Baked
I know I’m high because my voice sounds like a baby pterodactyl and IDGAF. Aidy Bryant is pretending to be a woman with freckles. One of the SNL football players has a really funny lisp. Am I a bad person for laughing? IDGAF. (But maybe I do?) I’m drinking water from a mason jar. WHAT IS HAPPENING ON THE TELEVISION? These weird superheroes are patting their crotches and it’s awful. Weekend Update without Cecily is nothing to me. My gurl Aidy is carrying this show on her back, we should all bow down. I’ve got 99 problems and Ariana Grande not singing ‘Problem’ is one of them. This medication commercial is really heavy rn. It’s been going on for probably 20 years. OK, we’re back. More football ughhh. Gasp they just made an offensive and ill-timed domestic violence joke. THIS IS VERY RACIST. We all agree this is the worst SNL episode ever. Chris Pratt you look very good in that suit but you keep messing up your lines. And now Ariana is singing with a guy with insane hair. WHO IS THIS GUY? Is it a helmet of hair? I’m calling it a hairmet. Hairmet. I Googled it, weird-haired guy is in The Weeknd. We all said Erika would be mad that we didn’t know. Thank god it’s over. Such a disappointment, Lorne. Maya ordered cookies and now we are watching “Pocahontas.” Let’s forget that episode ever happened.
— Daily Arts Writer
Buzzed
As I write this, I keep confusing this with the other night that we sat on Valerie’s couch and watched something random on her TV (it was “Hocus Pocus.” And it was last night.) But now we are watching the *Season 40 premiere of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”* And it’s truly awful. Where is Andy Samberg? Where is Seth Meyers? Where is Bill Hader? Where is Maya Rudolph? Where is Keenan Thompson? (never mind, there Keenan is). But seriously, “SNL” has got a lot of work to do this year. At one point, I may or may not have screamed “WHAT IS THIS, AMATEUR HOUR?” That’s where we’re at. Shape up, “SNL,” cause you look like MadTV right now.
— Alec Stern, Senior Arts Editor
Bored
The time was a little past 11 p.m. on a Sunday night. The setting was Valerie’s living room — a “(500) Days of Summer” poster above the couch, a “Friends” poster above the TV and a general smell of optimism (marijuana) lingering behind every door. You unlock these doors with the key of imagination. Beyond them is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the … Alec is convinced this is the worst episode of “SNL” he’s ever seen. As soon as Michael Che shows up in Cecily Strong’s old chair behind the Weekend Update desk, he screams — intoning a fleck of Jerry Seinfeld’s general sense of outrage — “What is this? Amaeteur Hour?? Amy Poehler and Tina Fey sat in those chairs once. I can’t take it anymore.” It’s all very meta and depressing until we realize Aidy Bryant is carrying every aspect of the show on her back. Every time she shows up on screen, Valerie sounds like she’s going to throw up with excitement, vomiting the words “she’s just so talented” onto Chris Pratt’s face. But as we get deeper into the sketches — a Marvel franchise based around shopping carts, a “Key & Peele” ripoff where imaginary NFL players recite their names and then (so #edgy) the laws they’ve broken — it becomes clear Pratt is being buried behind a barrage of bad writing. He stands there quietly wearing the He-Man wig as Ariana Grande does a weird, slow version of “Break Free” while all of us think of Andy Dwyer … and what could have been.
— Akshay Seth, Managing Arts Editor