Segments are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars
BUSH’S PLAN FOR IRAQ
George W. Bush (JAS) addresses suggestions of Iraq Study Group & others
— Wow, this is the THIRD consecutive cold opening with Jason’s George W. Bush impression. I guess SNL is trying really hard to establish Jason as their new Bush.
— Pretty funny touch with the sly, smug looks Jason’s Bush gives into the camera after each time he reads “Dear Mr. President” at the beginning of each individual letter.
— A laugh from Jason-as-Bush’s line about how velociraptors have been extinct “for, like, 500 years”.
— Meh, the “Bush gives a smug look into the camera after reading the beginning of each letter” gag is getting old, and the audience agrees. Jason had to really exaggerate his third smug look into the camera to milk so much as a tiny chuckle from the audience.
— Three cold openings in and Jason has been coming into his own in the role of Bush, even if he has yet to be given any noteworthy material.
STARS: ***
MONOLOGUE
real estate agents (KRW), (AMP), (MAR) reproach host; Alec Baldwin cameo
— I’m halfway through this monologue, and I can’t find anything to say so far. The “real estate agents are unhappy with Annette Bening’s portrayal of them” premise has started to get old within this.
— An Alec Baldwin cameo, just a few episodes after he hosted, and years before frequent Alec Baldwin cameos would become an annoyance.
— Alec turned out to be only mildly funny in this overall meh monologue. Not even he can save this.
STARS: **
APOCALYPTO
subtitles in Apocalypto trailer show Mel Gibson’s influence on script
— The Lonely Island try their hand at something new, with an “An SNL movie trailer re-cut” segment. I remember thinking back when this originally aired that it was going to become a regular segment. Instead, we end up seeing only one more edition of this segment, and it’s not until THREE SEASONS LATER.
— A cheap and predictable joke, just using infamous anti-Semitic Mel Gibson quotes as subtitles for the Apocalypto trailer, but it’s coming off funny enough here. However, Lonely Island would later do a much better job in their second re-cut movie trailer: Palin 2012.
— The “I smell bagels” subtitle at the end was the funniest part.
STARS: ***
GOOD MORNING: I HATE THIS TOWN
presenters (JAS) & (host) abhor their city
— Meh, not caring for this premise.
— Yeah, two minutes into this, and this is mostly not working for me. What IS working for me is Jason’s solid and fun performance, which is singlehandedly almost completely saving this sketch’s very iffy concept.
STARS: **
TV FUNHOUSE
“Diddy Kiddies” by RBS- young detectives puzzle over what Sean Combs does
— A laugh from the title of this episode being “What Does Diddy Do?, Part 23”.
— A humorous detail with the endless number of singer names credited in two P. Diddy music videos including a few random non-singer celebrities like Dane Cook and Ken Griffey Jr.
— That almost sounds like Lorne doing the voice of the designer.
— Some laughs, but I’m not caring for the pacing of this. Too many dead spots for me, and the premise has gotten boring after a while.
STARS: **
STUDENT-TEACHER ROMANCE
high school teacher’s (host) romantic yen for student (ANS) is unrequited
— Am I watching a prototype of Pete Davidson’s Chad sketches? This sure feels like one. Not only is the premise of this sketch and the dynamic between the two main characters straight out of a Chad sketch, but some of the monotone, brain-dead, one-word sentences that Andy’s teen character responds to Annette’s long-winded dialogue with are “Okay”, which is Chad’s catchphrase. If you told me Andy and Annette have been performing a future Chad script obtained through the magic of time-travel, as crazy as that sounds, I’d probably believe you.
— Annette’s not even trying to make it appear she’s looking anywhere near Andy’s direction as she speaks to him, instead being glued to the cue cards. She’s also a bit stumbly with her lines. If this were pre-taped like the future Chad sketches, Annette would excel in this with her strong acting talent.
— Ugh, now this features Annette pointlessly breaking out into a mock-dramatic musical number. Make it stop!
— Weak ending.
