain brand of fun-loving silliness that feels so rare for this very labored season; it feels like the sort of showcase sketch that immediately clarifies why Terry was hired, and what the show's hopes for him were. It's a shame that things don't work out for him as the season continues, seemingly, but at least for this moment, everything coalesces.
In discussing this episode, I've admittedly only singled out three sketches, but I think it speaks volumes about the state of the show that these three sketches can warrant more extensive discussion than 70% of the season's usual output. There's still quite a bit of fun to be had, though! Bits like Randy and Robert's fake ad selling cultist Rolls Royces or the latest "Limits of the Imagination" sketch are rather thin, but both of them are surprisingly fun all the same; hell, along with the cold open, they've kinda helped me appreciate Robert's presence at the show despite being infamously considered one of the worst cast members of all time. (It would be a stretch to call him great, but there's an endearing energy he lends to his line reads that, especially when put into the right character, can really connect.) I also detected a nice, writerly vibe throughout a lot of the episode's material, most visibly in the ensemble sketch where Randy and a gang of disgruntled sailors stage a mutiny that falters as soon as they realize they haven't created a list of demands. I get the sense we're in for a fairly conceptual season, and while that risks feeling painfully overwrought as it did in previous episodes, almost everything works to strong effect here.
There's a handful of unremarkable moments to the episode—the painfully long Franken/Davis sketch about Lithgow needing a giant beetle pulled out of his ass, another relentless Dennis Miller Update, the debut of screamin' Sam Kinison as this season's recurring guest comic—but occasional rough patches with this season are a given, and this is a very solid episode all the same. It's hard to say if Season 11 will be able to retain this level of quality as it continues—next week's host leads me to believe that we've got at least one more solid episode left to this streak—but this week is a comforting assurance that good episodes can emerge from this season, and most pleasingly, that the good can be in equal parts brought about the talent of a host as the talent of the cast. That's worth celebrating! (Penned 10/18/22)
GRADE: B.
12/14/85: Tom Hanks / Sade (S11E05)
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Of all the episodes in this season, this is probably the one that I was looking forward to the most. The reason is obvious: Tom fuckin' Hanks, baby! He's one of the most famous and beloved SNL hosts of all time, with classic after classic under his belt and pitch-perfect chemistry with every cast he's ever worked with. To think that he began his cherished history with the show in one of the most bizarre seasons in the show's history is fascinating, but also uniquely promising; he had to have done a good job here considering everything that followed, right? And lo and behold... he does! If anything, you could argue that he's almost too good for where the show is at right now, though Tom certainly doesn't have that air to himself. He's having an insane, contagious level of fun, navigating his way through good but not frequently great material, and really, that's the best we could ever ask of SNL right at this time.
It was a bit difficult for me to discern whether this episode was better than Lithgow's from last week, though I feel pretty confident that this episode, if not a downgrade, isn't quite at that one's level; at the very least, I couldn't rhapsodize about any of this week's sketches as exhaustingly. The only particularly weak sketch of the night is the cold open, an Entertainment Tonight spoof that finds SNL inundated with the pop culture minutiae of the day; it should be a cute enough ensemble sketch, but this simply isn't the cast to pull that off, and the dragged-out nature of the affair makes it feel like it was resurrected from the New Show trash heap. What it does do, though, is immediately establish that Tom is a host that the show has the utmost level of confidence in, joint-anchoring the whole affair rather flawlessly alongside Nora and even wringing some laughs out of the weak side-business he's been saddled with of making boooop noises along to the ever-repeating theme song. If a host's secret weapon is innate watchability in the most dire of circumstances, then they're basically a godsend for the season, though I'll give the episode credit, too: everything that follows is uniformly energetic, and if it's tailored to Tom, it feels far more harmonious than like he's swooping in to save the show from itself.
It might be the easiest trick in the bag, but uniting Tommy Flanagan with Tom as his equally-duplicitous brother is another immediate signifier of Tom's gameness and charm, performing the whole liar routine without ever missing a beat. It's also a nice sketch in general, despite the risk of the character's overuse—alongside The Pat Stevens Show, it's appearing for the third time in the span of only four episodes. Unlike Pat Stevens, though, the constantly-evolving format of the sketch keeps the character feeling fresh; bringing him home for the holidays is a perfect framework, and balancing Tom and Jon's competitive lying against Nora as their mother, so trusting in their intense fabrication, is a good way to even out the energy. ("This is my son Earl here, he's a special assistant to the President now, and Tommy's a part-time pagan god!") Tom and Jon score a big hit later on in the episode, too, joining Damon as three Jerry Seinfeld-esque stand-up comics who make incessant, observational musings to one another backstage. It's a ridiculous game of inside baseball (Seinfeld was still a bit of an unknown commodity at this point to the general public), but it's absolutely infectious watching these three performers dick around with the Seinfeld cadence and pat each other's backs over their mundane remarks as if they're revelatory, and by the end, even worthy of joke theft. I know this becomes a recurring bit, and I thoroughly welcome that; conceptual pieces can have a difficult time achieving successful recurring status compared to more character-driven material, but I think there's far more fun expansion on the idea that can be done.
All of those sketches use Tom and their performers in a fairly broad way, which is fair enough I suppose—we have a cast of very broad performers, and Tom is just a delightful goofball—but that makes it all the more refreshing that there are a handful of palette-cleansing sketches that play to different tonalities and let Tom and other performers dial into more nuanced performances. The fantasies sketch is perhaps the most miraculous, with Tom telling his wife (Joan) about his bizarre fantasies about how his life would continue if she suddenly died during their anniversary dinner. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a piece that risks being that mean-spirited was co-penned by a writer as dodgy as Al Franken, but somehow both Tom and Joan make it work. (Edit: William Ham informed me that this was primarily written by Carol Leifer, which might further explain that.) Tom sells all of the concerning details with a perfect, delicate passivity—as if he's unsure why the visions of getting together with a young, Swedish au pair are so distressing in spite of his best intentions—while Joan submits the necessary dramatic performance that gives all of Tom's words meaning and weight. The slice-of-life sketch that Joan shares with Nora is also very nice and far more grounded, with the two playing mothers exchanging their views of the holiday season and exchanging horror stories about their children; moments like that, as well as one final guest spot for Steven Wright (killer as always) and the stellar performances from Sade, help the episode maintain a nice ebb and flow even when its material isn't the most dazzling.
As a whole, this is a fun episode, and certainly a highlight for the season, though regardless of its many good moments, the best part about it is just what it sets in motion for Tom Hank's relationship with the show. It's funny to think that just last season, his name was used in a brief nothing-burger of a sketch ("Tom, Dick, and Horny") that poked fun at his vacuous, teen idol status; now, less than a year later, he's a beacon for the show's next frontier. I can't wait to see his ongoing contributions to SNL in the seasons to come, but at least for now, we've got another feather in this season's relatively-featherless cap. (Penned 10/22/22)
GRADE: B.
12/21/85: Teri Garr / The Cult, The Dream Academy (S11E06)
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For a number of reasons, I've had more time to sit with this episode than most. It's an episode I've been ghoulishly fascinated with for a while given its reputation; as I've alluded to every time I've had to write about Teri Garr before, she's someone who's worked in 8H several times with so many different performers, but never to any particularly great effect. Perhaps I also suggested that this episode would be the lowest of the low, some sort of climactic coup de grace to her relationship with the show, because its poor stance among fans has strongly spoken to that. And the thing is... this is not a good episode by any stretch. But at the same time, as I've thought it over for the past week and rewatched it, it's had me pondering the question of what it really means for an episode of SNL to be bad.
I have a working theory that there are, generally speaking, three bad types of SNL episodes:
1. The classic, cherished disaster. A host like Milton Berle going
rogue with their ego, or Chevy Chase zogged out on cocaine, dragging the show
into uncharacteristic, horrid depths. These are the bad episodes you hear
legends of.
2. The risk-averse slog. This is an episode
that isn't necessarily caving in on itself, but it's shackled by a complete
lack of ambition. In a bad season of SNL, it's an episode that either rehashes
everything that has worked in the past, all to diminishing returns, or finds
itself fixated on the lowest common denominator. There's no level of
appreciation that can be fostered for it. These are the ones I hate the
most—and having watched a bit ahead, I'll have some prime examples of this in
S11 to point to.
3. The noble failure. This is an episode
that tries, but it simply doesn't succeed. Unlike a risk-averse slog, this one
has legitimate intent; perhaps there's a strained, labored feel to things, but
the cast and the writers are really pushing. Obviously, I want SNL to be good,
but if it isn't, this is the second-best thing and it makes for fascinating
material to dissect.
This episode falls in that third category for me—I find myself bizarrely intoxicated by its roughness. It's only bad because the material isn't really there, but everyone is still going for it as hard as they can, having fun, and submitting maximum effort, and that resonates for me in a way that similarly-labored episodes from past, turbulent SNL seasons failed to. Maybe that sentiment of mine is also a byproduct of the far more harrowing things I've sat through by this point: both Season 5 and The New Show are probably the closest parallels to where Season 11 is currently at, but unlike those two, there's something exciting about seeing a new cast tasked with making something difficult work instead of a bunch of beloved performers, past their peak, submitting the most embarrassing work of their careers. Does that mean I get more legitimate enjoyment out of watching Anthony Michael Hall search anxiously for cue cards than watching Buck Henry anchor Weekend Tonight? I guess so, though... it's arguably a bit of a race to the bottom.
There's a high chance I'm just broken, because it feels sort of crazy, in conversations I've had with my trusty SNL-watching friend about this episode, how much I gleam from even the most purportedly labored of sketches. Take, for instance, Terry's Hildy sketch. Clocking in at over six minutes, it's an insanely long walk to its punchline, and it's certainly not a sketch that'll win any awards, but something about it clicks for me a bit more than most. Terry's performance gets it over as a maid who's cheerfully overinvolved in the dysfunctional family that she's maintaining, and the sketch ends with a moment of silly catharsis that—if not making the journey worth it for most—cleverly fulfills an arc for the character and finds Terry acting at the height of his ebullience. The "Roy Orbison Christmas Special" has proven polarizing as well, which is fair; the sort of holiday special sketches that emerge from early SNL can struggle to connect because they're so period-specific that they risk becoming esoteric pastiche. This one really works for me, though, for whatever reason. Randy does a credible Roy Orbison, Terry and Robert's performance of "Santa's Little Surfer Girl" alongside Teri actually sort of rocks (I've jammed to it more than I'd like to admit), and Danitra-as-Leslie Uggam's dramatic reading of a letter from a mental hospital patient—rotating the letter as she reads, before everything devolves into complete nonsense ("Bow-wow says Blinky the space dog!")—is a wonderful comedic moment. It's not a thoroughly funny sketch, but there's such a vibrant energy to it that it succeeds for me as a piece of carefree, ensemble fun.
Of course, the episode's most notorious sketch is an ensemble piece as well, and one that even I can't fully defend: "Big Tree" is a bizarre, full-cast disaster movie-spoofing epic dedicated to the infighting of a wealthy family over the world's biggest Christmas tree, and it definitely does not work as intended. And yet... I think it's bizarrely watchable. We've seen so many horrible epics across the show's history by this point, arguably as many misses as hits (if not more), but this one is far from the worst. I find sloppiness more charming than deadness—think back to the epics from the days of yore that hit their one bad joke endlessly, like "gay, sexually-assaulting pirates" or "man in relationship with ten year-old"—and I think all of the details support a bigger, more interesting picture, albeit one which doesn't fully come across. Some aspects are very ill-conceited, like the fresh-faced Robert being an architect and the even-freshed-faced Anthony being, somehow, a washed up geologist (it's so bad it's funny), but I like that goofiness in the attempt and most of the performances, and there's enough silly beats in the sketch that work for me (the use of miniatures, some fun bits of dialogue and characterizations) and grant an odd appeal, like a cute puppy missing its hind legs.
