Segments are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars
COFFEE TALK WITH LINDA RICHMAN
Linda & friend (host) have tickets to see Barbra in concert
— The final gasp of Season 19’s extreme oversaturation of Coffee Talk sketches.
— How many times in these Coffee Talk sketches are we supposed to be surprised at an announcement that Linda Richman got tickets to see Barbra in concert, as if that didn’t already happen before?
— Heather Locklear looks almost unrecognizable in that get-up, and is surprisingly pulling off this role well.
— I did at least get a laugh from Richman angrily referring to a caller as a “Nazi pig”.
STARS: *½
MONOLOGUE
host & PHH, KEN, CHF, Canteen Boy, Jay Leno [real] talk soap opera-style
— A predictable premise for a monologue spoofing Melrose Place, but there could be potential here.
— I like the rivalry being portrayed between Phil and Kevin.
— A big laugh from Heather suddenly slapping Melanie after kindly greeting her.
— Heather seems awfully fixated on those cue cards.
— Random Jay Leno cameo. At least I got to hear Heather call him an idiot, which was satisfying.
— Heather’s dramatic Melrose Place-esqe encounters with various performers, while kinda fun, are starting to get a little old.
— Random Canteen Boy appearance, showing up for the first time since his infamous encounter with Alec Baldwin’s scoutmaster.
— According to GettyImages, Julia had a part cut out of this monologue after dress rehearsal (pic here). I wonder if she played the part that Melanie ended up doing in the live version.
STARS: **½
EYCH
the hairball remover cats ask for by name
— A huge laugh from Ellen’s cat initially going “eych”.
— Hilarious visual of the cats “singing” the jingle, which really makes this commercial.
— The monkey ending almost feels like a precursor to the Bathroom Monkey fake ad that’s coming up early in the following season.
STARS: ****½
MELROSE PLACE
Wayne dreams that he’s with Amanda (host) in Melrose Place
— The audience initially seems confused as to why SNL is even attempting a Wayne Campbell sketch without Garth. I’m with you, audience.
— Do we really need two Melrose Place parodies so close to each other tonight?
— Wayne is just recycling a whole bunch of old jokes from earlier Wayne’s World sketches (e.g. “Here’s a quarter, buy a clue”, “She’d give a dog a bone”, comparing Vagina dentata to the title of a Police album, etc.), giving this Garth-less Wayne sketch even more of a sad, lazy feel.
— Okay, Wayne finally got a laugh out of me, with his “I seem to be allergic to emasculation” bit.
— The cast’s impressions of Melrose Place characters are going right over my head, as I’m not familiar enough with the show. Chris’ impression made me laugh, though.
— The running gag of Heather entering in different outfits and Wayne addressing it before saying “Never mind” is falling completely flat.
— Again tonight, Heather is fixated on the cue cards. Her delivery of some of her lines is AWFUL.
STARS: **
HOT BUTTON
Clarence Thomas (TIM) & Ted Kennedy (PHH) sexually harass
— Technically, this is the only actual sketch Phil ends up appearing in all night. I know they’ve been phasing Phil out this season, but how the hell do you use someone like him in only one sketch in his final episode?
— A one-note premise that’s already starting to get a little tired only a minute-and-a-half into the sketch.
— Okay, this has now been getting a little better, especially with the reveal of Phil’s Ted Kennedy posing as a caller.
— I love the running gag with Tim’s Clarence Thomas equating everything to porn titles.
— Kinda surprised by how short this overall sketch was.
STARS: ***
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “Throb”
WEEKEND UPDATE
while giving a Whitewater editorial, homophobic NOM tells KEN to back off
ADS plays guitar & sings about his inappropriate “Summer Love” targets
— Here comes the final Kevin Nealon-anchored Weekend Update.
— Pretty tepid jokes from Kevin so far tonight, and the audience apparently agrees with me.
— Interesting how Norm is doing a commentary in Kevin’s final Update, considering who ends up taking over Kevin’s spot at the Update desk the following season. This is a nice unintentional passing of the torch.
