The most inventive part of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE really wasn’t, because it was almost certainly unintentional.  Nevertheless, it was sort of brilliant, in a “found art” sort of way.  Soon after the monologue, there was a negligible piece about a suburban group performing a snowflake dance for the Christmas pageant at their local […]

  If tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE didn’t have much to recommend it–and it didn’t–blame can’t be put on its very busy host and musical guest Bruno Mars.  Mars did everything that was asked of him, and actually supplied the episode’s highlight, a rapid-fire series of musical impersonations (in the framework of a Pandora Radio sketch) […]

  Tonight’s footnote to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE history was that it featured the debut of new cast member Sasheer Zamata, who is, not incidentally, an African-American woman–“not incidentally” only because her hiring came after a rather embarrassing amount of pressure, both internal and external, was applied to force Lorne Michaels to acknowledge that SNL was […]

> A program note:  tonight at 9PM, HBO will premiere the documentary BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD, which screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival; it will then air many more times on the network’s channels.  It’s a fascinating, extremely well structured look at a point in 1970s pop culture history that’s been largely forgotten […]

  It felt like 12:55AM for the entire last half-hour of tonight’s SNL, and that wasn’t a bad thing.  Every post-Update sketch had the kind of oddball conceptualism that’s usually reserved for the last minutes of the show, and while the sketches didn’t all work, they had more imagination and wit than just anything that […]

  Comic crumbs were hard to come by on tonight’s mostly dreadful SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.  It’s a particular disappointment because after two episodes struggling with non-comedy hosts Adam Levine and Justin Bieber, the show had a definite uptick with the slyly funny Christoph Waltz, and this time the host was Kevin Hart, who’s proven his […]

  The only thing more boring than a typical Oscars is one without surprises, and the closest thing to a major upset this year turned out to be Disney’s loss in the Best Animated Short category.  (The studio almost instantly rebounded with the much more important Animated Feature prize for Frozen.)  All the conventional wisdom […]

  When the musical guest on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE is also the host (and isn’t Justin Timberlake), it’s usually a smart strategic idea to minimize the host’s comedy duties for the week.  But Lady Gaga, in her dual roles tonight, suggested such a knack for sketch comedy that one could easily have mistaken her for […]