Season 11 isn't quite the little engine that could which Season 6 was, because the presence of Lorne and veteran writers feels like a lousy safeguard, but sketches like "Big Tree" speak to something unique about where the show is at. There's a legitimate effort to do the best they can. While the show often isn't too great, I'm finding more appreciation for its frequent failures than I thought I would, and whenever the show scores actual successes—like this episode's 10-to-1 sketch, where Anthony disrupts his parents' game of Trivial Pursuit by repeatedly rewriting history with his time machine—they feel all the more gratifying. (Shout-out to that sketch for having the moment of the night, by the way: "Who broke Babe Ruth's home run record?" "Oh gosh, I'm gonna have to just throw in a wild one, let's see... was it me?" "Yes!") I'll always take swings and misses over more of SNL doing the same boilerplate shit that's made it drag at its worst—case in point, the return of Father Guido in the monologue and Novello's prolonged Update correspondence are the most exhausting parts of the night. And hey, even if Teri isn't used effectively as a host for the final time, there's a handful of other fun things about this episode, like the complete lack of recurring material and some awesome performances from our two musical guests, Dream Academy and The Cult! It's an undeniably flawed episode as a whole, but a fun mess; for that, I bestow upon it one of my favorite episode grades. (Penned 11/02/22)
GRADE: C-.
1/18/86: Harry Dean Stanton / The Replacements (S11E07)
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Okay, so... that whole "three different kinds of bad" thing I was talking about last episode? Here's an example of a show that kiiiinda straddles it. (Always a great sign when a theory of mine is immediately disproven.) It's perhaps most notorious for how fucking smashed Harry Dean Stanton is, pre-gaming for the live show backstage with The Replacements and drifting through the entire night with a drunken stupor that's somewhere between dysfunctionally Kristofferson and charmingly Carradine (yet never fully either). But even beyond his hosting performance, there's a very weird feel to the material. It's undoubtedly effortful but, perhaps simply because of the dank, unpleasant feeling of the episode, it doesn't teem with life so much as it festers uncomfortably as if, at any moment, it could break out in hives. If there's more originality here than in most of the season (there's only one recurring bit), it feels like a sort that isn't fun-loving so much as tumultuous, with my ability to admire the output being mired by the weirdly glum atmosphere. Simply put, I pointedly did not like this episode.
I really wanted to find more of a fun vibe to this one, honestly. While I think, for instance, that the aforementioned David Carradine hosted a pretty bad episode of the show in Season 6, there was a weird sense of authenticity he offered to his roles in his altered state that made some of its lousiest material more fitfully intriguing. Here, though, even if Harry doesn't have any derailing stumbles, he radiates an uncomfortable presence and it's obvious that the cast is nervously coaxing him along. There are pockets in the show where his stupor helps—he climbs up the fire escape and performs some blues with the SNL band for his monologue, which is pretty sweet—but it's telling that even when SNL straight-up gives him the role of playing a rowdy, intrusive drunk in the bar sketch with Robert and Joan, he feels legitimately off-putting in ways that make the potential comedy feel hard to laugh at as intended. He's got too many screws loose, and on a very loosely-screwed SNL episode, it threatens to turn every scene into a jumble of bizarre bits and bobs.
Of course, sometimes you can also count on Season 11 to dramatically cave in on itself without the need for external help, as is the case for this episode's harrowing epic, "Cleveland Vice." It's a spoof on Miami Vice, presumably, but it's set in Cleveland, which is definitely... a starting place for an idea? It's SNL at the peak of its bullshit indulgence, so inundated with its thin concept and this sense that specificity creates comedy that it feels impossible to approach, and any degree of keying into its bullshit story about detectives solving the mystery of stolen bowling balls yields no return on your investment. Hell, the "narrative" of the sketch doesn't even conclude in the way it was set up to conclude—it's obvious the balls are being stolen by a "Lamaze league" disguising the balls as baby bumps in the first scene, maybe the only interesting detail in the whole fucking thing—meaning that the whole thing is eight minutes of red herrings stitched together, including at one point a scene with Terry as Joan Rivers which doesn't plug into the rest of the "story" at all.
That's the most drastic failure, but it's far from the only thing that doesn't really work. I actually like the premise of the hospital sketch, with Jon reminding Joan of all of the increasingly horrible things she said to him while she was dilating, but it bizarrely fails to coalesce; its attempts at realism almost make the sketch feel like the writer had baggage, and all that bitter tone does is feed into the evening's off-putting vibes. I'm also sad to say that Danitra's big spotlight piece, "That Black Girl," didn't work for me as much as I wish it did. Maybe it's the complete lack of familiarity I have with That Girl which makes it difficult for me to thread, but I think I can get the exercise of transfixing the protagonist of the original show's privilege onto a black woman. There's a nice satirical bite to it which manifests itself well in the most understated of moments, too, like Jon's landlord character immediately dismissing the past three years of her overdue rent ("Who needs it?") and instead helping her try to find auditions. I just think it sometimes borders on too understated and too reliant on the basic humor of seeing this incredibly white show enacted by black performers. It never plays that sense as on-the-nose as this kind of parody needs to... so sadly, despite Danitra and Damon submitting solid performances, it falls into that "Cleveland Vice" camp of being achingly specific to no greater end.
This review has been overwhelmingly negative, but the weird thing about the episode is that it does have some pretty fun material, too. The post-monologue "Double R" sketch with Robert and Randy is a vast improvement on the first, landing on the funnily dark joke that they're having a "stink sale" to get rid of furniture tarnished by the scent of Randy's father's corpse ("Now who woulda thought brass would hold an odor!"), and the fun "Martin Luther King's Day Sale" sketch at the end of the episode—with Jon espousing the greatness of his mattress deals by tastelessly appropriating King's speeches—grants the episode an interesting symmetry. We also get the Handy-penned "The Death of a Gunfighter" sketch, packed with some great, writerly details, and an interesting pretaped curiosity, "The Big Ball of Sports," documenting the obscure, now-banned sport of "Balkan Dirt Diving." But how come none of those bright spots are able to make much of a difference? I think it comes down to sequencing. It's not just how much the good is nullified by the bad (I haven't even mentioned the agonizing Sam Kinison set, or Weekend Update being characteristically exhausting); the bad is so overwhelming that it even stinks up the good stuff like a rotting corpse, kneecapping my appreciation for the better pieces that, in isolation, would far much better. Here's hoping that we can write this episode's abysmal tone off as a one-time, drunken stink sale, because if it represents what's in store for the second half of this season... god help us all. (Penned 11/07/22)
GRADE: D+.
1/25/86: Dudley Moore / Al Green (S11E08)
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Something I don't talk about a lot with sketch comedy, but which I find endlessly fascinating, is running order. It's an art form, and it takes a brilliant tactician to turn the sequencing of an hour's worth of material into the best package possible, because in sketch, a show is greater than the sum of its parts. The same set of pieces, arranged in different ways, can yield wildly different quality versions of the same ostensive show—it's all about highlighting the best material, cushioning the weakest, and generally giving every sketch the best chance of success while maintaining an exciting sense of momentum throughout. But just as the running order can giveth, it can taketh away. The Dudley Moore episode is an interesting case study in just how much one bad sketch placed in a bad location can sink an episode before it's really allowed to start.
That sketch, of course, is the semi-infamous, Franken/Davis/Downey piece, "Miss Pregnant Teenage America," an eleven minute-long exercise in general distaste, casting Dudley's Roman Polanski as the host of a pageant concerning who the best pregnant teenager in the country is. The fact that Dudley is Polanski for no real reason is an ample demonstration of the low-hanging tediousness of the premise; the FDD trio love needlessly detail-oriented writing, and while that can work when all the stars align (think about something like "The Pepsi Syndrome"), it's more prone to become a gratuitous onslaught of pointless, generally offensive details. Why is there random anti-Semitism in the competition? Why does Robert appear as the man who impregnated three of the contestants while blaming women for their own lack of contraception? Such asides seemingly just exist to extend the runtime and make an unwelcoming sketch even more unwelcome. Some moments stand out at least, largely in performance; Danitra is shoe-horned in here as Cabrini Green Jackson very awkwardly, but she gets some good gonking to Eddie Murphy's "Party All The Time," and both Joan and Nora score some laughs as a dim-witted contestant and the retiring pageant queen, respectively. Even then, though, things are couched into such a degrading and desperate concept that any ounce of enjoyment feels pretty shameful.
It's an insane crater that threatens to swallow everything else, which is a massive shame, because literally everything else in this episode works. And I suppose that's a strange vibe befitting of our host, too. My only exposure to Dudley Moore before this, aside from his sorta-forgettable S1 hosting gig alongside Peter Cook, is fucking Best Defense, and that movie failed to prepare me for the fact that Dudley is actually a devastatingly charming performer when he's able to shine. Case in point: his two piano segments in this episode are effortlessly wonderful, combining his virtuosic skills as a pianist with his ability to score a laugh from so much as a glance at the audience. (Seeing SNL bandleader Leon Pendarvis beaming back at Dudley as he inserts Tchaikovsky refrains into their performance of Jame's Brown's "I Feel Good" is one of the most purely joyous moments of this entire season.) Dudley is also a performer, though, whose charisma is entirely dependent on the sort of choices he makes—something reflected in his somewhat-tumultuous Hollywood career as a leading man, and in "Miss Pregnant" dragging him through the gauntlet of questionability. Fortunately, he's able to effuse his charm over the rest of the night's proceedings, and the episode rises to meet him in a string of above-average, if sometimes overfamiliar material.
This season's been having quite a problem with beating its recurring material to the ground, and I assume things will only continue to worsen, but miraculously, this episode's retreads feel particularly lively and implement Dudley perfectly. I was hesitant to see Dudley cast as Master Thespian's new rival, Sir Roger Tewksbury, considering that John Lithgow's Baudelaire is an impossible performance to surpass, but Dudley's certainly no slouch; if his chemistry with Jon isn't quite as good, he's quick on his feet and and he radiates a delightful, Martin Short-esque energy as a small man who puts his full body into everything he does. There's also another installment of "The Pat Stevens Show," and while these segments have officially started to wear on me in their repetition and limited scope, Dudley's portrayal of Scottish race car driver Jackie Stewart is exceptionally absurd, relaying all of his tragic accidents on the racetrack and in his bizarrely dangerous everyday life. The strongest of this night's recurring offerings, though, is its iteration of "The Limits of the Imagination," undoubtedly the best outing to date. Dudley's cast rather appropriately as "a comic beaten by time and toil," flop-sweating his way through a hacky stand-up set before making a deal with Jon's Mephistopheles (character debut!) for the most captive audience he could dream of having—and in a perfect turn, the audience is so captive that it cannonballs his act with their relentless questioning all of his remarks. ("[My sister] is so thin she could walk through a harp!" "THEN WHY ARE YOU MAKING FUN OF HER? MAYBE SHE'S SICK! YOU SHOULD TAKE HER TO THE HOSPITAL. PERHAPS SHE HAS ANOREXIA. WE JUST READ ABOUT THAT IN PEOPLE MAGAZINE!") There's only room in the episode for one original sketch, though it's one I got a hearty amount of guilty enjoyment out of as Jon hosts an arduous game of "Guess That Tune" with Joan and Dudley's bafflingly stupid contestants. It's not high art, but everyone is perfect, with Joan notably submitting her funniest performance on SNL to date in her anguished struggles to recognize the likes of "Happy Birthday" and "Jingle Bells."
And yet, despite all of those strong things... "Miss Pregnant Teenage America" is still there. SNL seemed to recognize the errors of its ways, too; in the far-superior rerun broadcasts of the episode, that sketch is chopped out entirely, filling in the gaps with some repeated pretapes, a longer dress version of "The Pat Stevens Show" (which works better, and has some fun breaking), and a decent slice-of-life sketch which was previously cut after dress. It's a shame that revelation about the episode's quality didn't come until after things were broadcast, though SNL is smart to re-canonize its darkest hours and let its mistakes be forgotten; insofar as I'm one of the rare observers of this season in its original form, though, the episode takes quite the disappointing hit. Still a pleasant effort from the season—one of its best, and Dudley is a superb host—but it's telling that even the best episodes in Season 11 can be plagued by egregious flaws. (Penned 11/16/22)
GRADE: B-.
