(S32E01) "And we're baaaaaaack!" Anyone? Anyone? No? OK, well it's SNL season premiere time (that came fast) and Dane Cook is already hosting again. I can't remember the last time someone hosted two episodes so close together. He was just there last December. Well, it's understandable I suppose. I can't think of anyone else that's bigger on the comedy circuit right now and his name automatically attracts attention. He's all over the place, from touring to HBO specials. Anyway, the show was pretty decent I thought, but not because Cook was the host. He was barely in it.
First off I wanted to talk about the cast. Without Fey, Dratch, Mitchell, Parnell, Sanz, or any featured players, the cast is much smaller and I'm excited about that. Everyone will get more air-time and I think it'll make for a better show. Faces will become more recognizable and I think the cast as a whole will work better together. So yeah, I'm one of the few who has high hopes for this season.
Moving on, we had Dane's monologue which was just some of his stand-up. It was all new material (I think...) and for the most part it was very funny. The bit about everything being on YouTube was dead-on. But as I said, he wasn't in the show that much following the monologue.
As one would expect, Seth Myers and the rest of the writing team were all over current events and really had fun with them. The sketches about the TSA and Hugo Chavez were the two best in the episode I think. They were timely and made some really good points, especially the TSA sketch when the debate about liquids on airplanes came up ("What if I could produce a liquid on the plane... or a gel?"). As much as I liked the Hugo Chavez political round-up sketch, my only gripe was that Fred Armisen is the same character whenever he plays someone who's Latin or Spanish. Bug eyes, flailing arms. It's always the same guy. Cook's portrayal as Saddam was flat and didn't really contribute to the sketch either.
The digital short "Cubicle Fight" was priceless. Much better than most of the digital shorts from last season. "Two men enter, one man leaves." I loved the part when Dane blew the paper-punch holes into Jason's face. Funny stuff.
Most of the impersonations fell flat for me. I feel like the last time we saw Bill Hader do Al Pacino (that Anderson Cooper 360° sketch from last season), it was so much better. I wasn't amazed by Clinton and Condoleeza during Weekend Update either. I love Darrell Hammond but I was surprised he returned this season.
Speaking of Weekend Update, it went on too long. But for the most part it was very good. I think Seth and Amy play off each other very well (they used to do that British news show sketch... right?), and the intro with Brian Williams being rejected from the anchor job was hilarious.
The Poland Spring delivery guys? It was odd but I liked the end and the way they poked fun at SNL, Studio 60, and 30 Rock. When done right, self-reflexive humor can be subtle (and funny). They pulled it off here. After this sketch, the show kind of dragged along. The Farrah Fawcett thing was lost on me and the sketch with the bouncers was predictable. I did like the Geico commercial though. Maya, as Whitney Houston, singing about doing coke off a hot waffle iron? It's funny because it's probably true.
The Killers didn't really impress me. They changed their visual style right? Didn't they used to wear suits and look all flashy? For their first song off their new album Sam's Town, they were dressed all scrubby in jeans and flannel shirts. Of the two songs they performed, neither sounded as catchy as anything off their first album. But who knows. This was live and the album versions most likely sound far better.
Overall, as I said, a decent episode. Lot of high points and plenty of lows. But I am excited about this season. I really believe that it's going to get better every week.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
10-01-2006 @ 5:19PM
beth said...
What happened to Parnell and Sanz on SNL? Were they fired or did they leave to go on to better things. Many skits that made the show will be missed now that they are gone. Of course they lost a true asset when Racheal Dratch left.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:19PM
AC said...
How about Andy Samberg's Screech impersonation during Weekend Update? Dead-on, and seriously priceless!
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10-01-2006 @ 5:20PM
Ryan said...
Well I watched this premiere to see The Killers perform and they didn't disappoint. Loved their new stuff.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:20PM
el publico said...
I didn't think Dane did that good of job on the monologue...
..and I'm not alone..
http://digg.com/television/Did_Dane_Cook_Bomb_on_Tonight_s_SNL
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10-01-2006 @ 5:20PM
Rob said...
