SNL: Saturday Night Live

By Bob Sassone This weekend's horrible Saturday Night Live featured another takeoff on the Kathie Lee Gifford/Hoda Kotb hour of Today and the two hosts talked about it on their show. Hoda thought it was funny (and so did the crew) and that Kristen Wiig can sing. Kathie Lee didn't like it (well, she liked the...

By Annie Wu S35E06) There was a strange moment of nodding recognition at the end of the night, as I watched Jason Sudeikis and January Jones in the cloud-gazing sketch. Throughout, the man pauses to consider the woman's weird behavior and then concedes, "Ohh, you're a very pretty, pretty woman." Yup. T...

By Bob Sassone At 7, ESPN has College Football, Alabama vs. Mississippi State.ESPN2 has College Football at 7, Auburn vs. GeorgiaAt 8, ABC has College Football, Notre Dame vs. Pittsburgh.FOX has a new Cops at 8.Food Network has Thanksgiving episodes of shows starting at 8: two episodes of Good Eats and episo...

By Bob Sassone At 7, Syfy has the movie Open Graves.At 7:15, ESPN2 has College Football, Florida vs. Vanderbilt.At 7:30, Disney has a new Hannah Montana.At 7:45, ESPN has College Football, Florida State vs. Clemson.At 8, ABC has College Football, Connecticut vs. Cincinnati.FOX has a new Cops at 8.TCM has Take t...

By Bob Sassone Let's see: Bravo is owned by NBC and Bon Jovi is appearing on several NBC shows exclusively for a while, including Saturday Night Live, The Jay Leno Show, and Today (and doing a promo for all of the USA Network shows that feature a "hero"), so it's a natural that the band would appear with Jame...

By Danny Gallagher Here comes one of the most brilliant casting moves in television history since Saturday Night Live hired a 12-year-old boy to play Dan Quayle. Ron White, one-fourth of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, has been cast as the lead voice in a new animated sitcom called "Hounds" for Comedy Central.

By Joel Keller When I got to talk to him, he had been interviewing all day in support of his surprisingly emotional and inspirational memoir I Am The New Black, and he was tired. But there was a lot of stuff I wanted to ask him about, only some of which involved his well-publicized smackdowns of SNL co-stars C...

By Jane Boursaw I don't watch Saturday Night Live regularly, but surely someone must have spoofed her by now. With her nasal voice, hair fixation, and political opinions, she's like a skit waiting to happen. Aside from their political views, what other commentators just bug the heck out of you? (Yes, I rea...

By Bob Sassone At 7, ABC has the Sprint Cup NASCAR Banking 500 race.ESPN2 has College Football at 7, Virginia Tech vs. Georgia Tech.At 7:30, FOX has Baseball Playoffs, the Yankees vs. the Angels.At 7:45, ESPN has College Football, South Carolina vs. Alabama.At 8, Nickelodeon has a new iCarly, then a new True Ja...

By Allison Waldman You'll see him on Today, The Tonight Show, The Jay Leno Show, Saturday Night Live, a segment of the NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams and a sit down with James Lipton on Bravo's Inside the Actors' Studio. When The Circle is released on November 10, you'll know all about it... if you've watched...

By Bob Sassone He talks about what he could have brought to the NBC late night show, but that they didn't really listen to him. Instead, he says they... "felt bad for me. None of the cast I came up with saw this future for me. No sir. All I have to say about that is, where's Chris Kattan now? Where's Cheri Oteri now? That...

By Bob Sassone I don't mean that they're being sued for infringing on a logo or something like that, I mean they're being sued for the actual fonts that they use. I didn't even know you could be sued for using a certain font. The Font Bureau (which would make an excellent title for a crime series) makes fonts fo...

By Annie Wu All right, little Ms. "I Extra-Love Female Empowerment," prepare for me to work that ego.... Especially when one compares her to the typical "hot girl" host (see: Megan Fox's SNL premiere), Barrymore doesn't box herself in and offers a lot more opportunity for fun characters. Would someone li...

By Bob Sassone TBS has Baseball Playoffs all night.At 7, NBC has the President's Cup golf tournament.At 8, ABC has College Football, Michigan vs. Iowa.CBS has College Football at 8, Florida vs. LSU.FOX has a new Cops at 8.AMC has Rio Bravo at 8.ESPN2 has College Football at 8, Georgia Tech vs. Florida State.At 9, FO...