2/08/86: Ron Reagan / The Nelsons (S11E09)
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Ron Reagan and The Nelsons?! It's like the big nepotism special! I kid, kind of, because I can sort of get why SNL would want to recruit Ron. It's something of a power move to have the son of the president host your comedy show, especially when it's ailing, and the fact that Ron's politics notably align with SNL's more liberal leanings means that their shots at the president and his politics will have more of a built-in punch. I get all of that, crystal clear. Even so... it's undeniably weird, right? For as much as this season slips deeper and deeper into ill-advised hosts with no comedy background (Jimmy Breslin, anybody?), Ron will forever be one of the big, more inexplicable oddities. Fortunately, though, if Ron's no revelation as a performer, he's game and enthusiastic, and I can't help but feel like that contributes to this being one of the season's more enjoyable outings.
It probably helps that, realistically, Ron has very little to lose. It doesn't even really matter if he embarrasses his dad, since that plays in SNL's favor (though full disclosure: there's no super bold swipes tonight); he's just here to have fun, and as soon as the cold open of this episode takes its turn and he slides across the Oval Office floor like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, it's clear that he totally is. There's not a ton asked of him aside from being an affable presence, but it's because he's here that this episode's centerpiece, a Back to the Future riff casting him in the Marty McFly role of rewriting his parents' history, works as well as it does. It's already a pretty fun idea, but Ron does a lot to make it personal and play with his own politics throughout; most humorously, alternate-reality Reagan is a far-left Democrat that Ron has to radicalize for the sake of initiating his parents' relationship and saving his own life. Those sorts of touches make it work better than being either aimless pastiche or indecisive political satire—two things this season has been generally burdened by—because more than anything else, it's just FUN, filled with great performances (Terry as Nancy is always a delight, and Jon hams it up as Doc Brown), and miraculously finds good humor in its Franken-Davis diversions instead of careening off-course and up its own ass.
Ron's only other role in the episode (and the only time he ever plays someone other than himself) is in this week's "Limits of the Imagination" sketch, though it's definitely a lesser installment, hinging upon the idea that Ron is suddenly not recognized by his own family... until they see his ID. Fortunately, the rest of the episode offers a very wide range of interesting highlights. I haven't talked too much about Penn & Teller this season, because honestly I'm not too taken by the sardonic comedy magicians, but they fully win me over in their piece from this episode, performing several "tricks" that are, in actuality, concealed by the fact that they're performing their entire set upside down. It's such a simple idea, but having the studio audience keyed in from the get-go in a way that the at-home audience isn't is such a goddamn fun concept to play with, and the repeated back-and-forth between Penn and the audience to prove that everything is happening in real time—"ARE WE LIVE?!" "YEAH!"—is gleefully infectious. This episode also marks the debut of A. Whitney Brown's "The Big Picture," his series of lauded political commentary bits that mercifully wedge their way into Miller's Weekend Update tenure. It took some time to warm up to me (maybe in part because of Whitney making some real shitty comments, like, the day before I first watched this episode), but it's hard to deny this is a strong debut that hits it off with the audience; his comic persona, pompously verbose as if a caricature of the Miller-esque "thinking man's comedian," is already fully-formed, and he's able to leverage some of the most biting satire that we've seen this season with fierce panache. It's certainly a better debut at the Update desk than the Weekend Update Dancers, whose interpretive dances to news stories across the rest of this season register as desperate variety show bullshit more than anything else.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of all, though, was Danitra's solo character piece, "Shakespeare in the Slums." By this point, it's frustratingly obvious that Danitra can't really fit into the framework of the show despite being so glaringly talented—a point made painfully obvious by her great Cabrini Green Jackson character being needlessly crammed into last week's distressing "Miss Pregnant Teen America" sketch—though I'm glad that we're still getting peeks at her talent when SNL allots her the time to do her thing. This piece is one of her best, portraying Flotilla Williams, a streetwise young actress who reinterprets a sonnet from Romeo & Juliet into her own, less intimidating vernacular. More than simply being an opportunity to trot out her intellectual leanings (she was classically trained in Shakespeare in London), it's brilliantly lived-in, taking what could be an obvious stereotype in the wrong hands and imbuing it with a passionate sense of realism that borders on poignant. It's like night and day to see Danitra here in her element, flawlessly interpreting a complex role, instead of being forced to battle against another hoary caricature from writers that treat her disposably; SNL won't do a thing to prop her up, and it's a testament to her abilities that she shines in spite of it.
The rest of the episode has traces of same-oldness to it, but the lack of any big clunkers ensures that this episode maintains a good energy throughout. And really, all it takes is to not fully bottom out to end up on the upper half of the season! Snide comments aside, though, this is an enjoyable effort: by no means perfect, but a very pleasant watch with good vibes and some neat surprises. How much more could I ask of Season 11 right now? (Penned 11/08/22)
GRADE: C+.
2/15/86: Jerry Hall / Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble (S11E10)
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It's kind of obvious why Jerry Hall is hosting the show, even though she shouldn't. It would be mean to reduce her to her relationship with Mick Jagger, and I'm not really intending to do that... but it's pretty clear that SNL is, because at this point they'll do whatever it takes to get someone like Mick into the studio. If that means having his model girlfriend with no acting experience host, than so be it—it's not like the show's found other great options right now. But just generally speaking... why do "it girls" host SNL? Why does SNL think that they'll execute what the show needs them to? Just because someone is known doesn't mean they should lead a high-pressure live sketch comedy show, and that's a lesson that the show never seems to have fully learned if the likes of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian should be counted as anything. This episode is very much one of the earliest forms of those abysmal weeks: Jerry is a hot lady, and that's all they worked with.
Really, this is about as bad as an episode can be while being fully stable. There's not any confounding or upsetting variables, like a real disaster host or disaster sketches, but that almost makes it worse: there's just nothing to care about, and nothing you can excuse. Part of that is the sheer glut of recurring sketches that fills up this episode, almost all of which are at their worst or most labored. Maybe that also speaks to the difference between a similarly recurring material-plagued host like Dudley Moore, who can elevate things with a committed performance, and a host like Jerry, who can neither inspire the writing nor meet it at its already-reduced level. She's probably best in this week's "Limits of the Imagination" sketch—for the third week in a row, by the way—casting her as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's Maggie The Cat, because playing sexy clearly isn't a big challenge for her, but the sketch itself is far from the finest outing. I like Terry getting to do sketches that center on his gayness and grant him more authority to play with his identity, but aside from his desperate attempts to drop hints to the very lustful Maggie ("Lady, I'm a florist from San Francisco!"), there's not a lot of meat on the bone. The master thespian sketch is even weaker, with the decision that Jerry could serve as a foil to Jon at the same level as Lithgow or Dudley being particularly baffling. I can appreciate the change in format, with Jerry playing a love interest rather than a rival, but she's fully out of her depth—her delivery of "I was ACTING!" needs to be seen to be believed—and the queasier aspects of its set-up (Danitra has to play an African native, and Damon famously refused to participate in the sketch, where he would've worn a thong and held a spear without any lines) are too distracting.
It's no great surprise that Jerry can't play characters too well, however hard she tries, so there's wisely an equal amount of material where she plays herself... though that doesn't make it better, nor is she necessarily any more competent. Again, though, I don't want to place all the blame on Jerry, because she's not the only one sinking this episode. Everything is just bad. This week's iteration of "The Pat Stevens Show?" Bad. The worst this segment has ever been up to this point. I'm so burnt out on this character, and she only succeeds when her guest is good, but when the guest is Jerry Hall and she's botching the timing of all of her lines, everything becomes actively exhausting to watch. And speaking of exhausting: how lucky we are that we have an epic sketch where the joke is just that models are dumb! More than anything else, it affirmed for me how great Terry is in even the most dire of circumstances, with his role as Brooke Shields' badass, gun-toting mother standing out as particularly delightful. Everything else, though, is an exercise in beating a one-dimensional joke into the ground with weak impressions of different models attempting to balance their vanity against their subpar survival instincts in the Alaskan wilderness. Maybe it's cute for a short piece, but not an eight-minute one. It's telling for the night that one of the better pieces was the Tommy Flanagan cold open; the character is starting to get a bit old, Jerry is Jerry, and Mick Jagger's big cameo adds very little, but Jon's locked in as always and the writing plays to his favor.
Usually in reviews, I can't hit every sketch in a given episode because there's just too much to talk about, and a lot of pieces don't really deserve to be mentioned in the grand scheme of things... but in this episode, practically nothing deserves to be mentioned, so I might as well go all out. There's a sketch about sunbathers on a yacht who are dangerously close to Gaddafi's Line of Death, and it's so dull that another SNL reviewer said that he was pretty much just staring at Jerry's legs the entire time. We also have Sam Kinison to bask us in more of his misogynistic, hacky misery, a perpetual and painful reminder that the cutting edge doesn't stay cutting for long! The audience doesn't bite that much, which is appreciably cathartic perhaps, though it could also be that they're so exhausted from the episode they've been watching that even his desperate screams can't phase them. Lastly, I'll at least give credit to one sketch in this episode for bordering on decent: I liked Jack Handey's 10-to-1 about Randy being unaware of the perpetual danger surrounding his exposed, sore toe. The hour preceding it left me so weary that I couldn't laugh at it all that much, but in retrospect, the visual of Robert maniacally slamming the floor near Randy's foot with a hammer and the preposterous cartoon logic that keeps tempting his fate are pretty fun; it's just the sort of fun that, as with a lot of other "smart" sketches this season, would hit far harder with better performers.
I think that it's easy to go into Season 11 with a sour attitude and to immediately dismiss most of what it does, and I pride myself on being patient with it, trying to understand its intentions or appreciate its ambitions... but when you get an episode like this, what can I really say? The show isn't proving its naysayers wrong—it's just letting everyone down. (Penned 11/23/22)
GRADE: D.
2/22/86: Jay Leno / The Neville Brothers (S11E11)
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It can be a bit of a challenge to separate the Jay Leno of the past from the Jay Leno of the present. It's hard to harken back to a time when he was a jovial, beloved club comedian with an alleged sharpness to his act, yet to be blunted by years of talk show hosting and a feud with Conan O'Brien that recontextualized him to a younger generation as a dickish, power-hungry misanthrope who lives in a garage and asks us incessantly if we "know about this" like a lesser Anthony Crispino. And yet, Season 11 has gotten to the point where I was sort of desperate to see him host, because we're in dire need of capable emcees who know how comedy works. It was the best of circumstances for Leno to reach out to me, and he takes them—if this isn't an amazing outing of the show, it's one that has a lot of the right stuff and which is strengthened by his voice and presence.
Of course, that didn't stop me from feeling apprehensive, especially when he strutted out onto the mainstage in a garish, sequined suit to do six and a half minutes worth of stand-up... but really, Jay's not bad. Hell, I'll go so far as to say that his stand-up is very tolerable and frequently worth a light chuckle, though it perhaps doesn't feel as original as it was back in the day. In both his stand-up and his sketch appearances, too, Jay evokes a very broad, performative sense of excess—he'd physically nudge you to let you know he made a joke if he could—but it's a style that fits well into this cast, and which grants him a unique versatility that hasn't been super common this season. That versatility is nicely matched by the sheer sense of variety at play in this episode; there's a little bit of everything, and he acclimates himself well to whatever's required whether that means chewing the scenery or lending some gravitas to a more complex premise.
