Saturday Night Live

I know it’s a perennial favourite to talk about how crappy Saturday Night Live is getting “lately”—where “lately” can mean anything from the last year to the last ten years to the last twenty years, depending on the age of the person speaking—but this year it’s gotten really bad, again. Ever since Tina Fey left, the writing has gotten terrible. (Which is not surprising, since she was the head writer on the show.) It’s getting to the point where I don’t know if I’m going to bother taping it every week.

Take last Saturday’s show, for instance. They had a great “Digital Short”, Body Fusion, but then again, Digital Shorts are usually pretty good. (I think Andy Samberg is one of the few saving graces for the show, these days.) But most of the show was pretty bad; sketches that went on way longer than they had to, and other sketches that were, oddly enough, too short.

It just goes to show how much work the head writer on SNL really does. I’m sure that, when Tina Fey was there, she was doing a lot of work, behind the scenes, to rewrite the sketches until they were nice and tight. Until a new head writer of her calibre can be found—or until the current head writer catches his/her stride—I don’t foresee a lot of great shows in SNL’s future.

It’s too bad, because a show of SNL’s format has a lot of potential to be great. They just don’t always attain that greatness. Some time around high school, or maybe a bit after, I stopped watching, because it had gotten so crappy, and then started watching again a few years ago. I might end up stopping, again, if it keeps being this bad.

Note: I’ve just realized that this post was written pretty badly. (I was doing multiple things at once, as usual.) It’s somewhat ironic that I would write a post about how bad SNL’s writing has gotten, lately, and use bad writing to do so…