— I’ve never been too big a fan of the Chad sketches (maybe I’ll come around on them when I eventually review them), but they’re so much better than THIS overall sketch. I didn’t find a single redeeming quality in this sketch.
STARS: *
TWO A-HOLES IN A LIVE NATIVITY SCENE
blase A-Holes unconvincingly portray Joseph & Mary in live nativity scene
— I like the reveal of the disjointed one-liners the Two A-Holes are each saying in their respective phone conversation turning out to be delivered to each other, even if I kinda saw it coming after a while.
— Good gag with Annette placing Kristen’s phone into Baby Jesus’ manger so the Two A-Holes will finally look in the correct direction.
— Speaking of people not looking in the correct direction, Annette continues to be glued to the cue cards tonight.
— A very funny line with Kristen telling Annette “You look like Mrs. Brady”. She does have the Carol Brady haircut.
— Solid ending with Jason yelling at the donkey (who he thinks are two little people in a costume) “IT WAS NICE WORKIN’ WITH YOU GUYS! YOU’RE GOOD DUDES!”
— Overall, a nice bounce back for these characters after the slightly-below-par previous installment from the John C. Reilly episode.
STARS: ****
ANGER PROBLEM
fast food manager (FRA) warns (Matthew Fox) & other employees
— This was cut after the preceding episode’s dress rehearsal, which explains why the hell Matthew Fox is randomly in this. I can’t help but imagine what the reaction would be from someone watching this who’s not aware that the preceding episode was hosted by Matthew Fox. I can just picture them wondering to themselves in confusion “Is that the dude from Lost standing in the background? Why in the world did SNL get him to randomly cameo in a small background role as one of the employees in this?” It’s like how I’ve always wondered if viewers who’ve watched Adam Sandler’s second and/or third Denise Show sketches without having seen the first one (where Shannen Doherty, who was hosting SNL that night, played the role of Denise) wondered to themselves why the hell SNL is randomly using a photo of the chick from 90210 for the otherwise-unseen title role of Denise.
— I’m loving Fred’s increasingly funny threats of “(insert number here) seconds, I’m (insert violent action here).” I particularly howled at him telling Amy “20 seconds, my ass…is in your mouth.”
— WTF? The Lost-esque head-explosion/mannequin ending completely…lost me (no lame pun intended), and ended this on a weak note.
— There surprisingly has yet to be a really strong Digital Short up to this point of the season that has knocked it out of the park. There’s also been a strange shortage of Digital Shorts this season so far, with this being only the third one.
STARS: ***½
BUYER BEWARE
paranoid consumer advocates (KET) & (MAR) see scams afoot
— Hmm, the voice Kenan’s using seems like it’ll get grating hearing it from a lead character in a sketch.
— Two mentions in separate sketches tonight of someone waiting in line for a Nintendo Wii.
— Maya’s character is making me laugh.
— Kenan, during a mailbag segment: “I have a letter here from myself……”
— Overall, not bad, despite the dull premise. Kenan’s character voice wasn’t as grating as I was worried it would eventually get, and he had some funny moments. Maya’s performance and one-liners also kept me amused.
— I remember when this originally aired and I didn’t like this sketch (I had an aversion to just about everything starring Kenan around this time, as I was of the opinion back then that he was the weak link of this cast), I was worried this was eventually going to become a recurring sketch, but we end up never seeing it return.
STARS: ***
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
Gwen Stefani performs “Wind It Up”
WEEKEND UPDATE
Al Gore (DAH) tells about his confusing conversation with Lindsay Lohan
flatulent (KRW) apologizes for stinking up an airplane & Weekend Update
photos of failed hetero unions don’t support WLF’s anti-gay marriage song
— Blah, where is this bit with Darrell-as-Al-Gore’s recounting of his conversation with Lindsay Lohan going?
— Overall, yeah, no real point to that Gore commentary.
— This seems like the type of subtle, awkward character Kristen can sell in spades, despite the dodgy fart-related premise.
— At least SNL refrained from using a fart sound effect when Kristen broke wind.
— The payoff of Kristen’s commentary didn’t work for me.