The big piece worth talking about in this episode, of course, is Jim Downey's "Target Earth," a piece that notably struggled at table reads from the previous season due to its more high-concept nature. I'm not surprised Ebersol had a hard time wrapping his head around Downey's very dry style, but this one's a pretty unequivocal winner, casting Jay and Robert as two aliens who threaten to take the citizens of Earth as slaves for their planet... only for the US government to realize that they're leagues underneath Earth's current level of modernization. ("But surely they must have much to teach us!" "No.") It's not just that the premise is a lot of fun; Robert and Jay are killing it here, and their predilection towards overacting, while sometimes a bit distracting, gives their performances here a very fun sense of smarm as they brag about their "sophisticated network of dirt roads" and "the awesome power of [their] muskets." The whole piece also serves as another reminder that I really don't agree with Robert's status as "the worst cast member of all time," and not just because Anthony Michael Hall is in the same cast—perhaps he can be overeager in his performances, but he hits when he's served properly, and I have to wonder if he would flourish under a writing staff that was equipped to take on broader performers.
Aside from that, I can see how this episode would have a bit of a checkered reputation, because I can see most of its sketches being fairly polarizing. And in all fairness, there's also a real dog... Mike the Dog! This episode has a sketch where they got a dog who was having a hot few months to do a sketch where he nods and shakes his head at different prompts, and that's the only joke. Even by Season 11's standards, it feels curious, though it folds into the narrative of their increasing desperation pretty easily; there's something almost kind of sweet about looking back on a simpler time where people were so impressed by a cute dog following simpler commands, but it simply doesn't work. Something like this needs a performer willing to key into the inherent unpredictability of having an animal on set, and suffice to say, Randy is no Tim Kazurinsky, opting to be patient rather than particularly active. (Mike's a very good boy, at least, and Jay does his best stereotypical French waiter voice.) The other most challenging bit in the episode is its incredibly long "Star Search" sketch, which definitely skirts the line of being classic Season 11 excess... and yet it didn't bother me. It's a collection of hits and misses, but I like how it has the style of a variety show more than being an epic; it's an opportunity for the full cast to get involved, do some brief little character bit, and never risk overstaying their welcome. Sure, some bits like Robert's miming or Danitra's bad shot-putting don't have much to them, but they're far from the dregs that we've seen in previous weeks, and it's all worth it for Damon's bit at the end as "The Angry Comic," actively threatening the entire white race with some violent, borderline anti-comedy—"A funny thing happened on my way down here tonight: I killed three white people... I guess you had to be there."—and then using his intimidation tactics to force a perfect score from the judges. (Shout-out to Dennis' appearance in the sketch as well, doing a comically-stiff rendition of the classic "Olympia Cafe" sketch with Joan.) I'll save more of my thoughts on Damon for next episode, but I'm sad that we're at the end of his tenure to say the least.
The rest of the episode is comprised of shorter pieces, though there's some solid surprises in the mix. While Tom Hanks is sorely missed, I actually liked this installment of the stand-ups more than the first; Damon and Jon are still on fire, Dennis is a riot joining in on the fun (he's infinitely more fun as a sketch performer than he is on Update), and Jay gets his best work of the night as a veteran lounge comic who praises their approach to comedy while burrowing deep into his own brand of incessant shtick. There's also an interesting 10-to-1 which, fitting the vibe of this episode, is pretty polarizing, and it took me a minute to become receptive with how much Jon and especially Joan's characters risked seeming, uhh, mentally challenged? But "The Further Adventures of Biff and Selena" is a sweet slice-of-life piece at its core, with the pair playing very naive and awkward lovers struggling to seize upon the romantic feelings they so clearly have for each other. Oh, and last but not least: the Neville Brothers rocked! If this episode still has a roughness to it, it's the sort of charming roughness that makes the better episodes of this season enjoyable. If not for how many other fumbles we've had lately, it almost feels like the show could be getting somewhere. (Penned 11/28/22)
GRADE: B-.
3/15/86: Griffin Dunne / Roseanne Cash (S11E12)
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There were a lot of positive strides that Season 11 clearly attempted to make, but the greatest disappointment is how, simply because SNL is SNL, none of those improvements are able to come into fruition. For as much as I will bemoan the frustrating misuse of Terry and Danitra, though—two wonderful performers trapped on a show that couldn't serve them, relegated to relative obscurity for the rest of their lives—there's no greater poster child for the season's missed potential than Damon Wayans. It would be hilarious how little the show saw in Damon, a comedian who would go on to become one of the most lauded sketch comedians of all time and the cornerstone of an entire family dynasty, if not for how depressing it is. Even if he's still in the early phases of his career, and even if he always has a greenness in his performances, the sheer potential in him is striking; he's a performer who always makes an instant connection with the audience and knows how to use his voice without the show needing to prop him up.
And yet, he's lucky to be used as an extra in a given episode, and even luckier to be cast as a slave with one or two lines. I guess that's what being a "featured player" means at this point of the show's history, where it's basically a credit thrown to a writer who makes an appearance somewhere so they can feel happy about themselves. For someone like him who's actually a performer, it seems to say, "Hey, you can be in the show sometimes, when we feel like it, but sometimes, you just won't be!" The fact that he's a featured player, despite clearly possessing a degree of talent equal and sometimes greater than those around him, is truly ridiculous—and I can't think of anything that feels more aggressively like rock bottom than the fact that he was credited after a dog in last week's opening because of it. All of that leads to this episode, and the infamous "Mr. Monopoly" sketch where, in an act of rebellion for his repeated squandering, he took his unremarkable role as a police officer and played him as flaming gay. It sealed his fate almost immediately; although he got to perform one more sketch in the episode (a sequel to the Two Jones' sketch from the season premiere), Lorne chewed him out and fired him on the spot. A fair move for someone attempting to sabotage the show, I suppose, but it's not like Damon can be blamed for his lack of diplomacy. At least history proved him right; by the time he hosted in Season 20, he was bigger than the show that had previously rejected him. However tacit, it feels like as close an admission of defeat as Lorne will ever give.
It's fair enough that everything involving Damon overshadows this episode, which truthfully, isn't up to much. (If not for him fucking with the "Mr. Monopoly" sketch, it would be another piece lost to the sands of time.) I find it very telling that Season 11 was doing so poorly that Lorne had to swallow his pride and recruit an Ebersol-era writer for the week—and thank god for that, because I love me some Andy Breckman! He's not at his best here (though who's at their best this season anyway?), but his additions give a nice, whimsical slant to the episode that feels more tonally distinct than usual. All you have to do is hear the sketch title, "You Can Pick Your Friends, You Can Pick Your Nose, But You Can't Pick Your Friends' Noses", and you know you'll be in for a pretty great time; Breckman's a wizard at finding some simple joy and turning it into a ridiculous, committed idea, and watching Griffin Dunne (our night's host, by the way!) try to pick Randy's nose while Jon's talk show host chastises him for his refusal to obey the show's credo is a fine example of the sort of brilliant stupidity that he can accomplish. Another of his contributions, a twisted game show called "You Bet Your Finger!" that gets derailed by a faulty finger guillotine, is similarly enjoyable if not quite at the same level. While one could blame the one joke's failure to escalate, I think the greater issue is that classic Season 11 struggle of the cast being ill-equipped to execute the premise as dutifully as it needs to be executed. (At the very least, Anthony doesn't completely swallow the sketch's best joke: "Oh golly, what do you think the problem is there, Brian?" "Looks like gravity, Bob.")
(Breckman also wrote "Mr. Monopoly" but... we've talked about that one enough.)
The rest of the episode is a fairly mixed bag, but it never feels too dreary even if it's seldom interesting. It helps that Griffin is a fairly solid and likable host; reinforcing the Ebersol motif, he almost reminds me of Gary Kroeger. He's affable, and he sells everything as hard as he can, and in a season where material can be thin and dire, that's a good energy to have. (How many other hosts could sell that one-handed performance of the "Wipeout" drum solo as well as he did in his monologue?) He also contributed some great dramatic acting work to my favorite non-Breckman sketch of the night, "Tea and Sympathy," casting him as an undead car crash victim whose yearning for his ex has prevented him from finding peace. It's not a super funny sketch, and some of my fellow reviewers have had a hard time with it, but I found it deeply compelling; there's such a unique atmosphere to it, and Joan's strong, sweet performance as the mother of Griffin's crush grants the piece more of a delicate touch to its humor that borders on slice-of-life. ("Don't those kids realize that I was found clutching the wheel? I mean, my fingers were actually clutching the wheel at the moment of death on prom night! That should count for something, don't you think?" "Oh, well it is, it's a very classic image and it does count for something.")
Everything else in this episode I struggle to recollect, or have much comment on: Terry does his Nancy again for a bit, Don Novello sings some songs, and Penn & Teller do a trick. It's all pretty whatever, but it fills time. The show's done better, and the show's also done worse. It's Season 11! I can't wait to get out of it, and in that sense, I'm very sympathetic of Damon. (Penned 11/30/22)
GRADE: C.
3/22/86: George Wendt and Francis Ford Coppola / Philip Glass (S11E13)
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Desperate times call for desperate measures, but is that always a bad thing? Season 11, for the most part, would lead you to believe it, amidst the series of questionable decisions it's made up to this point... but sometimes, out of adversity, amazing things can happen. It's true that something as crazy as the George Wendt/Francis Ford Coppola episode could only happen in a season like Season 11, but it still feels so deeply improbable. With Lorne and SNL in general, any degree of self-analysis is a slippery slope that risks having its cake and eating it too, and there's a definite risk of this deeply meta night being a self-indulgent mess that pokes at the show's systemic problems without trying to rectify them—and perhaps it does, to some extent. But the audacity of this episode, and the willingness of the show to hold itself up to some healthy scrutiny, makes it a legendary success. This is perhaps the most unique evening of the show that you will ever see.
To summarize the gist briefly to any readers who aren't aware: the narrative of this episode begins with Lorne telling the cast that Francis Ford Coppola has been brought in as the episode's director per the bequest of the network, and he has been granted full creative control—and throughout the night, Coppola misunderstands, twists, deconstructs, and breaks the show's format for the sake of his own indulgent desire to win an Emmy and create true art. In a lot of ways it mirror's the show's only other effort to go as strongly meta: the legendary Charles Grodin episode from Season 3, which pretended that its host had missed all of the rehearsals for the live show and had no idea what his role as a host actually involved. There's a lot of comedy to be mined out of an episode gone wrong, especially since SNL is a show that thrives on its liveness inherently, but for all of their similarities, the sheer scope and ambition of this episode helps differentiate it. Charles Grodin's episode is fantastic, and it still remains one of my favorites of all time, but part of its effortlessness is that it played out when SNL was at its prime, working with one of the best casts they've ever had, and that it has such an ingeniously simple throughline. Whereas that episode also featured several winners independent from the Grodin storyline, this episode's narrative is so complex and sprawling that it touches down on almost every corner of the night's material; if it failed, the whole night would fail, too.
It's amazing, then, that basically everything that has to do with the episode's concept works, even if a few more minor moments pad it out. (It's also impressive that very little goes wrong; the only gaffe is botching Francis' mic during his Update appearance, though I'm very used to Update being a disaster anyway.) There's a great cleverness in how almost every main sketch in this episode shuffles through a different permutation of the effects of Coppola's controlling, egotistical nature. Right from the start, the jazzy opening cast montage have been replaced by brooding opening credits—in order of appearance, neatly—scored to a dramatic Philip Glass arrangement, and the monologue sets the tone of the episode right away: after George delivers his first big joke, Coppola interrupts and attempts to get a better take out of him while cajoling the studio audience to reimagine hearing his joke for the first time. ("I want you to react by laughing, but if you don't feel like laughing, I want you to go back and remember something from your childhood...") The sketches that follow, for the most part, don't slack on inventiveness either—there's a murder mystery sketch, for instance, where he takes over the camera blocking and subsequently botches every single reveal with incorrect cues that render it unintelligible, and a later Vietnam scene gets cut short by the revelation that the cast is being shot at and wounded with live ammunition for "realism" rather than blanks. At a certain point, you're excitedly waiting to see how a given sketch subverts your expectations, and every escalation is an utter delight.
