Saturday Night Live - Season 44, Episode 01: Adam Driver/Kanye West
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.
The regular cast has been increasingly diminished over the last few years, and if last night's episode is an indication, it's happening to the hosts, now, too.
It's not that Driver was a bad choice out of the gate, it's that SNL booked a singular talent for its first episode and didn't find a way to use him well, even with a summer to think about it.
The show failed to maintain the energy of that cold open, which also included a surprise cameo by SNL alum Rachel Dratch (and a cardboard cutout of Alyssa Milano).
Even pre-Trump, Kanye and "SNL" have always had a weird hate-hate relationship, but now we're not even getting any good performances to go along with that.
