“Saturday Night Life” — Brian Williams / Feist (Season Finale?)
Before I go and get all speculative, I want to say for the record that the first three sketches and shockingly the entirety of Weekend Update this week was more or less SNL-perfect (meaning it certainly could be better, but not given the way the show is produced and what it tries to accomplish or not accomplidh). Brian Williams was hilarious in those three sketches right after the monologue and then kind of disappeared for thirty minutes before playing himself in the last few sketches of the evening. Still, I loved those first three because he did, in fact, play a character and in at least two of them spoke with an accent(!). Also Feist! Who knew? Certainly not I (on the Rick J. Pecoraro Hotness Meter playing a Gretsch guitar puts you very close to the top). But, what this their season finale? More after the jump…
It certainly felt like a finale. Right off the bat the show threw in two cameos (Horatio Sanz who twice during the show played Bill Richardson, and then an actual presidential candidate in Barack Obama, who we first see wearing a Barack Obama mask for Halloween. Of course the real reason this may be the season finale is because the WGA, as of this writing, is scheduled to strike at 12:01am on Monday, November 5th. If this happens (and it certainly looks like it will happen) SNL will be forced to go dark. Despite the way it sometimes appears, the show needs writers to go on the air.
If the strike lasts as long as the previous one back in 1988 (five months), the duration of the season would more or less be nonexistent. Whereas Letterman and the rest of the late-night crew (Daily Show and Colbert excluded) could, if they wanted, make their show completely chat-based to get around the lack of writers, SNL can not, unless it became some kind of curious musical review/performance space which I have to admit I’d probably be more than happy to tune in to see.
I’m a late-night fan. If given the option to watch a single episode of any random drama on television or an episode of The Late Show I’d probably take The Late Show. There is something about the genre that feels like a call-back to the original golden age and it provides an entertainment experience you can’t get in other mediums. It’s sad that these are the shows that will be most affected by a strike. These are the shows I love and they will be absent from the airwaves for an unspecified period of time.
Fred Armisen had a great bit on Update last night where he played a studio executive and explained why the writers were being greedy. I would link to it on YouTube, but NBC squashed that with their new Hulu service (which hasn’t gone public yet). If you didn’t see it you’ll just have to imagine how funny it was. It’s probably for the best anyway, the writers of that sketch don’t get a piece of the online profits.
Tags: NBC, Season Finale, SNL, WGA Strike
November 5th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Hey, you can write…I see you do it on a daily basis. Just head on down to studio 8H a drop off your resume…and if you don’t have the references, well, you’re a writer…make something up.