It's also nice how balanced this episode feels with its cast; it would be a shame if anyone got snubbed from such a crazy episode, but more than just giving them all things to do, everyone manages to have a real spotlight moment. Terry, amusingly, forgoes participating in sketches in favor of following Francis around, kissing up to him and betraying his fellow castmates; Randy rattles off a dramatic speech about Francis' lack of humanity that momentarily causes Francis to walk out in shame at the episode's climax. Anthony and Robert pull their weight tonight, too, with the former having an explosive outburst over being shot in the leg and the latter contributing one of his most memorable bits of insanity, a confrontational monologue while zipped up in a suitcase. (It's a polarizing bit, but I can't not love lines like "I know why whales beach themselves... SPIDERMAN TOLD ME!") Best of all, the perpetually-underused Danitra walks away with the best sketch of the entire episode, and one of the most fascinating pieces of self-examination that SNL's ever done, with this week's iteration of "That Black Girl" getting cut off by Francis for its perceived inauthenticity. At one level, it's amusing for Francis to fully miss the sketch's satirical underpinnings, and there's a good laugh from him calling upon the piece's writers and discovering them to be... the most Aryan trio of people you will ever see. But having Francis bluntly call out the show's lack of black women writers—none of which it's had up to this point, and which it will continue not to have for a long while—is bracing, and Francis telling Danitra, to her face, "I don't believe that you're a real black women," is a legitimately harrowing moment. Drained of her concept because it doesn't speak to how Francis perceives "the black experience," she's forced to transform her sketch into a provocative piece of drama with a long monologue about the woes of her existence. Danitra's performed several trunk pieces from her stage show across this season (there's a significant one coming next week), but this is definitely the closest she's gotten to creating new, personal content for SNL, and she does so by brilliantly interrogating how much the show really values—or perhaps tokenizes—her talents.
There are only a handful of people who don't feel as amazingly-served by the episode, but they're at least decently prominent. Nora slaves away at supporting/character roles throughout the night, though she does get a fun team-up with Robert as a pair of pretentious actors dissecting Francis' career, while Jon reprises both Tommy Flanagan and Master Thespian to mixed effect, clearly out of fear that the audience would vie for some degree of familiarity in the midst of the madness. It's also disappointing that George Wendt, as the night's co-host of sorts, isn't really given much; despite being deeply-embedded in the narrative, he's mostly relegated to straight roles that don't let him key into his full comic potential. The best shots he gets are in the episode's two disconnected, fail-safe sketches that don't tie into the underlying theme, and while one is typical Franken/Davis nonsense (a Honeymooners riff, except Ralph finally hits Alice—abuse is funny!), the whale sketch is a delight, casting him as a fishmonger trying to desperately to sell a whale that he was erroneously shipped. It's a perfect blend of Andy Breckman and Jim Downey's writing talents, with moments of deadpan and quiet sophistication nestled into the absurd conceit, and George does a perfect job of selling his desperate pleas to customers to buy his product: "What the kids don't eat, you can melt down for candles!" It's a strange starting place for someone who would go onto become a recurring presence in the next era of the show, but George contributes good work when he's afforded the chance; I just wish he got more to do.
But ultimately, it's hard to begrudge the episode's select shortcomings by the time we get to the grand finale, Coppola's grand tribute to live television. Jon as Master Thespian rhapsodizes about the history of 8H before commencing a phenomenal tracking shot through the entire studio while the band plays a fanfare, with every cast member scattered across the sets giving a bow, and it's a legitimately awe-inspiring moment; for however much this episode keeps its tongue firmly in-cheek, the ending truly feels like a love letter to the studio, so extravagant that it might as well be the last episode of the show ever. But then, we cut to a bar that George has escaped to after quitting the episode, and while he watches the grand finale on a small television screen, all he can mutter is, "The horror... the horror..." It's barely a funny capper—though Franken scores a laugh by smugly deadpanning, "How do you think we feel? We're the producers"—but there's such a captivating, poignant nature to it. As the credits roll, the cast celebrates with Francis while George tries to hail a cab; in the meta-narrative of the episode, SNL has triumphed, but at what cost?
In a sense, that question stands. What does this episode mean for the rest of this season? In a weird way... it could mean nothing. And that's not a strike against it, though it's an interesting sort of observation. SNL is hurting, it risks cancellation more than ever before, and even Lorne's presence can't right the ship—so why not let a week spiral out so gloriously? (Even the choice of musical guest was deeply inspired; Philip Glass and his orchestra delivered some truly mind-meltingly gorgeous avant-garde performances, the likes of which we will never see on the show again.) If the Wendt/Coppola doesn't speak to anything in the long-term, though, perhaps it's best considered as a reminder that SNL is still a magical show even at its worst, that it can pull the most magnificent surprise out of nowhere, and that it shouldn't ever be discounted no matter how dire things feel. Part of the bittersweet beauty of this episode is that something like this will never happen again, and that it could've only happened with this deep of a fracture in SNL's identity, but that makes it all the more outstanding that it even exists.
And now... I can't wait to return to the mundanity. (Just kidding, I totally could.) (Penned 12/14/22)
GRADE: A+.
4/12/86: Oprah Winfrey / Joe Jackson (S11E14)
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After last week's huge success, there are officially no more episodes this season I'm particularly looking forward to, and of all the episodes we could air directly after Wendt/Coppola, Oprah Winfrey's is a fairly frustrating return to earth. But then, regardless of placement, there's a lot to be nervous about seeing SNL try to work with black female hosts in these early years; it's the sort of rare event that wouldn't happen again after this episode until, insanely, 2003, but at least the show was the slightest bit less homogeneous in its whiteness by that point. If Oprah emerges from this episode better than Cicely Tyson did from hers in Season 4, it's not much of a better episode and she's still frustratingly cornered into insulting positions by the show—the nadir of which being the cold open, a meta bit where she refuses Lorne's pleas for her to try on an Aunt Jemima costume. It's wince-worthy enough as is, but knowing that it was based on a real-life incident courtesy of dumb-fuck Al Franken, and having Danitra show up as Lorne's slave mistress suggesting that he beat Oprah for her insolence, smacks of the sort of discomforting, unresolved tension that Oprah was realistically not powerful enough to fully dissuade. Nonetheless, she puts on a brave face, gets that shit out of the way, and leads the rest of the show to the best of her ability. There's ups and downs all over this episode, but amidst the more difficult moments, there are also some exciting opportunities that she creates for SNL to take some different paths.
Most excitingly, this is the best episode in Danitra's entire tenure. Is there something sad about the fact that even her best episode features her playing a slave in her first role of the night? Absolutely, but the rest of the night is far more generous to her; not only does Oprah's presence allow her to explore more personal and racial themes with a scene partner, but it opens the doors for her to have a baseline camaraderie with the host that she's never really had before. Most surprisingly, Cabrini Green Jackson, who's usually left to solo pieces or awkwardly shoe-horned into random sketches, actually gets a full-fledged sketch where she has to break the news to her mother (Oprah) that she's pregnant. It's such a refreshing change of pace to see a sharp slice-of-life scene anchored by two black leads, and the fact that they're able to explore ideas that SNL is rarely entitled to explore—black culture, social taboos, and socioeconomics—without compromising to the show's white audience feels legitimately special. I also really appreciated the episode's 10-to-1 and all of its wonkiness, casting Danitra as "One-Shoe Emma," a waitress at Oprah's diner who is repeatedly mocked over her missing footwear. Between the very loose but cute narrative, some fun character bits (Randy's meat-headed dummy, Danitra's yearnful monologuing, and Dennis' very Dennis performance as her Prince Charming), and the live piano flourishes underlining pivotal moments in the scene, it feels less like an SNL sketch and more like it was culled from a scrappy sketch revue. I'd also be remiss not to mention that, even if Oprah isn't directly involved with the sketch, that Danitra's performance of "I Play The Maids" in this episode—a scathing satirical song about the demeaning roles black women have historically had to play in Hollywood—is no coincidence. Like the installment of "That Black Girl" from last week, it's damning, too; although it's an import from Danitra's old stage show, it becomes even more potent on SNL, where she's routinely had to degrade herself for screentime in other people's sketches: "Fine Hollywood tradition, I have advice on what to do / But now I have a more modern position: I play the maids in prime-time, too."
There's also a handful of other pieces that I can appreciate for their attempts at something different, even if they don't full get over. "The Wart Hog," a sketch about a legendary detective (Randy) who also happens to be a wart hog, takes a turn when his fellow police investigators whisk him off to the "World's Most Handsome Man" contest to convince him that he's not as horrific as he believes himself to be. If the idea needed a bit more to really work, the meta aspect of everyone racing to a different set mid-investigation teems with the sort of oddball spontaneity that I love seeing SNL toy with. The cute shop sketch is also fairly interesting, starting with Oprah fawning uncontrollably over the adorable stuffed animals in Joan's store before taking the peculiar, dark turn that Joan is secretly holding customers hostage; whether or not that twist works for me, both Joan and Oprah submit solid performances that help the scene land, and as with "The Wart Hog," it's always a pleasant surprise to be caught off-guard.
Unfortunately, the rest of the night is made up of bog standard Season 11 badness. The Pat Stevens Show is being run into the ground, and this week's installment borders on just being a straight interview with Oprah despite the promising concept of her teaching Pat a thing or two about running a daytime talk show. There's also a very unwarranted Tommy Flanagan bit tacked onto Oprah's monologue, despite the fact that Oprah, for obvious reasons, is one of the most adept people this season has had at handling a solo monologue. (We do get the fun of Oprah's absolutely terrible Tommy impression, at least.) Anthony and Robert, meanwhile, contribute one of the thinnest things I've ever seen on SNL, a book report comprised entirely of fart noises because, in a ground-breaking twist, they didn't actually read the book! Comedy! I'm noting that the segment exists simply because it somehow isn't the worst thing that Anthony does this episode, and I want to use that to highlight the extent that the return of "Craig Sundberg: Idiot Savant" is one of the worst fucking things ever. It was dreadful the first time, and there was no reason for it to return; it seemingly just exists because Franken and Davis wanted to channel Anthony's nervous, stilted searching for cue cards into a plausible character choice.
So what is there to make of this episode, then? As with the majority of Season 11, it's a hearty blend of good, or at least interesting material, and white noise, though I think there's a uniqueness to it that gives it a bit of an edge in spite of those shortcomings: Danitra's presence is a great asset, and it feels like the episode's weirdness is more intriguing than dysfunctional. I've lost any hope of this season improving or finding a sense of stability, so if this is the kind of benchmark that I have to settle for, then so be it. (Penned 12/16/22)
GRADE: C.
4/19/86: Tony Danza / Laurie Anderson (S11E15)
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Did you know that Tony Danza is Italian? Because he sure seems to make a point of that with his entire state of being! I kid, to some extent, but it's interesting; for however weak some of the hosts this season have been, their lack of range has left them feeling more bland than painfully specific. If Jerry Hall has the on-screen personality of a coat rack, Tony Danza is so undeniably Tony Danza, and he's just Danza-ing all over the place all night—and unfortunately, I'm not very keen on it. There's definitely an ecosystem where his everyman charms make sense, like in Taxi I'm sure, but unlike his co-star Danny DeVito, his whole persona feels cliched and antiquated rather than something enduringly special. (Just take a look at where both of them were by 2006 to compare; one joined the cast of one of the most beloved modern sitcoms, and one was on his third year of a daytime talk show on the verge of cancellation.) Subsequently, this is a bit of a tough episode to figure out, because whereas Tony's toolset as a host starts to wear exhaustingly thin, there's a more playful vibe to this episode than Season 11 usually has, and I want to try my darnedest to appreciate that however much it gets hampered.