— Geez, Amy has some real groaners among her Update jokes tonight, even for her standards. Once again, I argue that little-to-nothing has changed with her on Update from the dreadful Fey/Poehler era. I’m still waiting for her to get decent as an anchorperson, and at this point, I’m sadly starting to think it’s never going to happen. I liked her as an anchorperson more when these Poehler/Meyers-era Updates originally aired than I do during my re-watches in this SNL project.
— Hell yeah, another Will Forte Update song!
— Some laughs from Will’s dumb anti-gay marriage preamble to his song.
— I absolutely love the melody of Will’s “Silly Silly Gays” song. Nice touch having Will’s song be assisted by a guitar-playing Fred (making his ONLY live appearance of the night, by the way, and he doesn’t even have any dialogue in it).
— Hilarious turn in Will’s commentary, with him unintentionally displaying photos of failed heterosexual celebrity marriages when trying to support his anti-gay marriage argument. I also love how his panicked reactions to those photos are still being sung in melody to his song.
— There seems to be a theme with lighters throughout tonight’s Update, as Kristen’s character lit a match to try to hide the scent of her fart, Amy used a lighter to light the cellphone she “smoked”, and now Seth is celebrating Will’s song by waving a lit lighter in the air ala a concertgoer.
STARS: **½
MONSTER UNDER THE BED
girl’s (AMP) monster-under-bed claim panics her parents (WLF) & (host)
— I love the turn with Amy’s character’s parents having an extremely paranoid reaction when Amy tells them she thinks a monster is under her bed. Will is particularly fantastic in his insane paranoia here.
— Will’s “friendly shark” analogy was hilarious.
— I love Annette shrieking “YOU IDIOT!” while strangling Amy after Amy reveals she brought chocolate into her room.
— The escalation to this sketch is great.
— Fun appearance from Bill as a jolly, singing monster. Bill is physically unrecognizable under that make-up (the exact same make-up that I believe has been used in various sketches in the past, including one with Will Ferrell as the devil trying to come up with love songs that Garth Brooks can use). You can only tell it’s Bill under that make-up by the voice.
STARS: ****½
VALTREX
Rerun from 11/11/06
AFTER WORK SNACK
Neil, Jean, fellow uptight co-worker Meryl (host) inch toward threesome
— Wow, the second half of this episode starting with Weekend Update has been huge for Will. Very welcome, given how limited his airtime had been lately due to him being busy filming the movie The Brothers Solomon.
— Good to see the return of this very solid, forgotten sketch from the preceding season’s Lindsay Lohan episode.
— Yet another sketch tonight where Annette is blatantly glued to the cue cards. Geez, it’s coming off particularly odd here, even if she is supposed to be playing a socially-awkward character.
— I love the little bit with Kristen taking her time pulling out a plastic bag of tipping change to give a tip to the waiter.
— Another great little Kristen moment, with her very funny line about once doing salsa dancing when under the influence of a very strong ringworm ointment.
— Annette isn’t blending in too well with Will and Kristen’s characterizations here, even if it’s the point that Annette’s character is more self-conscious than Will and Kristen’s characters. Lindsay Lohan did a much better job in her characterization in the first installment of this sketch. Who the hell could’ve ever guessed that a 19-year-old Lindsay Freakin’ Lohan would outdo Annette Bening in her portrayal of a subtle, quirky middle-aged character?
— So many funny little quirks from Will, Kristen, and Annette’s characters here. Too many for me to point out.
— This is using the same surprise twist from the first installment of this sketch, where we suddenly see Will’s character detailing the raunchy night of lovemaking he and his two co-workers have planned with each other, which isn’t a surprise anymore, but is still working for me, especially with the new aspect of constantly using the word “mess” in place of the f-word when talking about sex.
STARS: ****
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
Akon performs “I Wanna Love You”
STANFIELD & PARTLOW
lawyers (host) & (BIH) specialize in dowager-to-cat inheritance cases
— Annette botches a line right out of the gate in this.
— Bill’s first brief walk-on was very funny.