— Norm doing a “homophobic perspective” is a funny meta, tongue-in-cheek spoof of Norm’s real-life views, though considering this is his first season, I’m assuming audiences at the time wouldn’t have gotten the meta-ness of this commentary.
— Noteworthy that Norm says to Kevin at one point “Go over some of your fake news and I’ll finish up here”, as Norm would famously introduce a lot of his own future Weekend Updates with “And now, the fake news”.
— Kevin’s jokes have been getting better, and I loved his random “Lord and Taylor” bit.
— Surprisingly, this is Adam’s first Update guitar song as himself this season.
— The mother reveal in Adam’s song is pretty funny.
— Ehh, the humor in Adam’s song is now dying off, and is paling badly in comparison to his previous Update songs as himself.
— During Adam’s song, we get a brief cutaway to Tim in the studio audience as his character from the Captain Jim & Pedro sketches, singing the words “Summer Love” while giving a thumbs-up. All I have to say about that is, SNL has really been trying to push these Captain Jim and Pedro sketches in the homestretch of this season.
— And thus ends Kevin’s final Weekend Update. I’m not clear on what the story is behind his departure from the Update desk. For years, I had always heard that he stepped down from Update voluntarily, because he felt Update was holding him back from appearing in more sketches (which is even sadder in hindsight, considering he would end up appearing in a significantly LESS amount of sketches the following season). But in more recent years, I’ve heard that he was actually fired from Update. Does anyone know the real story?
— According to GettyImages, this episode had a cut Chris Farley Weekend Update commentary that would later resurface as a bonus feature on his “Best Of” DVD, in which he plays a cigarette-smoking character named Jerry Sozio, who tells a rambling story that mostly just consists of him repeatedly going “So I says to the guy, I says, I says, I says…” (pic here), which would be reworked in the upcoming season 20 as a Point/Counterpoint Weekend Update commentary.
— Kevin’s overall tenure as a Weekend Update anchor was a letdown from how I had remembered it being in past viewings. Before doing these reviews, I had considered Kevin a not-great-but-still-fine Update anchor, I had really appreciated the Chevy Chase style he tried to bring back to the desk, and I had never really understood the criticisms many people seem to have of him as an anchorperson. But when covering his Updates in this SNL project, I’ve become quite disillusioned on his Update tenure. I was fine with his Updates for most of his first season, but towards the end of that season, I started feeling his Updates took on a disappointing blandly average quality, which is where it would stay for the following season 18, before getting even worse in season 19, where he seemed to really struggle at times and the studio audiences seemed to be over him. I’ve now come to fully understand the criticisms people have of him, even if I’m still not as down on his Update tenure as those people are. After getting through this pretty rough season of Update, all I have to say is, I welcome the upcoming new Update anchor with open arms, especially since he’s always been tied with Dennis Miller as my personal favorite Update anchor of all time.
STARS: ***
ACROSS THE BAR
in a bar, (KEN) tries to match (host)’s silent nontraditional flirtations
— I love Kevin’s dopey smile when Heather starts flirting with him.
— Very catchy 90s background music, and it’s adding a great touch to this sketch.
— A huge laugh from Heather randomly pulling her nose up and snorting.
— I love Kevin imitating everything Heather does, especially when does the same drawing of himself that Heather just did.
— Ha, I love the fact that Kevin kisses Norm on the lips, considering this is coming right after a Weekend Update in which Norm kept adamantly accusing Kevin of being gay and having the hots for him. Now THIS is a passing of the torch.
— Hilarious how after Heather’s bra-removal trick, Kevin just sits there frozen and stumped, not knowing how he can imitate that, then he just grabs Norm and kisses him once again. Norm noticeably starts cracking up this time.
— Great turn with the drinking of poison.
— Overall, a masterpiece. Why, oh, why couldn’t tonight be Kevin’s final episode? This sketch would’ve been a fantastic way to conclude his SNL tenure.
STARS: *****
60 MINUTES
Andy Rooney (NOM) reads addresses off letters he’s received
— Our third of season 19’s trilogy of solo Norm sketches with him impersonating a famous figure.
— Yet another solid celebrity impression from Norm.