Another source of difficulty, though, and one that's a lot harder to reconcile with than Tony being given so much leeway to do his shtick, is that the first half of this episode is bad. Even if a decent amount of the material has interesting qualities to it, there's such a bizarre, labored feel, as if everyone is stretching for time. There's absolutely no reason at all, for instance, that the Nancy Reagan sketch at the top of this episode should've been seven minutes long; it's a fun physical comedy showcase for Terry in the end, as he executes an energetic workout and hoists a massive weight in the air as the first lady, but it takes so long to get to that point that it barely feels like a suitable reward. There's also another characteristic S11 stinker in the mix, "Lyndon LaRouche Theater," which feels like something like a spiritual successor to the season premiere's "National Enquirer Theater" sketch—only this time, instead of simply being a writer, Al Franken gets to perform in it, too! It's such a fine line to walk between parodying exploitative shock and simply partaking in it, and as expected, there's none of the nuance to the sketch needs to function as anything beyond dumb shock—Queen Elizabeth is peddling heroin!—and mindless homophobia—Henry Kissinger has a gay lover! (Tony in that role, by the way is... certainly something. Very Italian.) Tack Weekend Update on after both of those sketches, and by the 39 minute mark of this episode, there's only been drips and drabs of light amusement.
That's why I wanna focus more on the back-half, because that feels like where this episode comes to life; even if not everything works, there's an amazing sense of variety that feels rare to see but always excites me. My favorite sketch of the night is the "30 second count" piece, with Jon's ringside announcer carrying us through a wrestling match plagued by a new rule where the knock-out count has been increased from 10 seconds to an astronomical 30. It's ironic that it would end up in an episode where all of the material was being dragged out to a fault, but it works perfectly here; Tony's boxer happily beats his opponent into submission (some of Anthony's best work, as he drools and stares off into space) between prolonged ringside interviews and awkward cuts to a clip of Tony narrating his life story—all of which happens to be the night's best use of Tony's natural braggadocio. There's also some refreshing slice-of-life material, which has felt exceedingly rare this season, though it's of varying quality. The bedroom scene with Joan is probably the lowest point of the night for Tony as a performer; it's a solid script, with the two repeatedly trying to find the breaking point for one another's love ("Would you love me if I refused to ever have sex with you again?" "In a different way."), but Tony is fully unable to give his role the gravitas it requires, and he subsequently just giggles his way through it and makes a lot of Danza noises. Fortunately, he's kept more at the outskirts of the return of Biff and Selena, which does a fun job of world-building upon the previous one. I love seeing recurring characters placed in a new environment, and the premise of Biff nervously bursting out into a song he planned at a bar's open mic night for Selena ("Butt dancin', bay-baaaaay!") offers a tremendous jolt of energy to close out the night as everyone dances about and shakes their butts. It's the purest sort of fun you could ask for from SNL, all wrapped up in a delicate character showcase.
There's a few other things strewn about, but if they're characteristically slight, they're not unenjoyable. I enjoyed the sketch where Randy slammed the shit out of a telephone, apropos of the topical reference it was making, because chaotic outbursts amuse me to no end; I got some laughs out of the intense PGA tour advert framing itself like a wrestling ad for the same reason, even if I think the execution didn't live up to the concept. (We do get Tony as a Russian golfer though... a very Italian Russian golfer.) Jon also gets a solo monologue piece as the Master Thespian, because either he or Tommy has to be in every episode, and while I could've done without it, I at least appreciated the format change. Last but not least: Laurie Anderson! I love Season 11's eclectic musical guest choices, and bringing her back after her memorable performances from the very unmemorable The New Show is much-appreciated, even if SNL is even more baffled by how to sound-mix her performances than usual. (Also: I love how much of an organic fit Philip Glass was for the Wendt/Coppola episode, but I can barely imagine what a passing conversation between Laurie and Tony would look like.)
In full, I can't really bring myself to like this episode... but I can't bring myself to dislike it either. It's an uphill battle, but with most of the exhaustion being pinned to an overexuberant host, it's at least a different sort of uphill battle than this season usually is. Is that a good thing? Honestly, at this point, kind of! (Penned 12/18/22)
GRADE: C-.
5/10/86: Catherine Oxenberg and Paul Simon / Ladysmith Black Mambazo (S11E16)
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In this episode's Weekend Update, something significant happens, and it's not that Dennis Miller finally told a funny joke: he announces that SNL has officially been renewed for a twelfth season. Amidst the iffy and sometimes outright terrible episodes scattered across the second half of the season, I have to wonder what it was that got the show renewed. The promise of some change, perhaps? The Wendt/Coppola episode proving that there was still a rebellious creative spirit somewhere deep inside of the show? Who can say. More than anything else, though it's surprising that such exciting news hasn't done much to bolster the show's morale; this episode feels, generally, like it's running against the clock. A few good things, mostly bad. That's Season 11 for you!
It's also such a classic Lorne Michaels trick, in times of need or uncertainty, to stick Paul Simon in his comedy programs to soothe the audience while he struggles to find a voice for his productions—a trick he's used as far back as the second episode of SNL, and as recently as the second episode of The New Show. There's no more damning indication that we're kinda over everything than forgoing the standard cold open with a Paul Simon musical performance, but hey, if your comedy can't be counted on, why not go for something that people might wanna actually see? I'll also give it to Lorne that Paul is a fairly fun person to rely on; I'm always surprised by how refined his comic instincts are and how comfortable he is as a live sketch performer. That's also not intended to dismiss this episode's co-host, since for some reason Lorne enjoys pairing two entirely random people together to get more ratings presumably... but Catherine Oxenberg from Dynasty is here, too! I continue to be shocked that there was ever a time that soap operas were so big that actors from them could host SNL, but to Catherine's credit, she's actually quite good, if not given any charitable material to work with.
Paul walks away with the best things from this episode, alongside his characteristically strong musical performances. (That Ladysmith Black Mambazo number!) He's put to particularly good use in the night's best sketch, casting him and Jon as chained-up prisoners intent to hatch fruitless escape plans. Sure, it's easy to rely on Paul's tiny lil' body to score some easy laughs (which is fair, because he makes Jon Lovitz look big comparatively), but he also deploys some legitimately good physical comedy as he flails at Randy's amused prison guard from his tight shackles, and the bits of absurdist dialogue keep it engaging through the quieter moments. (Case in point, one of my favorite moments was just the first line: as we swoop in on the prison cell, walls covered in tally marks, Jon exclaims, "The first thing we're gonna do when we get out of here is find the guy who made the marks on these walls and KILL HIM!") Paul's also at the center of the season's final "Limits of the Imagination" sketch, an impressively elaborate piece tracing the rise of his musical career back to a deal with Mephistopheles; I always enjoy Paul's gameness to take swipes at himself (see again: the height stuff), and ending with his final moments in the distant year of 2010, discovering his final resting place in hell to be an elevator playing Muzak versions of his greatest Simon and Garfunkel hits endlessly, is an excellent little capper to poke fun at the downsides of his increasingly-secure legacy.
Catherine Oxenberg, meanwhile, doesn't get anything remotely tailored to her, and mostly plows her way through whatever lukewarm material she's given to the best of her ability. The Late Show with Joan Rivers sketch is classic S11 pop culture sludge that she's thrown into rather apathetically, and it's the sort of piece that's simultaneously built only for its specific time but barely satisfies the contemporary audience attuned to its references. Most frustratingly, there's no reason that it couldn't work; Terry's Joan Rivers impression is one of his more fun drag roles and he can chew scenery like a motherfucker, but he's hampered by the writing's lack of focus or perspective. Instead, the focus is placed on some immensely-topical dirty laundry surrounding Jane Fonda, Bridgette Bardot, and Catherine Deneuve and their clapback to a tell-all novel about their romance with Roger Vadim (I know a handful of those names!), and all I can really say is that it eerily reminds me of those random Ebersol-era sketches that I deliberately chose not to write about because they exist to score cheap brownie points and reinforce the idea that SNL is, to some extent, designed to reflect the world around it. Against all odds, though, for however exhausted I am of the character, I found her sketch alongside Tommy Flanagan far better, and the best non-Paul Simon thing of the night. Part of why I've become exhausted by him is how lazily he's been written into meta bits with hosts across the season just being themselves, so seeing him properly weaved into his own universe, playing off of another character, is much appreciated. It's pretty old hat, sure, but Jon and Catherine have a charming chemistry, and I enjoyed Catherine's more grounded character as a hotel employee pretending to be a popular actress—it mirrors Tommy, but it doesn't devolve into crude imitation.
And... that's pretty much all the stuff worthy of comment from this episode! Everything else in this episode is actual filler, especially with how much the back-half devolves and omits Paul from the sketches entirely; instead, we get a run of thin, shorter pieces that are really, really exhausting. There's a sketch where Joan, as a mother, monologues about moral clarity while slipping in and out of silently mouthing her talking points, which fills time; even more brutally, there's a fake commercial for coffee that Nora and Randy aggressively yawn their way through, which comes at such a low point in the episode's rundown that it feels actively spiteful of the audience. When we finally hit the goodnights, neither Paul or Catherine even say anything; everyone just kinda claps until the band realizes that they should segue into the goodnights theme, which feels symbolic in some way. Despite a handful of enjoyable pieces, this episode sadly doesn't amount to a more enjoyable whole, and like the show itself, I'm simply eyeing the show's future instead of finding much joy in its present. (Penned 12/23/22)
GRADE: C-.
5/17/86: Jimmy Breslin / Level 42, E.G. Daily (S11E17)
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I respect that Jimmy Breslin clearly doesn't give a shit whether or not he exists for my amusement—as he says in his monologue, "I'm going to spend the next 90 minutes groveling in the dust trying to make some rat 19 year-olds out there like me." There's just something inherently fun, especially in such desperate times for the show, about having a host who doesn't realistically have anything to prove. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of another of my favorite improbable hosts, newsman Edwin Newman from Season 9; both Edwin and Jimmy greet all the material with an undeniable gameness, if one that doesn't encourage them to stretch their limited range so much as be themselves no matter who they're supposed to be playing, because quite frankly, being themselves is enough. While this episode isn't anywhere near as good as Edwin's was, it's a surprisingly decent outing for the season that finds all the right uses for its unlikely emcee.
I'm not entirely sure why Jimmy Breslin was on the show's radar though, unless they were seriously scrounging for anyone to host this badly. He's an investigative journalist more known for his writing than public appearances, to my knowledge, though it's clear in his monologue that he has a strong outlook; to quote Wikipedia, he's "the brash embodiment of the street-smart New Yorker," which is an intelligent way of saying that he has no fucks to give, but many, many smirks and snarls. There could've been more work done on the writers' parts to funnel that into weird scenarios, but it's a distinct enough voice that it manages to shine through even the most rote of offerings. And fortunately, too, the only time this episode really tries to get away with using Jimmy at face value is in the season's final installment of The Pat Stevens Show, though he's able to circumvent the sketch being yet another dull interview by actively clashing with Pat's stupidity ("Oh, poverty is so sad because there's nothing we can do about it!") and decrying her lack of legitimate commentary before storming off-set.
Elsewhere, he shines with his surefire brashness, perhaps most enjoyably in "Midday with Jennifer Hicks," being interviewed alongside Randy and Jon as a trio of Bond villains who are promoting their new book and reflecting upon the ineffectiveness of their schemes to defeat James Bond and instead offering advice on just... getting on with it. The exercise in trope deconstruction might not be as fresh these days as it was back then, but everyone's more low-key performances are excellent, and the writing is an indulgent treasure trove of hyper-specific observations—you can just feel the feverish pitching in the writer's room as this sketch was being penned. (Among their advice, by the way: don't let Bond near a self-destruct button, let alone label it; keep your countdowns short; and if you're using an exotic form of torture like a slow-moving laser, don't leave the room until he's dead.) It's the sort of sketch that could work in any era, which is a high compliment, but the decision to trot it out for this week with Jimmy Breslin and to cast him as Auric Goldfinger—confessing that his German accent in the films was from when he was "running away from a lot of things"—is pitch-perfect, too.
