Fridays was not as good as SNL at the time, but it had
its moments.  Even back then, Michael Richards was
Krameresque -- his best bit was playing a spastic
wannabe ladies man -- he had more facial tics than a
barrel of Crispin Glovers.  And Fridays had lots of
great music.

As for SNL -- the last time I saw my former college
radio station colleague (namedrop alert) Bob Odenkirk,
who wrote for SNL before going on to the Ben Stiller
Show and Mr. Show w/David Cross, was ages ago at the
Heartland Cafe in Chicago, where we were watching a
pal's band play.  Bob told me that the reason the last
half-hour of SNL almost inevitably sucks is because:
1) they leave the lesser sketches for the end
(obvious) and 2) if anything earlier in the ep runs
long, they have to cut lines from the subsequent
sketches.  As he noted, it's bad enough to have Brooke
Shields (this was many years ago) trying to do a skit,
let alone after it has had a bunch of lines cut since
the full run through that they did earlier in the
evening.

I haven't watched a substantial amount of an SNL ep in
ages.  I sometimes run into something funny, but I see
a lot of painful stuff -- in particular, could they
quit doing the character bits on the Weekend Update --
just let Fey and Poehler do their thing.  The
character bits almost always suck.

One other thing -- how many cast members do they have?
 20? 30?  It seems like that from the intro credits.

Mike Bennett

--- Stewart Mason <craigtorso@verizon.net> wrote:


> > Please!
> >
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Michael Coxe" <audities@gmail.com>
> >
> > And speaking of bad comedy - will some please
> cancel Saturday Night
> > Live. Please!
> 
> Why?  The current cast is the strongest one they've
> had since I was a
> teenager (the Myers/Carvey/Hartman era, my pick for
> the best and most
> consistent period), has more strong female members
> than it's ever had
> before, and the show invariably has at least a
> couple of utterly
> hilarious sketches per episode.  (Last week's "Lazy
> Sunday" video is
> already being posted around half of the Internet, as
> is Smigel's Phil
> Spector parody starring Darlene Love, "Christmastime
> for the Jews.")
> I know it's always fashionable to hate on SNL, but
> I've seen wretched
> seasons of this show, and there hasn't been one for
> a while.
> 
> I was in elementary school when Fridays was on, and
> even then I 
> thought it was sophomoric, and not the good kind of
> sophomoric.  Was 
> there a single sketch on that show that didn't
> devolve into mindless 
> pot jokes?
> 
> Speaking of DVD releases, I would love to see Shout!
> Factory release
> box sets of the early SNL seasons, because it would
> put paid to one of
> the biggest ongoing TV myths: the first five years
> of SNL were AT
> LEAST as uneven as any seasons since, and quite
> often descended into
> absolute crap.  Seeing these episodes distilled into
> 30- or 60-minute
> packages has caused people to forget the 30 to 60
> minutes of garbage
> that have been excised.  Well, that and the usual
> boomer nostalgia.
> 
> S
> 
> 


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