By Bob Sassone Has SNL done a Dancing with the Stars spoof yet? Is it always as crazy as last night's episode? I'm showing the clip below (click here if you want to skip all that dancing) because it not only has Donny Osmond about to make out with judge Bruno but it also has one of the great TV quotes of the year (...

By Annie Wu It's been a while since we've seen such consistently enjoyable writing in an episode. Usually, there's a distinct lull during the course of the 90 minutes, but I didn't feel it this time. Hopefully, this is a good indication of the rest of the season.Continue reading Saturday Night Live: Rya...

By Joel Keller For those who missed it (or weren't on the east coast) on Saturday night, new SNLer Jenny Slate managed to do something in her first-ever sketch that hadn't been accomplished on the show in 28 years: she let loose with an f-bomb. Continue reading Lorne Michaels goes easy on Jenny Slate for SN...

By Annie Wu Yes, Saturday Night Live new girl Jenny Slate's f-bomb was the most thrilling part of the show's otherwise bland 35th season premiere. It's not like we've never heard that word before, and it's not like accidental verbal naughtiness has never happened on SNL (I still distinctly remember...

By Bob Sassone At 8, ABC has College Football, Iowa vs. Penn State.FOX has a new Cops at 8.Nickelodeon has a new iCarly at 8, then a new True Jackson, VP.At 9, FOX has a new America's Most Wanted.Lifetime has the movie Homecoming at 9.Syfy has the movie Children of the Corn at 9.Also at 9: BBC America has a new Robin Ho...

By Bob Sassone At 8, ABC has the series premiere of FlashForward, then the two-hour season premiere of Grey's Anatomy.CBS has a new Survivor at 8, followed by the season premieres of CSI and The Mentalist.NBC has new episodes of SNL Weekend Update Thursday, then new episodes of Parks and Recreation, The O...

By Jason Hughes I'm sure she'd say she's too old for regular television work, or that she's having too much fun guest-starring on every television show and half of the movies, but I just can't get enough of Betty White on TV. With it coming out now that Betty White has signed for a guest spot on NBC's 30 Rock, sh...

By Bob Sassone It seems that every season is the "Saturday Night Live isn't what it used to be" (aka "Saturday Night Live sucks!") season, but it always survives. And some years, like last season when they had the election to riff on and appearances by Tina Palin and lots of buzz in the news, they thrive. But T...

By Bob Sassone Filed under: Saturday Night Live, Celebrities, Casting, Reality-Free Nick told you earlier today that Saturday Night Live had hired two new female cast members. I guess two female cast members had to be let go to make room for them (it's late night math).

By Jason Hughes It looks like Megan Fox hosting the season premiere of Saturday Night Live is all but officially confirmed by the folks behind the show. And now we've gotten word that U2 will be the first musical guest for the new season of SNL. They're in the midst of their U2 360 world tour promoting their lat...

By Nick Zaino Filed under: Saturday Night Live, Casting, Reality-Free Several sources have been following up on a report on Sean McCarthy's The Comic's Comic blog about two new Saturday Night Live cast members, including the New York Post and Variety.

Are you 18 to 49 and aware of the new TV shows? I don't get NBC's results. Trauma and SNL Weekend Update Thursday are the shows viewers know about but Community isn't? Doesn't seem right to me.

By Jason Hughes Now, either Megan Fox will be hosting the premiere of Saturday Night Live on September 26th, or the Internets are just taking this unconfirmed story from Life & Style Weekly and running with it. I hope she does host it, and I hope they let her go unscripted in her monologue, because if the...

By Bob Sassone Filed under: Saturday Night Live, Video, Celebrities, Reality-Free This is an interesting find: the Saturday Night Live audition tapes for Phil Hartman, John Belushi, Will Ferrell, and Dana Carvey. Below is Hartman's audition, and after the jump Carvey's two audition bits (Choppin'...

By Allison Waldman But did you know that Dan Aykroyd steals the movie right out from under Meryl Streep's nose ... not to mention Amy Adams, too? It's true. Director Nora Ephron wisely included the famous Saturday Night Live sketch called The French Chef, in which Dan masterfully skewered Julia's TV show. The cry...

By Joel Keller When the question of Leno and CBS's Nina Tassler's assertion that NBC would declare victory no matter what numbers they got, Bromstad tried to pass us to the session for Leno's show later in the day. Telegdy did the same. But we wouldn't let them off the hook. An example exchange, for instance,...