In 2004 Ben Affleck hosted in March and the season premiere in Oct, now that's pretty damn close together.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:20PM
Jeff said...
That was 90 mins of my life that I will never get back....
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10-01-2006 @ 5:20PM
Nate said...
the first killers song was terrible, he could not sing that high, i was actually laughing at him, the 2nd song was great tho, SNl was ok, weekend update was way to long i thougt it would never end, also did anyone have commercials poping up at all the wrong times?
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10-01-2006 @ 5:20PM
Tim said...
Dear God, Dane Cook's monologue was horrible. Why didn't anyone pull Dane Cook aside before the show and say, "You know, we used to have a recurring character named Debbie Downer who always brought up bad news at the most awkward time. The premise was funny for three seconds, but we played it out for three years or so. So... you might not want to spend the first five minutes of your opening rehashing those jokes because trust us, we've run them into the ground."
The TSA sketch was really well-written though, so still I have some hope for this season.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:20PM
Annie Wu said...
I thought the monologue was pretty bad. I like Dane, but I hate it when he laughs at his own jokes, as if prompting the audience to do the same. The YouTube bit cracked me up, though. Mainly because I actually searched a keyboard mash and received about two pages of results.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:21PM
hessian said...
STUDIO 60 is going to kill SNL.
Maybe they should crib from Sorkin's scripts.....
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10-01-2006 @ 5:21PM
Vanderbilt said...
Dane Cook is a talentless frat boy who got lucky. His brand of comedy makes "Family Guy" look like "Arrested Development." I understand he's popular, but I watched the show(while enduring his excruciatingly bland monologue)thinking the writing would make up for such a dull host. I was wrong. I thought Tina Fey's departure would provide for an interesting turn for SNL. I was wrong. Same semi-humorous political jokes, awkward sketches providing one moment of laughter, and a Weekend Update segment that "The Daily Show" could run circles around. This is SNL's make or break year, and the premiere episode makes me think that we'll be saying goodbye to it by this time next year. I understand Dane Cook is popular and promoting a movie, but there's NO excuse for Jamie Pressley to be hosting next weekend.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:21PM
Christina said...
Dane's monologue sucked and some of the sketches felt flat for me, but the TSA bit was pretty awesome. I have high hopes for the coming season -- the first episode with a smaller cast and a new head writer is bound to be kind of hit or miss. Aside from losing Rachel Dratch (which is just a sucky situation - considering she left SNL for 30 Rock, and her role on 30 Rock has been totally downsized), I think all the casting changes were pretty right on. I would rather have Finesse Mitchell than Keenan Thompson, but let's face it - even with a cut-down cast, the black guy is only going to get one sketch a night. Seth and Amy are always great together and I have a feeling WU will be a lot of fun. I just hope Seth is able to particpate in more sketches now that he is head writer. Utilizing Kristin Whig is the best move the show has made regarding a female cast member in quite some time (probably since they bumped Amy up to full cast member her first season). If they can get a handle on the writing and the strengths of each actor, this has the potential of being a really, really strong cast.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:21PM
MosquitoControl said...
I saw some of it.
I'll preface this by saying I haven't found SNL entertaining, or even tolerable, for over a decade. But I decided to check it out now that Horatio Sans isn't bringing it down.
Still bad.
Dane Cook looks awful in High Def (awful), and the water bottles? Not funny.
As for the Screech impression, it was terrible. It sounded like Shaggy, not Screech. It would have been close enough, but nothing funny came from it.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:21PM
Bob said...
This might be the cast and season that ends things for this classic show.
Last nights' show was horrible! I might have chuckled a couple of times but thats all. You would think that the first show of the season would be the best. They had months to prepare for it and it was bad. Dane Cook wasn't funny at all. If I hadn't seen the opening title I would have no idea that the one sketch was about Al Pacino. The Poland water sketch was so bad, even the characters made fun of it WHILE they were presenting it. Thats an insult to the people watching. I imagine Seth Meyer will be OK on the News; he is probably the best of all the players this year, but even the News was bad last night and they had plenty of good material they could have worked with.
I have watched this show for 32 years and had hoped it would go on forever but I don't see how it can even last this Season based on last night.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:21PM
Paul Gale said...