— The gag with the customer testimonial just being old black-and-white wacky stock footage of a cat playing ping-pong with a human seemed like it should’ve gotten a bigger laugh than it did.
— All of a sudden, this sketch awkwardly gets cut off mid-progress due to the show running long.
— Overall, not sure how to feel about this sketch as a whole, not just because we DIDN’T get to see the whole sketch, but because, while I liked some moments, some other moments kinda fell flat.
STARS: **½, I guess
GOODNIGHTS
IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS
— A middling episode. The strong Will Forte-dominated portion bolstered this episode’s quality, but the first half of this episode was, aside from the Two A-Holes sketch, completely unmemorable and contained some really mediocre pieces, and the episode ended on kind of a poor note with the aborted final sketch that wasn’t all that great to begin with. Another reason for me being left with an iffy feeling towards this episode was Annette Bening, who, despite some okay moments, was a much more mediocre host than I ever would’ve expected.
— Am I correct in remembering that this episode never got an NBC rerun? If I am, then I take it as a sign that the people at SNL weren’t too crazy about this episode either.
MY PERSONAL CHOICE OF “BEST OF” MOMENTS FOR THIS EPISODE, REPRESENTED WITH SCREENCAPS
HOW THIS EPISODE STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING ONE (Matthew Fox)
a step down
My full set of screencaps for this episode is here
TOMORROW
Justin Timberlake hosts the Christmas episode
Love Alec Baldwin cameos all the time 🙂
I’m sick of all of the Baldwin cameos. More so now than ever.
Yeah, Annette Bening was a weak host–glued to cue cards and the writers seemed to have trouble finding the best material (the monologue is referencing the seven year old American Beauty?). Was she promoting something? I don’t blame the show for having her on–it’s good to have different hosts and she isn’t a trainwreck or anything.
This is another episode where the better material is kind of backended. Good Morning I Hate this Town is a dumb premise that perhaps could have worked on a slightly more subtle level–having disdainful hosts seems good for some laughs, but to actually call the show that is very lazy.
There had been kind of a long run of weakish or okay digital shorts (by their standards). The next episode, though, er, stops that streak (although it’s still kinda hit and miss from that point on this season–to be fair, looking at the list of shorts, there’s never really a portion where I feel like they’re on fire for a really long time in a season–that’s the nature of the beast).
Annette Benning starred in Running with Scissors (co-starring Alec Baldwin), which was released in theaters that October.
That’s about the only reason I could think why she was a host at that moment.
Wow, that’s a deep cut. I knew she did voice work, but I didn’t know she did TV Funhouse.
I’m glad that I’m not the only Ghostwriter fan that posts on here.
Heh … Wood TV 8, the NBC affiliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The girl in the green shirt in Diddy Kiddies is voiced by Blaze Berdahl, who is best known as Lenni Frazier on PBS’s Ghostwriter, the same show that gave our friend Jamal Jenkins his screen name.
Promo’s: Nuni & Nuni appear in the promos while their sketch eventually got cut after dress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9yW-Rpihyc
Thank goodness they were kind enough to cut those wretched characters out. Generally I like the periods when they’d have recurring characters in the promos but they are, to steal from another recurring duo, not worthy.
Don’t worry. In the next episode, we’ll get a Digital Short that blows all the previous ones out of the water! I’m not gonna say its name, because I’m sure you all know which one it is.
Those Chad shorts are about the only things I can still tolerate Pete Davidson in. I’m sure you’ll come around on them when you reach them….who knows how long from now.
I like some of the Chad shorts. The specific plot that is “attractive woman hits on oblivious Chad” got done to death, but I like some of the variations, such as the one where Mulaney is the killer messing with Chad.
Shocking as it may seem, I think the Chad shorts are…great! Kind of an anti-character. The exact inverse of the “people react to total weirdo” type sketches. It’s some weird voodoo that each edition still works for me.
