MAYA & MARTY: Tuesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel
Virtually everyone involved with NBC’s new-ish summer series MAYA & MARTY is linked to Saturday Night Live, from Executive Producer Lorne Michaels, to stars Maya Rudolph and Martin Short, to featured performer Kenan Thompson and the premiere’s guest stars Jimmy Fallon, Larry David, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Kate McKinnon. (Even the voice-over announcing is by SNL cast member Beck Bennett.) So perhaps it’s not a surprise that the overall feel of the show makes one imagine the mothership’s weary writing staff, with a Lorne-pointed gun at their heads, being forced to joylessly crank out more sketches after the season had ended.
Rudolph and Short are enormously likable and nimble multi-talents who’ve never quite made their ways to solo stardom, and one roots for them to finally have a primetime showcase of their own, but all the material in tonight’s premiere was in need of at least one rewrite. Having scored the coup of landing Tom Hanks for a pre-taped bit to parody a quintessential Tom Hanks-ian role as “The Astronaut,” the sketch didn’t come with any better punchline than a reveal that the man had been hiding from his wife (Rudolph), pretending to be in space so he could hang out with his buddy (Short). An even more woeful piece had Thompson rehashing his SNL Steve Harvey imitation for a Little Big Shots parody that did no more than have Short and Fallon paw each other as obnoxious twins with buck teeth. Another bit had Short as an elderly grandma trying to read “Goodnight, Moon” to her granddaughter (guest star Miley Cyrus, a recent SNL host/musical guest) while interacting with an obtrusive neighborhood skank (Rudolph). A Melania Trump fake commercial had Rudolph in shockingly sloppy form, seeming more like a character in one of SNL‘s ex-pornstar sketches than anything to do with the Trumps.
Sloppiness was the hallmark of the night, even in the night’s funniest sketch, a revival of Short’s Jiminy Glick celebrity interviewer character, this time with Larry David as his guest–it was raggedly edited from what seemed to be an hour of footage, but it worked because David seemed genuinely tickled by Glick’s anti-semitic questions and the ability to rage against them. The only sketch that built any kind of momentum was a dated parody of Ken Burns’s Civil War PBS documentary, in which Rudolph’s clueless letters to her soldier husband ignored anything important going on in their lives.
Sadly, the brightest moments of the hour were the musical numbers, a pair by Cyrus (with Rudolph joining in on one), and a crowded tapdance finale from the cast of Broadway’s Shuffle Along, which at least gave primetime exposure to a musical not named Hamilton.
Maya & Marty has one of NBC’s strongest summer lead-ins from America’s Got Talent to prove the network’s commitment, and as with SNL, no doubt some weeks will be stronger than others, and perhaps over time the staff will figure out a rhythm and tone to give the new series a flavor that doesn’t feel like SNL discards. Aside from the goodwill they’ve earned over the years, though, the premiere didn’t provide much cause to stick with these stars while they try to work their show out.
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