SHOWBUZZDAILY Review: “Saturday Night Live” with Martin Freeman

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Martin Freeman, of The Hobbit franchise and the miniseries version of Fargo, brought a drier energy to tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE than the typical host, and that paid off for the show in a few of the night’s sketches.

Freeman first came to American attention playing Tim (who in the US version would become Jim) in the original British The Office, and one of the night’s highlights was a pre-tape that combined Freeman’s paper company character with his Bilbo Baggins for a Middle-Earth relocation of the sit-com.  It had some inspired bits, like Bobby Moynihan-as-Gandalf-as-Ricky Gervais, and especially Taran Killam’s Orc-ized Gareth (think Dwight), and although the sketch didn’t make as much of the Tim/Dawn romance as it might have, Kate McKinnon was just right as a Tauriel-ized Dawn/Pam. The very last sketch made use of Freeman’s credits, too, as his South Dakota waterbed salesman could have stepped right out of Fargo, although the piece was mostly about his character’s wife (Aidy Bryant), who had decided to become the company spokesperson and mascot, complete with massive signage of her face above the building.

Freeman was given a rare non-singing, non-Q&A monologue, and although it was mild–something about all British celebrities knowing each other, with Killam’s Alan Rickman-as-Snape outshining McKinnon’s Maggie Smith-as-Dowager-Countess–at least it was different.  Later, he and Leslie Jones did a nice job of not overdoing it in a sketch that had them as a 5-day-old couple already getting married, to the many objections of those around them, even though he’d lied about being King of England, and she was a WNBA player with 10 children.  Freeman also skillfully underplayed in one of the night’s less effective sketches, a piece about a southern morning talk show where the hosts (Killam and Cecily Strong) maintained that they were wildly in love although he appeared to be gay, but the only real joke was that they kept cutting to Freeman’s handyman to kill time during their lengthy opening intro segment.

Although SNL will air another episode next week before Christmas, tonight’s show was heavy on holiday sketches.  The best was a pre-taped musical number in which Kenan Thompson’s Sump’n Claus tunefully promised cash to adults who found themselves on Santa’s naughty list, because everyone deserves sump’n.  Less effective was a pre-taped commercial for Christmas mass done in the super-amped style of the old Under-Underground Records/DJ Supersoak promos, the joke this time being that instead of outrageous musical acts, the “performers” being showcased were ordinary churchgoers like the guy with sweaty hands and the organist who can’t get her music together.  Although What’s Up With That? has officially been retired, Thompson more or less returned to the theme as leader of a hotel lounge band who kept interrupting his song at a tree-lighting celebration to try and pry information from his sax man (Freeman) about a scandal he was trying to keep quiet.  A slightly surreal ending wasn’t enough to make it work.

As is depressingly usual, SNL‘s news-related segments were its blandest.  The cold open took the nugget of info from the Senate’s CIA torture report that a pair of psychologists had been paid $80M to come up with the torture protocol, and turned it into a sketch about the same doctors being responsible for everyday tortures like Time Warner Cable customer service and the requirement that laptops be taken out of bags on airport security lines.  Weekend Update featured Sasheer Zamata doing a desk bit about the fact that Apple has no black emojis, a promising premise that went nowhere, plus the return of Strong as her Rom-Com Character persona, which didn’t add anything to its first iteration in the season premiere, plus the umpteenth appearance of Vanessa Bayer’s Bar Mitzvah Boy.  Michael Che managed one sharp gag about Dick Cheney, and that was about it for Update wit.

The night’s strangest sketch came after Update, and seemed to have been included for timing purposes, squeezed on its own between two lengthy commercial breaks.  It had Freeman as a Heinz Ketchup factory supervisor trying to teach new employee Killam when to pull a lever on the assembly line, and it was a long build-up to a blah visual punchline.

The episode’s best pieces were mostly front-loaded, so this was an SNL evening that looked better the sooner you switched it off, but at least Freeman gave it a different feel than other recent efforts.  The last show of 2014 will be hosted by Amy Adams (plugging Big Eyes), with musical guest One Direction.