Sorry, but anything with Pete Davidson is awful, including Chad. He seems to be one-note and just obnoxious. I felt his presence on the show got worse after his relationship with Ariana. He needs to take a page from Jost and avoid getting personal on the show. His movie proves he doesn’t need SNL anymore at this point.
I think Good Morning, I Hate This Town is actually a decent premise, but it’s not delivered very well.
The only thing from this episode that I liked was Anger Problem. Fred is pretty funny in it, and it probably should’ve stayed in the Fox episode.
Yep, “Running With Scissors,” a good book that became a so-so movie.
In hindsight “Diddy Kiddies” grew on me, and Will had two great sketches after Update. Akon’s song was good, though I remember hating Gwen’s song when it was on the radio. Bening was such a disappointment as host; unlike DeNiro, SNL was wise to reconsider ever having her host again.
The Smigel toons quality was started to drop quite a bit by this point, I dunno, to me it seemed like his heart wasn’t quite in them as much anymore, if I remember right didn’t they start to appear way less frequently and pretty much disappeared for good by the next season?
Smigel discusses unexpectedly getting fired from SNL just before the Palin thing blew up in this podcast. (he starts talking about SNL, including Ambiguously Gay Duo and the Michael Jackson cartoons, at about the 24 minute mark).
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-insane-story-behind-triumph-the-insult-comic-dogs-epic-ted-cruz-takedown
How many other times have they aired a pretape that was cut for time from a previous week, but still had that week’s host in it? The only other example I can recall is the Deidra Wurtz: Downsizing Expert sketch from S36, which aired in the Dana Carvey episode but you can still see the previous week’s host Jesse Eisenberg hastily edited out of it.
Scarlett Johansson is in “the tangent” digital short which I believe aired in a later episode
You are right, this show was never re-broadcast on NBC. I think they posted the cat lawyer sketch online at some point so you could see the end.
The only one I might even remotely remember is “Two A-Holes in A Live Nativity Scene”…
Speaking of Pete Davidson, the premise of this teacher sketch is also vaguely similar to a “teacher trial” sketch he did early on, which was basically about how he’s called to testify against his female teacher for their illegal relationship but he just talks about how much he loved it. That sketch got a big backlash (so naturally they remade it the next season…). Interesting how this did not. Not sure if that’s because views were different in 2006 or just because there was much less online commentary and thinkpiece material about SNL at that time.
Anyway, the description of this episode could be aggressively mediocre. It starts off with a shrug and mostly shrugs along throughout the night. I’d say it reminds me of when the Seth assembly line kicks into gear 3-4 years from now, but that isn’t quite the case – this is still much more interesting than many of those episodes.
I don’t want to have too negative an opinion of Annette, because she wasn’t that bad, but her performance in the office coworkers sketch was pretty awful. The look was right (somehow she reminded me of Gail Matthius…) but she was, as you mentioned, so focused on the cards, to the point of almost never looking at Will or Kristen, and it seriously damaged the whole piece for me. She makes the character frightening, which doesn’t work with what is going on. The version of this with Rainn Wilson might have suited her more, as it has more of a frightening vibe (given that they talk about a murder plot). To be honest I don’t like THAT sketch a whole lot either, so I wonder if part of it is that the first was so brilliant, the rest can’t compare.
The cold open was so very cookie cutter that I began to zone out early on and noticed how much Jason was playing W like Melanie Hutsell played Jan Brady. Then I began to wish they had pulled a Kate McKinnon ten years early and had Melanie come in to play W for the week. To quote another oh-so-incredible President – what have you got to lose?
Annette’s monologue may be the most bewildering in SNL history…or very high on the list. I know these are written at the last minute, but was that truly the best they could come up with? If they didn’t want to do lazy Warren Beatty gags, they could have even tried something like having the two Jersey guys on since she was briefly on Wiseguy (trivia note – she is the last of four Wiseguy performers to host SNL [two hosted pre-Wiseguy], and if you haven’t watched Wiseguy you should try it). It would have been cheesy, but still given more comedy fodder than “female real estate agents resent her.” The only part of the whole thing I was amused by was Maya talking about how she was suspected of cheating thanks to American Beauty and she actually had been cheating.
