Saturday Night Live - Season 44, Episode 03: Seth Meyers/Paul Simon
Trailer
On Saturday night, a new season, a late-night comedy show featuring several short plays, simulations of television commercials, and a live band. There is a new team of award-winning celebrities performing comics and popular music stars. It is a new display of a wide range of music and graphics that seem to be the most famous and have won the admiration of many.
But Meyers's episode ended up avoiding those sentimental pitfalls, and instead featured goofy, original sketch-writing that highlighted the current cast's strengths-with one notable exception.
Something - well, a lot of things - felt broken about the first two weeks of Saturday Night Live's 44th season. And while last night's episode by no means put all worries to bed, I'm sure Lorne Michaels and cast are sleeping a bit easier this morning.
Four years after leaving "Saturday Night Live," Seth Meyers returned as host and star in a series of sketches Saturday that largely underscored how good he was all those years here.
The excellent Chris Redd played Kanye West in full White House meltdown mode, echoing his meeting this week in the Oval Office, in the cold open of the most consistently funny SNL so far this season.
Besides being the butt of jokes in Weekend Update, there was even a skit featuring a West song that had nothing to do with the rapper. SNL just can't quit you, Kanye!
Both Donald Trump and Kanye West have appeared on the show in the past... It's a tough line to walk, but SNL has been perhaps better at it than any other show for the past forty-four seasons.
This is an episode where the host is more than competent and doesn't need the cast to really take the wheel from him, and while it might not allow everyone to get equal time, it at least makes proper use of the time it has.
Sometimes a "Saturday Night Live" cold open is a genuine surprise, a distillation of recent history that comes completely out of left field. And then sometimes the events of a past week are outrageous enough that they demand an obvious approach.
Seth Meyers was never a standout cast member until he came to the Weekend Update desk, so having him blend back in with the cast of SNL while letting everyone else do the heavy lifting was the smart thing to do.
President Donald Trump has made "Saturday Night Live" relevant this season. He won't be taking credit for that. But without the spoofs of the president and his administration, the NBC show would have little to recommend it.