By Brad Trechak Amy Poehler is returning to Saturday Night Live ... sort of. She's not actually going to be on the show during its usual Saturday performance, but rather on the Weekend Update Thursday spin-off. She'll be sitting behind the anchor desk with her co-host Seth Meyers.

By Danny Gallagher Filed under: Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, Awards, Emmys, Reality-Free Tina Fey's surprise return to Saturday Night Live as Sarah Palin was one of the ten greatest TV moments of 2008 (and quite possibly the decade, the century, the millennium and the eon).

By Danny Gallagher Hollywood's latest choice for a Saturday Night Live film remake is both the strangest and most interesting choice they could make, short of a big screen "Weekend Update" action epic or a "Toonces the Cat" feature-length Pixar film.

 CA He and Fallon showed one of their "we can't stop laughing" sketches from SNL. It's not the Debbie Downer sketch we all remember, but it's worth seeing again. Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, ...

 CA This looks like something from an SNL sketch, but it looks real. It's the Comfort Wipe! You place toilet paper on the end of the stick and...well, you know the rest. I don't know about you, but I don't think this would work for me. It's too long. ...

By Eliot Glazer Once upon a time, Melanie Hutsell was on top of the world. And by "on top of the world," we mean she was on Saturday Night Live, doing characters whose signature dialogue quietly seeped into the mainstream conscious and were applauded on arrival by the studio audience. And then she vanished,...

 CA This installment of Sketch Comedy Saturday is less about you pining for new episodes of Saturday Night Live and more about me having an excuse to use this old image of Stephen Colbert with a puppy. It makes me sick, it's so adorable. ...

By Danny Gallagher Last month's triumphant return of the "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketch to Saturday Night Live was a hilarious bit of celebrity snark genius. It is without a doubt the only sketch in the show's history that just gets better and better every time a new one is rolled out for the public to digest and...

Related articles from Gawker, Blogcritics, sepinwall (Blogspot), TVgasm, boards.nbc.com and more.

 CA It's time to get your sketch comedy fill and kick the Saturday Night Live summer break shakes. This week, I'm here to educate you on a little British program called Big Train. It was created by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, the brains behind ...

By Mike Moody Yup, a MacGruber movie. Forte told Fallon about a script he wrote for a feature film based on the SNL sketch. "John Solomon, Jorma Taccone, and I just finished writing it. We're gonna make it in Albuquerque. It's me and Kristen Wiig and cast to be determined," he said. Video after the jump.Continu...

 CA It's summer time and I can see you sketch comedy nerds are starting to get the shakes from Saturday Night Live withdrawal. No worries, I've got some goodness to feed your short attention span and sketch comedy needs. Here's a program that every ...

By Kona Gallagher Filed under: Industry, Programming, The Apprentice, Law and Order, Saturday Night Live, The Office, Heroes, Pickups and Renewals, Friday Night Lights, Upfronts, Chuck, Reality-Free, America's Got Talent, Parks and Recreation

By Danny Gallagher Filed under: Saturday Night Live, Reality-Free Fox may have lost Mad TV last Saturday, but Saturday Night Live lost something worth much, much more to the world of television than Mad TV. And no, I don't mean that the SNL writing staff lost their snack machine.

By Annie Wu S34E23) Wow. Way to go, Will Ferrell. Maybe they should just bring back Saturday Night Live alumni for season finales from now on, because this episode was spectacular. Ferrell brought back some old favorites and a slew of famous faces, from the familiar to the inexplicable, including Amy P...

By Annie Wu Those that have even half-paid attention to my Saturday Night Live posts know that I am not a huge fan of featured player Casey Wilson. In fact, I would go so far as to say I actually kind of dislike her on the show. I feel a great deal of familiarity when I watch her on SNL, because she acts the way I p...

 CA Tennant seems a little young to host, but when I think of Masterpiece Theatre (and not it's modern versions), I keep thinking of those SNL sketches from the 70's with Dan Aykroyd as Leonard Pinth-Garnell. But that's probably more an issue with me.

By Annie Wu While I can't answer the second part of this question (it will remain one of the great mysteries of the late night universe), I can offer a little more information on SNL's resident new guy and rising star, Bobby Moynihan. Despite appearing as a featured player in only twenty episodes so far...

By Bob Sassone NBC has Saturday Night Live Just Game Show Parodies at 7, then Saturday Night Live Just Commercials, and then a new, two-hour Celebrity Apprentice. At 12:15am, Cartoon Network has a new Delocated, followed by a new Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job.

