It wasn't the show's finest era by a long shot. I remember staying up late to watch SNL at the time with my parents, who frequently lamented how far it had fallen from the '70s and '80s; they were right. But nevertheless, I spent those years watching Meadows and the rest of the gang most every Saturday night, and now I miss them. Most of all, I miss the way SNL had a full roster of straightmen/women back then to back up its more outsize comic talents. Adam Sandler and Chris Rock were and are hilarious, sure -- but they're so much funnier standing next to a perfectly deadpan Tim Meadows or Norm Macdonald. Not all of the comics who have been cast in Grown Ups are capable of carrying a movie on their own, but put them together and you're guaranteed some extra laughs just from the reaction shots these old colleagues will give each other.
Check out a vintage clip below to see the kind of understated chemistry I'm talking about between Meadows and (in this case) Christopher Walken. Then tell me: Who else is looking forward to seeing these SNLers play, appropriately enough, a bunch of former high school friends reunited after 30 years apart in Grown Ups?
The blogosphere is already oscillating between whether Palin's planning a run for president in 2012 or whether she's just written her political epitaph. Me, I'm just wondering whether her next act will be, say, going head-to-head against Rachel Maddow with her talk show Sarah Barracuda on Fox News. Or filling the recent Jon & Kate media blackout vacuum with Sarah & Todd Plus Six on TLC. (For those bothering to count: Track + Willow + Piper + Trig + Bristol + Bristol's son Tripp = six.) While Palin may make for a dubious elected official to some, I think we can all agree the woman makes for -- and inspires -- some ridiculously entertaining TV. (Below, I've embedded just two examples.)
So tell me, PopWatchers, do you hope to see more of Sarah Palin once she moves out of the governor's mansion, or less?
Chris Kattan has joined the cast of ABC's new fall comedy The Middle -- a solid, if hardly life-changing, family sitcom starring Patricia Heaton. The pilot is actually pretty funny: Heaton makes a great harried mom, the wonderfully deadpan Neil Flynn (of "Janitor" fame on Scrubs) plays her husband, and they nail the quirky-family vibe. Kattan will play one of Heaton's coworkers at a car dealership (here's to hoping their dealership doesn't go under like, um, all the rest of them in the United States). To me, this is exactly the right use of Kattan, or any moderately funny Saturday Night Live alum -- small doses, in supporting roles that can play to their strengths.
Post-SNL roles used to be something of a joke -- and enterprises like Kattan's own Night at the Roxbury have never helped the sketch comics' reputations as anything resembling actors. (But, hey, Will Ferrell was there, too, and he survived nicely, Land of the Lost notwithstanding.) These days we've got more successful SNLalums than we can handle, from Jimmy Fallon to Maya Rudolph, who's getting good reviews even in a dramatic role in Away We Go. The key is actually thinking before giving these folks a part: As far as I'm concerned, Tina Fey deserves an Emmy just for Perfect Use of Tracy Morgan. I like that guy more now that he's on 30 Rock than I ever did on SNL.
What do you think, PopWatchers? Are you excited to see Chris Kattan again? Will his casting make you want to watch The Middle more or less? Can you ever forgive him for Night at the Roxbury?
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down to lunch with Maya Rudolph for an EW feature about her surprisingly dramatic role in the new film Away We Go. And like many comedians, she was much more low-key than the often riotous characters she played on Saturday Night Live. But she was more than happy to give me a few behind-the-scenes tidbits about some of her best-loved SNL characters.
Whitney Houston Her fake Geico commercial opposite Andy Samberg is perhaps the funniest thing I've ever seen on SNL. "All I was trying to do was make Andy laugh," she says. "You could see him just barely holding on at the end. But my goal was to get him to break."
Oprah Winfrey Remember the genius skit where the audience member's head exploded? "When I did Oprah, I picked up on her talking [in sing-song voice] like thii-iiisss. I felt like it conveyed the feeling of Oprah to me. It made me laugh. And now I swear she does it more!"
Donatella Versace "That was so fun to do because we didn't make her a real person, so any scenario worked. She could sit in a bathtub with a hairdryer because she loved the feeling of electrocution. She broke things over her head, walked through walls, burned herself. And she was into it. She thought it was fantastic."
Jodi Dietz Rudolph channeled a New York City housewife on the talk show Bronx Beat. "I still find myself slipping into Bronx Beat. She's our real friend, Jodi Mancuso, who works at the show in the hair department. She loves it. She'd give us ideas: 'You should tawk about prime rib. You should tawk about cutsa meat.' I love that woman."
Pamela Bell Rudolph's over-the-top National Anthem singer is one for the ages. "I was making fun of this new style of singing that people seem to do, where not only do they lay it on thick, they have, like, 20 different voices in the same song, which I find so incredibly strange. I actually got the idea from American Idol, one of those montages of people singing the same song. Everyone was singing 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game.' And there was this girl who was supposed to sing 'Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks,' and she said, 'Buy me some ee-nuts and Apple Jacks.'"
Find me someone who doesn’t like Jason Sudeikis. (Okay, I'll grant you Artie Lange, but that sort of proves my point). Sudeikis is a go-to guy onSaturday Night Live and was a charming sweetheart on 30 Rock. Now that he’s slated to costar in Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, it’s time for that timeless SNL question: Will he be Chevy or Piscopo?
SNL has been a springboard to movie stardom ever since Chevy Chase and John Belushi, but there have been an equal number of promising late-night players who truly proved not ready for cinematic primetime. (Even Red Sox fans wrinkled their noses at Jimmy Fallon’s Fever Pitch.)
Sudeikis has leading man potential, but can you imagine him starring in romantic comedies or Judd Apatow-style projects? Do you plan to see Bounty Hunter, PopWatchers, and if you had to bet now, where do you see Sudeikis in five years? Vacation or Johnny Dangerously?