The “I hate this town” talk show felt like something Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer would have done. Jason is about as strong as Ferrell would have been, but Ana would have been great in Annette’s part. Annette is…fine, but that isn’t enough in this case.
The Kenan and Maya sketch ended up annoying me – I don’t know, it just seemed loud (Kenan) and dumb, and not the fun kind.
The monster under the bed sketch is one of those I wanted to like more than I did. It was well-performed, and had a creative ending, but something wasn’t there for me. I will praise Amy for how she played the child character – matter-of-fact rather than cutesy.
I was going to say Amy was back to being cutesy on Update, but it felt more manic than cutesy. It was as if they all knew the first half had been lackluster so they just amped up everything at the desk. Will in particular brings a great deal of energy, even getting up and dancing (and he goes on to do some real work to keep the back half of the show together). I don’t get why they didn’t end the Update with the fart joke – Amy and Seth fleeing in horror would have been a funny visual.
Amy laughing at her own jokes over and over wasn’t a great choice, but some of the other zaniness, like pretending to light up the cell phone, was a little funny. Seth seemed to be continuing in his early ‘dudebro says edgy things’ persona with the Indian caller joke – I wonder if he was influenced by shows like Colbert taking off around this time. I hated Amy’s joke about slavery being a bigger strategic mistake than Iraq – it felt so lazy and gotcha. I have to admit I did kind of enjoy Darrell’s Gore reprisal, even though it felt half-written and nonsensical. It helped that he seemed to be enjoying himself too.
The cat sketch probably wouldn’t have been up to much even if we’d seen the whole thing, but I appreciated seeing Bill get a chance at such a simple, effective use of his gifts – just making goofy faces at the camera and meowing. It stays with me a lot more than the monster piece because while he’s good there, the makeup is what gets the attention. With SNL, less is often more.
That’s a good trivia question re: Wiseguy, John.
I’m wondering if the blase post-Ferrell political cold opens are down to Jim Downey being somewhat right of center. I believe he’s talked in interviews over the years about being relatively conservative, at least compared to other SNL writers. So perhaps Downey respected W enough that it was difficult for him, personally, to find a comedic handle during these years? Just a theory.
@John-Others have said this before, but I don’t think I have: your posts are like a mini-bonus-review in addition to Stooge. Very insightful and I enjoy reading them.
With Wiseguy, I count Bening, Ray Sharkey, Kevin Spacey, Jerry Lewis… but also Tim Curry, right?
And I’m surprised Michael Chiklis and Clyde Kusatsu never hosted.
(I’m kidding about Kusatsu)
And Deborah Harry.
I assume the movie “Wired” destroyed any chance for Chiklis to host SNL.
(Speaking of Wiseguy, it’s surprising that Stanley Tucci hasn’t been invited.)
@Preston4 Wired was so wretched even I forgot about it. Excellent point; he’s never going to host
@Kubelsky that’s so nice of you to say. I ramble on so much I wonder if anyone wants to read them. This is the main place I can come to talk about this stuff, plus it’s a way to save my thoughts if I want to go back and remember something from an episode.
I realize now I forgot two (Harry and Sharkey – apparently 80-81 fled my brain) so it was 6, not 4. More than I’d realized. That’s a pretty healthy number…at one point I thought maybe Jonathan Banks could host but that is not too likely I suppose.
I’m a sucker for a celebrity I never would’ve expected as host so I was on-board with Bening. I took her cue-card reading as “seasoned performer not used to live tv” which has been somewhat a staple for SNL’s history. All in all I was fine with her and the sketches were different enough. It reminded me when Bening stepped into the movie limelight mid 90s-early 00s as a fairly serious actress and realizing sometime during that that she did a sketch character performance as Dan Aykroyd’s wife in “The Great Outdoors” in ’88.
(It also helped that there was a lot of Forte in this episode…)
Warren Beatty can be seen in the audience in live bumper between WU and Monster Under Bed. (here’s a blurry screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4WXUYZH.jpg)