Cheney, Palin, Bush?

BOOMERANGST: "Saturday Night’s" Alright For Watching

By Roy Trakin

Since its debut in October, 1975, Saturday Night Live has been its Boomer generation’s touchstone for comedy, just as Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and Sid Caesar’s Ten From Your Show of Shows was for its predecessors. To executive producer Lorne Michaels’ credit, he has continually infused the program with new blood over the years, keeping its thumb on the pulse of youth culture.

Like any other pop cult phenomenon that has outlasted its own roots, depending on when you first discovered SNL, that’s the cast you cherish, whether it’s us old-timers and the likes of Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Rander and Bill Murray, or the groups raised on successive casts including Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, up through Chris Rock, Chris Farley, David Spade, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Jimmy Fallon, Will Ferrell and the latest breakout stars, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

There have been fallow periods (Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr., anyone?), but for the most part, Michaels has kept the pedal to the metal, steering the show through an incredible 33 years as a fixture at 11:30 p.m. on NBC.

With this year’s hotly contested election, filled with juicy characters, SNL has had its best season ever, even generating a series of prime-time specials on Thursday nights (and a pre-election day special the Monday night before) that have garnered some of the show’s most impressive ratings in its history. Thanks to Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, the show has once again become a water-cooler topic, helped out in no small part by the viral distribution of many of its best bits via NBC’s official hulu.com site and elsewhere.

And while the current cast, featuring such really talented farceurs as Bill Hader, Will Forte, Andy Samberg, Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, Kenan Thompson and my own pick for future stardom, Kristen Wiig, is one of the better ones, the individual shows are still wildly uneven, interspersing moments of genius with stuff that doesn’t work, especially when they’re obviously fishing for the next big character or catch-phrase that can be turned into a feature film.

This past week’s episode was a perfect example, as host Paul Rudd admitted himself, practically a consolation prize as the first installment after the Obama victory, a (very) cold opening with a rather unfunny Sudeikis as Joe Biden and series of stupefyingly awful gay-oriented sketches that made me wonder about Rudd’s own sexuality.

Of course, the thing about SNL is you never know when you’ll get a pleasant surprise, and this week’s came in the form of an unannounced cameo by Justin Timberlake. The talented performer completely won this skeptic over after appearing on Weekend Update with Seth Myers to perform a jaw-droppingly amazing two-minute “condensed” version of what he claimed would’ve been his hosting gig the following week, which he was forced to postpone, ending by jumping up on the anchor desk for an impromptu song-and-dance. Check it out here. He followed with a performance as one of musical guest Beyonce’s bare-legged dancers with Andy Samberg and Bobby Moynihan, a TiVo-worthy moment if ever there was one on a show that provides at least a couple every week, no small feat after all these years.