There's a similarly timeless feel to my favorite piece of the night, "Lone Wolf McCord," a take on a gritty cop show where Randy's lone wolf detective gets chewed out for his cavalier, aggressive school of police work... only to become deeply distraught and needy when he realizes how everyone actually sees him. There's almost something Steve Martin-esque to me in how Randy emotionally collapses, trying to defend his peculiarities tactfully despite being a blubbery mess ("I try to go by the rules but it's so hard! I mean if a car's going fast, you have to go fast too to catch em, don't ya? And I know I use a big gun, but I need one, I have big hands!"), and Jimmy makes for an especially fun foil to him as the gruff police chief who struggles through ineffectual damage control, only to make Randy more and more cripplingly self-aware. This is also a good time to mention that Marvelous Marvin Hagler is this episode's special guest, for some reason! I guess it's because Lorne felt a need to cram as many disconnected people into these last three episodes of the season as possible, and really, who's more of a polar opposite from Jimmy Breslin than a professional boxer? He's a pretty affable presence, though, and he does a fun job of adding to the sketch as a fellow cop attempting to assuage Randy's humiliation while struggling not to acknowledge the truthfulness of how the others have assessed him. There's no denying that he's not the most natural comic performer, but the night is wise to maintain him at a special guest capacity, letting him play off of his boxer persona in a few other inconsequential, occasionally-charming pieces. Most notably there's the cold open, where Dennis Miller reports on his upcoming fight against Anthony Michael Hall. It's... alright to start the episode off with, I guess? It feels like there's a direct correlation between Anthony's involvement in a sketch, and how bad it is (see: the New Show-esque "Tornadoville" sketch in this episode which he fails to save from collapsing under the weight of its own concept); he's pretty present here, doing some scary mugging and blaccent work in between missed cues, but we do get a few fun moments with Marvin and the season's final serving of Tommy Flanagan as Anthony's wrestling manager. Hooray!
In addition to Tommy and Pat, there's a few more farewells for the season as well, and ones that actually mark the end of the road rather than a mere transition into the next era. Among them, I can't say that Randy's Ronald Reagan impression will be sorely missed, though I'll give him a bit of credit: it's a big task to play the president on SNL, especially coming off of a period of the show's history which was so apolitical and with the last reference point being Dan Aykroyd's great Jimmy Carter. Randy never clicked into the role too meaningfully, and while this final installment has a bit more going on conceptually that I appreciated, the superimposed shoulder angel and devils felt too cutesy and mostly amounted to Randy talking awkwardly to himself. I'm more sad about this episode marking the final appearance of Danitra's Cabrini Green Jackson, though it's nice that the season is finding increasingly interesting ways to use her. This is probably the best send-off that she could get, and it's a fitting one for Danitra as well even if there's still one episode left this season; rejoining on the stage for a very nice musical number with the Mell-O White Boys, the back-up singers from her original, pre-SNL stage show, is a bittersweet, full-circle moment for her tenure.
The rest of the episode isn't all that exciting, but it's stuff that I can generally let slide; I can't let the continued awfulness of Weekend Update and the worst Sam Kinison routine yet hold back my grades for episodes, even if they hold back my enjoyment of the episode as a whole in key places, because it's simply not fair to everyone else. And everyone does pretty well here! Even if this is a far from perfect week, we're at a point in the season where I was surprised to see a show that felt particularly energetic and involved, and for Jimmy Breslin of all people! (And hell, we also get E. G. Daily, the future voice actor for Tommy Pickles form Rugrats, performing a music number as a sex doll come to life and dancing with Jon as Biff! That's some fun craziness that deserves mention!) It's a strange penultimate episode, and it doesn't feel like it's fighting particularly hard ahead of the finale so much as casually existing, but I'll happily accept its laid-back, playful charms in the moment. Only one more to go, everybody. Let's make it count! (Penned 12/27/22)
GRADE: C+.
5/24/86: Anjelica Huston and Billy Martin / George Clinton & The Parliament Funkadelic (S11E18)
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There's a bizarre symmetry to the fact that the season began by sending all of our cast members to hell, and it's ending by trapping them in a fire. It's one of the most infamous moments in the show's history, and certainly one of the greatest talking points for the season; concluding an episode-long arc surrounding co-host Billy Martin's questionable involvement, and under the temptation of Mephistopheles, Billy douses the cast locker room with kerosene and sets it ablaze with the full cast inside. I, for one, have no idea how to really interpret it. It's SNL confessing that the past season has been a disaster, and that none of its cast members aside from Jon Lovitz—personally spared by Lorne—have a particularly high value. Is the show qualified to be making these meta references to itself, at the expense of its own cast and writers? Is this commentary an admission of defeat couched in cynicism, or merely a smug display that the show is ahead of its own critics? I'm not sure. But as the cast ran about through the goodnights, screaming and fending off the smoke and crudely-imposed flames, I was mostly left wondering how any of them feel about the past season they spent at SNL.
I feel like this back-half has been a particularly weird time for the show, where the cast has started to fragment even more than they were already fragmented. Especially since the announcement that the show had been renewed for a twelfth season, it feels like the cast has started filing down separate tracks: while the likes of smug ol' Dennis and the omnipresent Jon and Nora feel assured, and sometimes outright celebratory, the vast majority of the cast is left to fight against a show that is quickly losing interest in them in favor of the prospects of cleaning house. And sure, it's obvious that someone like Anthony had no use being on SNL and others like Robert and Joan were simply too young, but I feel like it's telling that for all of the show's attempts to surge into a radically new era with the likes of Terry, Danitra, and (momentarily) Damon bringing exciting new qualities to the show at the start, they've clearly turned against their initial vision, and with that, those who were supposed to break new ground by the end. For however eagerly I look forward to the era of Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, and Kevin Nealon, too, I can't help but feel that it's an egregious failing of the show that it whiffed an attempt at exciting unconventionality so much that they only found stability again by loading the show with such a thoroughly unchallenging cast. These aren't people who made the season worse, yet they've found themselves at the show's mercy in spite of everything they attempted to offer... and that just makes me sad, quite frankly. They were failed, and the same hubris that failed them makes the whole fire concept a bit too disgraceful and shameless for me to fully connect with.
There's also, however, a whole episode attached to that moment, though having now seen it in full, it's no great surprise that it's dwarfed by its notorious ending—there's not a ton going on here, especially for a finale. SNL season finales are always sort of a challenging affair, because you hope for something more bombastic but usually get an episode that trudges its way to the finish line, and I really shouldn't have expected anything more from a season which already feels like it's barely making it to the live show half the time as is... but disappointment is such an easy thing to feel! It's kind of hard to know what anyone was going for with this one, perhaps most of all because neither of its co-hosts are able to do that much for the episode. It was funny to learn recently that Anjelica Huston was very close to becoming an SNL cast member considering that, if this is any indication, she would've fit right in as another clearly-talented actor shoved awkwardly into an environment that does not play to her skills. There's not a single thing in this episode that she lands, and she's quick to make gaffes or blow cues in a halting manner; hell, at one point, during the "mafia greeting cards" sketch where she's picking and reading different Hallmark cards, she ends up reading the same card twice. Billy Martin isn't that much better, but against all odds, he feels like a more enjoyable presence, maybe because he possesses that Jimmy Breslin quality of having nothing to prove. He's just having a blast, clearly thrilled with whatever he's been written into despite the episode's attempts to cast him as disgruntled and temperamental, so it's a shame that he vanishes in the second half and mostly exists to carry the episode's pseudo-narrative.
The episode's sketches, for the most part, aren't really written with the host in mind, either. Frequently, Anjelica or Billy are casually involved, rarely asked to do much or be particularly funny so much as meld with the ensemble and try to make things work alongside everyone else. There's a few interesting ideas, but sadly, they feel bogged down by the complexities of this season and unable to live up to their promise. I liked the meta sketch prefaced by Lorne as a piece pulled from the previous week for promoting alcoholism, for instance, only to play out as a gracelessly glamorized celebration of drinking, but aside from some funny, on-the-nose dialogue—"You sure drink like a glamorous role model!" "Just remember, it doesn't matter how much you drink! Just that you drink as much as you can!"—it has absolutely nowhere to go after the initial reveal beyond a mildly-amusing tag from Randy. I similarly love the idea of the "moments of doubt" sketch, with Anjelica, Randy, and Joan burrowing deep into internal monologues during family breakfast, but its execution feels too straightforward. I'll at least reward points for its brevity, and ending on the family dog's internal monologue ("Food... outside... outside... food...") is the sort of clever escalation I would've liked to see the whole sketch pursuing.
The rest of the episode is more decidedly cast-driven, in good ways and bad. The best of the night's offerings, in my opinion, was the lesbian bar sketch, where Joan's straight character is slowly whittled down by Nora as she realizes that there's nothing a man could do that Nora couldn't; while it's far from perfect (the ending especially doesn't work, if a bit cute), there's a surprising progressiveness to it in how it chooses not to gawk at Nora's character or demonize her sexuality so much as elevate her as a decisive, unflinching, attraction-warping bachelorette. Kudos to Nora, too, for landing her character so perfectly—she has an immaculate level of control as a performer that makes it clear that her place at the show is secure through the summer. I also quite enjoyed Danitra's final solo piece as Aquanetta Feinstein, reading her inner-city adaptions of classic nursery rhymes: "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall! Humpty Dumpty DEAD!" It's not her best sketch, but it's one final, parting reminder of everything she could've brought to the show, had the show accommodated more for her voice; even with her tenure about to expire, she maintains such an eye-catching poise. If there's one cast member who walks away from this episode looking particularly unfortunate, though, it's Terry, who dons horrendous blackface as Patti LaBelle in his final sketch appearance, hollering at the movies with poor Danitra in tow. It's so goddamn hacky, and he's caked in so much greasepaint that his teeth look like they're glowing; for however much I've liked Terry, he's certainly a complicated performer who didn't hesitate with this sort of stuff to the very end.
It's also worth mentioning that this episode, as a finale, does feature some surprising pseudo-cameos to goose the proceedings up, to varying degrees of effectiveness. Al Franken makes his first return to the Update Desk since eviscerating Jean Doumanian in Season 6 to comment on the status of the Al Franken decade, and it amounts to a smarmy and shameless plug for his movie, One More Saturday Night, while directing the television audience to specific theaters it would play at—eye roll. Father Guido Sarducci also makes a couple minor appearances in this episode, narrating the final SNL Dancers number and doing a little ad for his new bocce ball video guide, both offering the usual Sarducci softness that passes right through me. The most exciting special guest for the episode is Damon Wayans, who's return for some stand-up feels like a gesture of gratitude from Lorne... or maybe just a sneaky way to bring Damon back and throw him into the fire for the goodnights. Either way, he's pretty great, taking the opportunity to flaunt his talents without being impeded by the restrictions of being a cast member, and aside from a handful of unfortunate moments, he emerges with the most laughs out of the entire night.
And with that... that's the episode. And that's the season! Wow. When it's the end of an era, I usually spend my final review reflecting and reminiscing, but quite frankly I'm just over the moon to be done with Season 11. It's the least I've ever enjoyed SNL, and while I'm sad to say goodbye to a handful of performers (more on that if you scroll down), their status as shining lights in the darkness felt actively diminished by the show's mishandling of them. I can't really give SNL any credit for this strange chapter beyond that it successfully siphoned out the most applicable performers with its format and, as time would have it, successfully power-washing the memories of this season away from everyone's collective memories. These scars on me, though, having to write about every single one of these last eighteen episodes... will they ever leave? Probably. I like being overdramatic! Maybe this is a gassed-out final paragraph, but I'm just mirroring the source material. Either way, I've eaten my vegetables, and I can't wait to discover what's next in store. Onwards and upwards! (Penned 12/28/22)
GRADE: C.