By Kona Gallagher Filed under: Saturday Night Live, Video, Watercooler Talk, Festivus, Celebrities, Reality-Free Obama may have been our first celebrity candidate, but Palin was our first beauty queen. Whether you loved her or hated her, it's hard to argue that she was a captivating figure.

By Annie Wu Cold Open: Amy Poehler is back as Hillary Clinton! This also gave an excuse for Darrell Hammond to wander around in front of the camera again. Seriously, won't someone please let this man go home? I hope someone new plays Hillary Clinton soon, because A) Amy deserves a baby break and B) her Hi...

By Joel Keller The election - Yes, it was too long. And, yes, it was exasperating at times. But it was the source of a lot of entertaining television. Of course, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and SNL were in top form (Tina Fey became a huge star, thanks to Sarah Palin). But entertainment came in many forms th...

By Mike Moody Filed under: Saturday Night Live, Video, Web, Talk Show, WebisodesAmy Poehler is really taking this mommy thing seriously. The Saturday Night Live vet just launched a new web series, and I'm happy to report that it's probably not what you'd expect. Permalink | Email this | | Comments

By Richard Keller Fret not, psychotic one! You'll have one more chance to see all of the SNL specials at one time this very evening. Starting at 9:30, NBC will be airing all three episodes at once. This will give you the chance to see Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, Will Ferrell making an appearance as the current Presid...

By Brad Trechak Our own Annie Wu has already done a review of the episode and put up a bunch of clips (which I encourage you to watch). I watched it live and it was pretty much the best SNL episode I've seen in a while. The writing and performance was certainly better than the Michael Phelps season premiere (the o...

By Annie Wu Filed under: OpEd, Saturday Night Live, Reality-FreeNew York magazine has reported that the Saturday Night Live team is brainstorming some way to involve the real Sarah Palin in one of the upcoming "Weekend Update" episodes. Word is, she might play Tina Fey in a spoof of her American Expr...

By Richard Keller Filed under: Other Comedy Shows, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Video, Retro Squad, TV Squad Lists, Reality-Free Do not adjust your web browser. You are now entering the Retro Squad, where we are reviewing past episodes of classic TV shows. Permalink | Email this | | Comments

By Joel Keller Filed under: OpEd, Saturday Night Live, Watercooler Talk, Celebrities, 30 Rock, Reality-FreeI'm not here to argue for or against the comedic talents of current box-office champs Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. No, what I'm here to ask is: why do people dislike them so much? I'm not talking abou...

By Annie Wu Filed under: OpEd, Saturday Night Live, Episode Reviews(S33E06) Let me preface this entire review by saying that I've seen Juno multiple times and greatly enjoyed each viewing. I think Ellen Page is a talented actress and Juno would not have been as successful without her. I'm saying this...

By Joel Keller In today's Washington Post, Saturday Night Live kingpin Lorne Michaels defended his choice of Fred Armisen to play Barack Obama, starting with last week's episode. After the much-publicized search for an Obama impersonator (or Fauxbama, as some are calling it), Michaels decided on Ar...

By Annie Wu Filed under: OpEd, Saturday Night Live, Episode Reviews(S33E03) "Amy Poehler: 1986": I thought that this was a great choice for a cold open! A young, big-haired Amy Poehler being visited by a magical poster version of Jon Bon Jovi? Fantastic. In general, it was really cute and made me feel...

By Bob Sassone Filed under: Late Night, Saturday Night Live, Celebrities Contrary to many, many reports that have been circulating this past week (including one from TV Guide's Michael Ausiello a few days ago), Maya Rudolph has indeed left Saturday Night Live. The news is confirmed by NBC.

By Jonathan Toomey Filed under: Saturday Night Live, TV Sports, Celebrities, Casting According to Sports Illustrated, the Cleveland Cavaliers' all-star forward and ubiquitous sports entity LeBron James has signed on to host the season premiere of Saturday Night Live in September.

By Annie Wu Filed under: OpEd, Saturday Night Live, Episode Reviews(S32E19) Cold Open: Bill Hader's Ryan Seacrest impression isn't that accurate. Has the impressions master finally met his match?! I knew Mary Katherine Gallagher would make an appearance at some point in the episode. It wouldn't b...

By Annie Wu S32E06) Some of you weren't so happy that we stopped reviewing Saturday Night Live, so I'm going to give this another go, just so that everyone at least as a place to discuss. And I will try and resist saying "ehh, it was okay, I guess" for every single review, but, let me warn you, it's going to b...