— I love the brave anti-comedy of this, with Norm just slowly showing a long string of envelopes and saying where each is from, all the while the audience reacts almost uncomfortably. I recall seeing an old SNL newsgroup post from 1994 in which someone compared this sketch to the famous Sideshow Bob rake scene in The Simpsons, in that it’s funny at first, then stops being funny for a while when it keeps going on and on, then becomes funny again because it keeps going on and on. There’s also a very Andy Kaufman-esque quality to this sketch, and as someone who considers Andy Kaufman one of my comedy idols, it’s no wonder I love this sketch so much.
— Good ending with Norm’s Rooney detailing how he always sets fire to letters he receives and dumps it out of a window.
— A perfect sketch in my eyes, and it symbolizes so much of what I love about Norm’s divisive sense of humor.
STARS: *****
AMAZING TIME SAVERS
bigoted (host) sells pasta makers to home shoppers
— The name of Mike’s character, Richard Hayden, is also the name of David Spade’s character in the movie Tommy Boy, which I believe was filming at this time.
— Speaking of Mike’s name being Richard Hayden, Heather oddly called him “John” just now, for some reason. Cue card error?
— Hilarious turn with Heather’s character, as part of an analogy, casually mentioning the Holocaust being a lie, and then acting nonchalant about that statement while many phones ring off the hook.
— Very funny how Heather’s character keeps downplaying the Holocaust statement during calls she takes, and keeps trying to tie it back into the Pasta Maker machine.
— More laughs from Heather’s character now casually making racist comments about minorities.
— Heather’s performance in this sketch is fantastic.
— David playing a stoned caller discussing the different ways “rural” can be pronounced reminds me of a scene he would later do in the movie Black Sheep where he involuntarily gets stoned and finds various ways that “roads” can be pronounced. I believe both this sketch and Black Sheep are written by Fred Wolf, but I’m not sure.
— I love Mike’s very uncomfortable reactions throughout this. When something similar would later happen to him in real life in a certain Hurricane Katrina benefit incident with Kanye West, I bet Mike wished he had a table to hide under like he did in this sketch.
— A great touch at the end with a whole bunch of phones being heard ringing immediately after the un-PC ending disclaimer.
STARS: *****
L’HOMME D’ORGASME
Orgasm Guy visits his French cousin (Rafael Fuchs)
— I liked Rob’s tongue-in-cheek mention of Orgasm Guy being his most famous character.
— Who the heck is this Rob Schneider lookalike playing French Orgasm Guy? Odd how they’re letting a completely unknown person star in a sketch.
— A minute into this French scene, and Norm’s half-assed French accent has been the only laugh so far.
— Yeah, this sketch is falling terribly flat, especially when compared to the great first Orgasm Guy sketch.
— Overall, the only thing this sketch really succeeded in was breaking the streak of perfect post-Weekend Update sketches. Gee, thanks for that. If this was intended as Rob’s swan song, oof.
STARS: *½
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “Any Time, Any Place”
SO LONG, FAREWELL
cast & recurring characters sing “So Long, Farewell” to end the season
— I absolutely LOVE this idea. An extremely fun and fitting way to close a season, and a very sweet idea for a sendoff for such an invaluable and irreplaceable cast member like Phil Hartman.
— David’s only two appearances of the whole night have been in drag.
— Interesting how the featured players are singing about their lack of airtime, which doesn’t really make sense in Norm’s case, especially given how much he dominated tonight’s episode.
— Speaking of Norm, you can tell by the awkward smile on his face that he feels silly about participating in this musical piece. The following season, he’s completely absent from the big Grease number in the John Travolta episode’s goodnights, so I’m guessing he had an aversion to doing musical pieces.
— I love that Richmeister and Pat sang the lyric “We skipped this year, and that’s why it was bad”. Nice way of acknowledging both the year-long absence of those two characters and the lack of quality of this season.
— Michael’s (in his ONLY appearance of the whole night) Laverne and Shirley bit is great.
— Ah, now Matt Foley is the only person remaining onstage, as the song slows down.
— When Phil says “I can’t think of a more dignified way… to end my 8 years on this program”, his voice is trembling in a way you can tell he’s holding back tears. I’m starting to feel emotional right now.