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Cumulative Season Rankings:
1. George Wendt and Francis Ford Coppola / Philip Glass (A+)
2. John Lithgow / Mr. Mister (B)
3. Tom Hanks / Sade
(B)
4. Jay Leno / The Neville Brothers (B-)
5. Dudley Moore / Al Green (B-)
6. Pee-Wee Herman / Queen
Ida & The Bon Temps Zydeco Band (C+)
7. Ron Reagan / The
Nelsons (C+)
8. Jimmy Breslin / Level 42, E.G. Daily (C+)
9. Chevy Chase / Sheila E. (C)
10. Griffin Dunne /
Roseanne Cash (C)
11. Anjelica Huston and Billy Martin /
George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic (C)
12. Oprah
Winfrey / Joe Jackson (C)
13. Teri Garr / Dream Academy, The
Cult (C-)
14. Tony Danza / Laurie Anderson (C-)
15. Catherine Oxenberg and Paul Simon / Ladysmith Black Mambazo (C-)
16. Harry Dean Stanton / The Replacements (D+)
17. Madonna
/ Simple Minds (D+)
18. Jerry Hall / Stevie Ray Vaughn,
Double Trouble (D)
FAVORITE SKETCHES:
10. "30 Second Count" (S11E15 / Tony
Danza)
9. "Cliches" (S11E04 / John Lithgow)
8. "Fish Market" (S11E13 / George Wendt and Francis Ford Coppola)
7. "Lone Wolf McCord" (S11E17 / Jimmy Breslin)
6. "The Limits
of the Imagination" (S11E08 / Dudley Moore)
5. "Shakespeare
in the Slums" (S11E09 / Ron Reagan)
4. "Master Thespian"
(S11E04 / John Lithgow)
3. "That Black
Girl" (S11E13 / George Wendt and Francis Ford Coppola)
2. "Target Earth" (S11E11 / Jay Leno)
1. "Grand Finale" (S11E13
/ George Wendt and Francis Ford Coppola)
Other great sketches: "Where You're Going" (S11E01 / Madonna); "Those Unlucky Andersons" and "The Life of Vlad the Impaler" (S11E02 / Chevy Chase); "Vegas Nancy" (S11E04 / John Lithgow); "Liars," "Fantasy,"; "Time Machine Trivia Game" (S11E06 / Teri Garr); "Stand-Ups" (S11E11 / Jay Leno); "You Can Pick Your Friends, You Can Pick Your Nose, But You Can't Pick Your Friends' Noses" and "Tea and Symphony" (S11E12 / Griffin Dunne); "Prison" (S11E16 / Catherine Oxenberg and Paul Simon); "Midday with Jennifer Hicks" (S11E17 / Jimmy Breslin).
FAVORITE MUSICAL PERFORMANCES:
10. Al Green (S11E08 /
Dudley Moore)
9. Laurie Anderson (S11E15 / Tony Danza)
8. Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo (S11E16 / Catherine
Oxenberg and Paul Simon)
7. Sheila E. (S11E02 / Chevy
Chase)
6. The Neville Brothers (S11E11 / Jay Leno)
5. George Clinton & The Parliament Funkadelic (S11E18 / Angelica
Huston and Billy Martin)
4. Dream Academy (S11E06 / Teri
Garr)
3. Sade (S11E05 / Tom Hanks)
2. Dudley
Moore & The SNL Band playing "I Got You" (S11E08 / Dudley Moore)
1. Philip Glass (S11E13 / George Wendt and Francis Ford Coppola)
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WEEKEND UPDATE: I wanted some serious change from how little Ebersol valued the fake news slot throughout his entire run, but I guess Dennis Miller's Weekend Update is a precautionary tale to be careful what you wish for. If it isn't clear from my periodic snipes from the past season of reviews, I don't like Dennis much. It's not even strictly a matter of failing to separate the jingoistic nutcase he's become in the present from his spry younger self—I just don't think his persona has aged well at all. Maybe it was fresh in 1985 to have a comic be so erudite, conceited, and apathetic of the audience's approval, especially after years of semi-desperate or crestfallen anchors, but Dennis feels like an overcorrection. He's just... obnoxious. His comedy exists solely to entertain himself, and it isn't very fun watching some comedian jizz all over himself every single week as if he exists above the ensemble.
It's annoying, then, that audiences ate him up. Even if his persona pretends that their approval means nothing, it's obvious that it only serves as more justification for Dennis to burrow deeper and deeper into himself; I'm left to assume that he'll only grow more and more insufferable as the years go by. The best I can give him right now is that there are moments of spark, ad-libs that reflect his remarkable sense of assuredness, and silly bits where he feels more like a human than the physical embodiment of smugness. There's just too small an amount for those faint charms for them not to take a hit as his ego accelerates.
As for the correspondent spots on Update... it was a pretty rough season, and definitely a step back from Season 10. (I already greatly miss the Ebersol era's frequent rotation of cast members doing bits at the desk as themselves.) Damon had a handful of decent early spots, and Nora debuted her sex kitten Babette character in the back-half, but it felt like we were lucky to get anything beyond a very stiff rotation. The one shining light in the darkness was the introduction of A. Whitney Brown and his signature "The Big Picture" pieces, though admittedly I could struggle to get into them on the occasion because of how much Dennis' Updates, and the season in general, bludgeoned any degree of intelligent conversation into white noise. He's certainly skilled at what he does, though, navigating complex issues with surgeon-like precision and sharp comic insights, and I appreciate the edge that he brings to the show more than the umpteenth Father Guido Sarducci guest spot. Either way, this inaugural season of Dennis' Update felt less like a playground for characters than previous years. I can only hope that, like his mullet, it'll continue to grow more wild and unkempt.
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SOME WORDS ON THE DEPARTING CAST: Time for a round-up of all of our one-season wonders and whoopsies!
Randy Quaid may have become something of a laughing stock as time went on indebted to his modern-day insanity, but it's striking to look back on him in his heyday; he's certainly been the most underrated, malleable, and reliable cast member this season. While the introduction of Phil Hartman next season effortlessly washed away his unique position in this cast as comparatively lesser, it's mean to fully discredit how capable he was of interpreting the material he was given, regardless of quality, and making it all just that little bit more palatable. There were a lot of ways that the show set him up to fail—he had to serve as the face of the show's political satire with a confounding Reagan impression, and his status as a capable performer was all too easily exploited in most of the season's worst sketches—but he never made it look like he was under duress no matter how much was collapsing around him. He was the elder statesmen of the season, an overqualified performer who was happy to spend a year working at the show and supporting those around him, and given SNL's stability, I really appreciated that. I'm sure they appreciated it, too.
Anthony Michael Hall, meanwhile, is the complete inverse of Randy, a performer with limited qualifications to be doing what he was asked to do for the show. His hiring was Lorne's most hedonistic move: it doesn't matter if he's only 17 years old and has absolutely no sketch comedy experience, because he'll get people to tune in to the show! And maybe he did, but what those people saw was a person so far out of their depth that he actively ruined almost everything he touched. Being thrown into an unintuitive environment drained him of all of his charm, and the most laughs he got out of me were from his sheer badness in most of the sketches he participated in, where he'd frequently scan about the room in search of cue cards or fumble every punchline he was presented. The writers certainly tried to work with him—he felt all too present a lot of weeks—and unlike a lot of his other fellow cast members, he wasn't actively failed by them so much as he failed himself.
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And yet it's Robert Downey Jr. who seems to have attracted so much renewed attention for his brief SNL tenure as the worst who's ever done it, and I think that's incredibly unfair. He was certainly brought into the show a few years too early, and some level of refinement would've served him well, but I could never be angry with his lack of polish; he had an innate energy to him, maniacal but surprisingly articulate, that I think could've been harnessed to far greater effect if the writing played more to his favor. It's worth noting that Robert was actually asked to come back for Season 12, though he turned it down upon finding out that he wouldn't be able to go forward alongside Anthony... I find that interesting, and perhaps a bit symbolic of how much Anthony could kneecap his potential in the sheer act of being tied to a lesser performer. (I'd rather remember him less for his fart book report alongside Anthony than for his recurring actors segment alongside Nora, where he barreled through the dense, verbose writing and maintained a strong characterization without ever missing a beat.) Either way, while I don't know how he would've slotted into the next era's cast, I personally believe he would've benefitted from more time to hone his voice at the show, with help from writers who sought to explore his potential. As it stands, I think he's a touch underrated—certainly flawed, but charmingly so, and his charisma made up for his lack of discipline. We need cast members like that sometimes.
Joan Cusack was in a similar predicament, where it's sort of painful to think about how much more successful she'd be at the show with a few more years of experience under her belt. Whereas I think Robert had room for growth, though, I think Joan had too many ups and downs that it's hard to consider what her trajectory would be like if she stayed with the show beyond this one season. When it came to more broad comedic performances especially, she felt fairly uncomfortable and was prone to questionable character choices. With that being said, though, she was also shockingly capable at inhibiting more complex roles, especially in sketches with more of a slice-of-life vibe; I think frequently about her pitch-perfect role as a sympathetic mother in "Tea and Sympathy," and sketches where she's simply supposed to exist in the world of a scene, like "Fantasies" from Tom Hanks or "Cliches" from John Lithgow, were a particular strong suit. I guess, in addition to her youthful inexperience, that's the parable of bringing someone into SNL who's more of an actor than a comedian and trying to fit them into a box that they don't really fit into.
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Terry Sweeney seems to be something of a polarizing cast member among fans in conversations surrounding this season, though I veer more positive towards him. It's true that there are some things about him, like his willingness to do blackface to play certain drag roles, which are simply unacceptable, but I've noticed a lot of other people criticizing him for being seemingly all too eager to get in a dress and do drag roles in general... but that's not something I really hold against him. Sure, I'd have loved to have sees Terry do more varied work, but it would also be ridiculous to suggest that SNL wasn't equally or even more at fault for failing to understand how to use the openly-gay, campy performer; for as remarkably magnetic as he was on-screen, he frequently eluded the writers and rarely got the chance to demonstrate his full capabilities. I'd be remiss not to mention, for instance, that he was a remarkably gifted physical performer, but aside from a handful of Nancy Reagan pieces, when did he really get to display that? It's hard to say what his tenure would've looked like if he survived the chopping block with Season 12 functioning a very different wavelength, but in an alternate, more progressive universe, I bet he could've been a fine cast member. In this universe though, where his greatest advocate was Al Franken... shit's rough.
I've talked about Damon Wayans prominently in the Griffin Dunne review, but I'll quickly reiterate: what a waste. I was talking to my watchalong buddy about Season 11, though, and he lumped Damon into the same camp as Joan in terms of being a performer who was tragically placed into the show before his time. I can understand that sentiment to some extent, given Damon's rapid ascent in the five years that would follow that culminated in In Living Color, but I feel like there's no telling how good of a cast member Damon could've been if he was really given the time of day. He was prone to breaking, but he had a natural charm that ensured no flub ever played to his detriment, and I feel that if he got more screen time to work through his greenness, he could've quickly honed his chops and become more of a fixture. But alas, he was slotted in as the season's sole legitimate featured player (my apologies to Dan Vitale) for no real reason, and his frequent barring from participation clarified that he would never be entitled to the success at SNL that he deserved. So really, kudos to him for leaving and blazing his own path. He certainly didn't need the show as much as the show needed him.
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Last but absolutely not least is Danitra Vance, whose departure from the show is one of the most disappointing things for me about entering the next era of the show. As it stands, she's one of the greatest one-season wonders the show's ever had, and it's all the more impressive given everything she had to fight against. Danitra was frequently misused, degraded, or struggled with her dyslexia when shoe-horned into other people's sketches, all of which suggests that being a cast member was simply untenable... and yet, her comic brilliance shone brightly, indebted to the bevy of character pieces she was able to bring from her earlier stage shows. I give SNL credit for giving her room to be unequivocally herself, certainly more than any other cast member this season, even if it doesn't deserve any credit for its fruitless attempts to integrate her more into the show's fabric. For as tragically short as her life would end up being, too, I'm glad that she could be on SNL and have her work be broadcast to millions of viewers and archived—it's such a shame to me personally that so much of her other material lacks strong documentation. Everything she brought to the show, though, was essential to the season's occasional success; Danitra was brilliant, vulnerable, and so thoroughly ahead of her time that her material is as striking now as it was then. She deserved so much better than she ever received.
SEASON AVERAGE: C.
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Season 9 | Season 10 | Season 11
Season 12
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