I'll preface this comment by saying I'm in highschool and not a frequent SNL watcher, but I watched it because Dane Cook, the comedian that I heard about four years ago, was on. Maybe because of some sort of maturing that i definitely didnt do in between the time I discovered him and now, but he was terrible. The show itself was really unbearable. Compared to even five years ago, the show has gone down so much. In one hour of TV (which is all I watched because it couldn't even keep my attention for it's entire length), i laughed about four time. Dane's impression of Sadaam was so terrible and unnecessary to the sketch. The writers of the show have good ideas, such as Hugo Chavez's talk show, but they never really succeed after the drawing board. Almost all of the comedians, except for Amy Pohler and Andy Samberg (sorry Keenan), should be fired from the show. The executives made a mistake by firing Chris Parnell, for he was one of the funny ones left, and Darrell Hamond has indefinitely overstayed his welcome. Hopefully the heads of NBC watch their own show, Studio 60, because it speaks volumes about the incompetence on this show. Rant Over.
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10-01-2006 @ 5:22PM
Anna said...
I thought it was okay.
I don't like Dane Cook. I'm a college student who should be among his target audience, but I have no idea where he came from, just that all of a sudden he's here, and he's not that funny. And it wasn't an appropriate SNL monologue - it was just an extension of his comedy act.
I thought several of the sketches were funny. I enjoyed the Poland Springs skit, especially the end. With the water bottles falling, they managed to drag it out so long that it got old, then came back around and became funny again (although at the end it started to get old again). The Farrah Faucet sketch was hilarious, totally random and silly, although then it led into a pretty lame sketch. The Al Pacino might have been funny if it had been a better Al Pacino impression, and same with the Hugo Chavez - all I saw were stereotypes and no real impression of a person. I liked the Pervez Musharraf. The Digital Short was clever, although stabbing him with the envelope slicer was unneccessary.
And finally, WU was pretty good. I loved the intro, and although it went on too long, the only thing that really missed was the Dustin Diamond bit. The impression was nothing like Screech. I grew up watching Saved by the Bell every morning, and that impression was just a cruel mockery of a special needs kid.
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10-01-2006 @ 6:07PM
Sue Coble said...
I did not think Cook's monologue was funny. I really didn't think any of the show was that great. Were we all spoiled by Belushi, Ackroyd, Chevy, Dana Carvey, Rob Schnieder, Eddie Murphy, etc. etc.? Nothing seems to compare to the side splitting sketches from yesteryears. For the last 5 years or more it just keeps getting worse and worse. Of course, I am always optomistic when the new season starts, thinking....."maybe this will be the comeback year." But, sadly it isn't. I watched something else after weekend update. It wasn't worth sitting through the rest of it for me.
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10-01-2006 @ 7:56PM
rick said...
Personally, I find Cook's comedy to be pretty bland, and yes I did find his monologue to be worn and unoriginal (it also seemed to be void of actual punchlines). That being said, I kind of like him as a player in the sketches. Unlike most of the people who have been hosting the show as of late, he isn't being used to play off a type (like Donald Trump, et al). Instead, he blends seamlessly into the sketches, whether it be as the straight man (the TSA class) or the joker (the Poland Sping thieves).
Of course none of this matters when Weekend Update continues to brind the show to a grinding halt and then benches the host for 30 minutes.
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10-01-2006 @ 8:58PM
Diego said...
Man that was horrible, i was lucky to have recorded MAD TV before that or it would've been a boring night. Dane Cook's monologue was boring, he was really bad at hosting and the sketches were flat. i chuckled a few times but it was just bad. Mad TV's Dane Cook impersonation was funnier, they got his number. I really hope Jamie Presley can bring the funny next week.
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10-02-2006 @ 1:41AM
Diego said...
Man that was horrible, i was lucky to have recorded MAD TV before that or it would've been a boring night. Dane Cook's monologue was boring, he was really bad at hosting and the sketches were flat. i chuckled a few times but it was just bad. Mad TV's Dane Cook impersonation was funnier, they got his number. I really hope Jamie Presley can bring the funny next week.
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