The movie business is a minefield of bad ideas. But someone needs to deactivate this one before it blows. At yesterday's Peabody Awards gala, Saturday Night Live honcho Lorne Michaels hinted to The Hollywood Reporter that he was having "discussions" about a feature-length version of MacGruber.
Now, let's take a step back for a second. This may never happen. I'm sure Michaels considers many such horrible ideas -- many of which, sadly, make it onto the air every week. But a movie based on a sketch that wasn't even mildly funny the first time it was on the show is just plain doomed. Doomed, I tell you!
For the uninitiated, MacGruber is Will Forte's "wacky" mullet-haired riff on resourceful '80s TV action hero MacGyver. He's a clueless doofus who always has 10 seconds to stop a bomb from detonating using everyday objects. The gag is, he always gets so preoccupied with something else that he doesn't save the day and the bomb goes off. Apparently, this is the kind of material that gets you a Peabody these days. Trust me, it's even more painful than it sounds (add the occasional Pepsi tie-in and it's also shameless). But if Michaels and Forte think this is their ticket to Wayne's World-type box office gold, they're also delusional. The skit barely manages to eke out 90 seconds of material, nevermind 90 minutes. See for yourself...
Let me play Hollywood oddsmaker for a second and predict that the domestic gross of MacGruber: The Movie falls somewhere between Tim Meadows' The Ladies Man ($13.5 million) and A Night at the Roxbury ($30 million). And if it somehow manages to come out on a holiday long weekend, maybe it sneaks its way up to It's Pat kind of money. Who else thinks this is a bomb waiting to happen? What do you think is the worst SNL flick ever?
Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine's obligatory yet clueless allusions to such insidery Star Trek things as "the fascinating Pon Farr ritual" on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" is remarkably akin to what I'm doing right now: attempting to write a blog item about a franchise I knew very little about until I saw it this weekend. But it no longer has to be that way. We all loved the movie. We all have a right to talk about Star Trek!
I'd like to report that thanks to Zachary Quinto's relentless Zachary Quinto-ness, I just had my second sexual fantasy about Spock. Trust me, it's even more awkward when it happens in the office. When Michael Slezak came by a few minutes ago for a mini Kit Kat, I took off my glasses to make everything suitably blurry before attempting to give him some light verbal direction. "Act less human...Don't smile...Stand on this footstool...You're in space. Be in space...Why aren't you in space? Will you please just diagonalize your f---ing eyebrows?" It was a little like the horribly misguided G.O.B./Kitty sex scene in Arrested Development. ("Glasses off, hair up! Ugh, glasses on!") Alas, it wasn't working. For so many reasons. Damn him.
Please share your own inappropriate thoughts about Spock.
The theory that NBC's Parks and Recreation would be improve over time might have finally come to fruition with last night's episode, "The Banquet." Within the first minute, I found myself laughing harder at the show than I ever have before.
The moment I lost it? When Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler's character) explained the tragically gruesome story of Nathaniel the pioneer: "They cut his face off...and made it into a dreamcatcher...and they made his legs into rain sticks. And that's the great thing about Indians back then: They used every part of the pioneer." The tentative delivery from Poehler was perfect -- she's made Leslie a fully-realized character instead of a caricature.
I've been a fan from the start, but will be the first to admit the show's early episodes were light on the laughs and heavy on the awkward. Now five episodes in, Parks feels settled and focused. Nearly every character had a great moment in "The Banquet." April the Intern calling Leslie "sir." Leslie's butch haircut. Ron's affinity for bacon-wrapped shrimp. Tom's coining of the phrase "peacockin" to stand out in bars. Even perennial straight-woman Rashida Jones got to have some fun with bleeped-out curse words. (Is that a new trend on NBC, or something?)
Justin Timberlake and Will Ferrell are set to host the final two episodes of this 34th season of SNL (on May 9 and 16), so let's take a look at the year that was:
Number of episodes: 22
Number of episodes hosted by women: 3. There were three female hosts for season 33 -- which had only 12 episodes. Of the eight previous 20-episode seasons, the average number of female hosts per season is 7.25.
Number of times Tina Fey hosted this season: 0. Her Sarah Palin appearances were all as a guest, not as a host. Number of Peabody Awards this season earned: 1, specifically for its
"political satire." According to the awards committee, "The late-night
legend stole the election-year thunder from its satirical competition
on cable and may have swayed the race itself."
Number of SNL characters who appeared on Superbowl commercials: 1 (McGruber)
Number of former SNL cast members who hostedthis season: 2 (Tracy Morgan and Will Ferrell) Number of first-time hosts: 13. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are both megahosts, and Ben Affleck, John Malkovich, Dwayne Johnson, and Justin Timberlake are all three-time hosts; Hugh Laurie, Will Ferrell, and Seth Rogen had hosted once before. Number of featured players: 4
Number of cast members: 9, down one after Amy Poehler's departure
Number of episodes senior-most cast member Darryl Hammond will have been on by the end of this season: 272
Number of episodes newest featured Abby Elliot and Michaela Watkins will have been on: 15
We've already seen the High School Musical-alum-turned-17 Again star bring the chuckles with this week's cameo-studded funnyordie.com skit "Zac Efron's Pool Party." Now come the promos for his upcoming April 11 Saturday Night Live hosting gig, with resident goofballs Fred Armisen and Keenan Thompson. See below:
What do you think, PopWatchers -- does Zac have the chops for live comedy? Will you be tuning in or TiVoing this weekend? And how many bets on an HSM skit? (I'm seeing cast newbie Abby Elliott for Vanessa Hudgens, and Kristen Wiig as the Tiz, for sure).
