snl
Big Screen
Showtime For Toronto, Tyler Perry And Leno
1:56AM Richard Rushfield | Hollywood’s on the road today—beginning the six month slog to Oscar season up in Toronto. But who’d they leave at home to help Tyler Perry carry this weekend’s haul to his Bentley? It’s all in the trades. More »
Small Screen
Cameo-Laden SNL Season Finale Will Traumatise Lorne Michaels
1:00AM Foster Kamer | Last night’s Will Ferrell-hosted SNL season closer was a perfect freak-storm of cameos (Tom Hanks, Anne Hathaway, Norm McDonald, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler) and nostalgia. The play-by-play, post-jump. More »
Why Is ‘SNL’ Hellbent On Making Every Band Sound Like A Special-Needs Orchestra?
7:06AM Seth | In our critical treatise of last October, “Coldplay’s ‘SNL’ Freak-Out: Easy-Listening Performance Art, Awful, Or Both?” we remarked upon not just Chris Martin’s spastic stage presence, but on the ungodly music itself: More »
Fake ‘SNL’ Apology Regrets Depicting Blind NY Governor As an Idiot
3:45AM STV | A statement sent to Defamer purports to offer an apology from Lorne Michaels, who regrets equating NY governor David Paterson’s blindness to garden-variety retardation last week on SNL. But wait, says NBC: He’s not sorry! More »
Obama Vs. Boy George: A Study In Fred Armisen-Impression Contrasts
8:18AM Seth | This weekend’s John Malkovich-hosted SNL featured a great many virable moments, if you’ll indulge us the coinage of an incredibly annoying e-jective (make that two incredibly annoying coinages), but we’ll set aside the toe-tapping pleasures of interslack ejaculation for a moment to focus instead on the work of Fred Armisen. Always a strong SNL soldier, Armisen’s star has dimmed of late for what has been deemed a substandard Obama impression—indeed, by Obama himself. More »
En Vivo! Desde Madrid! Es Sábado en la Noche!
6:17AM Seth | A Spanish version of SNL will premiere early in 2009, but not necessarily on a Saturday night. Fernando Jerez, programming director of Cuatro, said in a statement the sketch show is “going to be pretty much like the original version” and that the network “couldn’t be more excited to host its first token Negro.” [Variety] Barbara Walters’s 10 Most Fascinating People of 2008 lifted ABC to a Thursday win. We were sure she was going to pick Obama for the top spot, but she threw everyone a curveball and chose a certain courageous and tenacious woman from the campaign trail instead. We couldn’t agree more. [Variety] Joseph Fiennes and John Cho are close to starring in ABC’s new Lost companion series Flash Forward, the tale of a worldwide two-minute blackout caused by watching ABC’s last, snore-inducing Lost companion series, Life on Mars. [THR] After the jump: Ooh, goodie! Just what we need—more annoyingly ubiquitous bus ads about teenagers fucking! More »
Seth Meyers’s Gay ‘SNL’ Damage Control Interview
3:05AM Seth | Last week’s SNL had no less that eight sketches featuring gay themes or gay content. The comedy in these sketches, without exception, derived from one of three premises: 1. Men kissing or otherwise enjoying each other’s bodies. 2. Men acting effeminately. 3. Men describing the sex they’ve had with other men. And then there was that part where Seth Meyers silenced the anti-Prop 8 audience by telling then, “OK. Vote’s over.” All this led us to describe the proceedings as a gay minstrel show. More »
SNL’s Gay Minstrel Show
3:10AM Seth | Where do you mine for easy laughs when you no longer have the most satirisable election in history at your disposal? In SNL’s case, that would be the Gays, a topic this week’s Paul Rudd-hosted episode visited and revisited so often, we lost count. And where does the show stand on the subject, in this, arguably the most important week for gay civil rights in history? Enjoy the highlight reel above, accompanied by this handy synopsis: More »
Tina Fey Suggests That Defamer Has Some Issues
8:37AM Kyle Buchanan | Few things made us laugh harder than Tina Fey’s devastatingly precise Sarah Palin send-ups on Saturday Night Live this season (or the fact that the quote that will be attributed to the candidate for all time, “I can see Russia from my house,” was said not by Palin but by Fey). Still, as the hardest working woman in comedy was repeatedly spirited away from her 30 Rock duties, we grew worried for her — after all, she has a show, a kid, a book, an Emmy, an upcoming Steve Carell romcom… couldn’t Lorne Michaels let the woman rest? We voiced our concerns after the SNL sketch where Fey appeared with the actual John McCain (her sixth appearance on the show this season), and now Fey is telling EW that she took our words to heart: More »