— And now I’m feeling even more emotional as we see the now-legendary visual of Phil singing goodbye to the slowly-zooming-away overhead camera as Matt Foley falls asleep in his arms. That’s something that, while probably touching even when it originally aired, would later take on a VERY touching, emotional meaning in retrospect after the untimely deaths of both Phil and Chris mere months apart.
STARS: *****
GOODNIGHTS
IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS
— A bit of an oddly structured season finale, in that the first half was shaky and iffy, but the second half was amazing. There were no less than FOUR sketches in the second half of this episode that got a five-star rating. Very, very impressive, and it more than makes up for the shaky first half. Not a bad way to end a season. Heather Locklear was a wildly inconsistent host, coming off terrible in some pieces (mainly the Wayne Campbell sketch), pretty good in one (Coffee Talk), and perfect in two (Across The Bar, Amazing Time Savers). She was also strangely absent from most of the post-Weekend Update half of the show, but considering her inconsistency and the fact that most of the post-Update half was on an absolute roll, that’s probably a good thing.
— This would end up being the final episode for Phil Hartman, of course, as well as Rob Schneider, Julia Sweeney, Melanie Hutsell, and Sarah Silverman, making this the largest number of cast departures in years. As for the legendary Phil Hartman, a.k.a. “The Glue”, just…. what is there to say? There are no words I can come up with that I feel can do justice to his greatness and importance to SNL, a greatness and importance that, in my opinion, has yet to be matched since then, and possibly never will. I just want to add that back when I first started this SNL project, Phil was one of the cast members who’s tenure I was most excited to cover, and now that I’ve completed it, I feel very honored. Rob Schneider, I’ve always felt had an underrated tenure, and I still feel that way, especially when covering season 18, which was a fantastic year for him. Unfortunately, his tenure didn’t end on the best note, as he took a step down his final season and became more hit-and-miss than usual. Julia Sweeney was a cast member who I’ve always felt was on the show at the wrong time. During these early 90s seasons, she struggled more and more as her tenure progressed and the Boys Club atmosphere of the show increased, culminating in a terrible final season in which her airtime was basically reduced to that of a typical featured player. If she were on during a better era for female cast members, I have no doubt she would’ve had a successful run and could’ve produced more recurring characters than just Pat. While I highly doubt she would’ve been a breakout star performer, she most likely would’ve been a solid Ana Gasteyer-type utility female. As I mentioned several times in earlier reviews, Melanie Hutsell is a performer I had always had disdain for in the past, but came into her tenure with an open mind during this SNL project. That ended up working to an extent, as I found myself being a lot less annoyed by her and starting to appreciate some of her comical supporting performances. I even developed an immunity to her mugging tendencies. However, I still don’t find her anything particularly great, and the sketches she starred in were usually more miss than hit. Sarah Silverman, I have almost nothing to say about, because she did next to nothing during her one-season tenure. Knowing what a big star she’d go on to become later in her career, her underusage on SNL feels like a huge missed opportunity on the show’s part, but I also wonder if Sarah’s young age at the time played a big part in that. Maybe she was just too green for the show back then.
— Season 19 as a whole was certainly a disappointing one, especially coming after the amazing long run of successful seasons from 1986-1993. The first half of this season, while still a big step down from what came before, actually wasn’t TOO bad, aside from the very rough Christian Slater episode. We even got a string of episodes ranging from okay to great in November and December. But as soon as the second half of the season arrived, the troubles for this season kicked into full gear. A lot of episodes were rough, certain sketches started having a low-energy feel and dead atmosphere, and strong episodes were much fewer and farther in between. Many unfortunate characteristics from the doomed upcoming season 20 also started arising during the last few months of this season. Even though I came into this season being prepared for all of those things, I wasn’t expecting to be depressed by the string of bad episodes from around February and March. I’m guessing the reason it was depressing to me this time, unlike in my previous viewings of this season, is because, due to the nature of this SNL project, I was now watching this season in the context of SNL’s entire timeline up to this point. I guess reviewing this season after having just reviewed the high-quality 1986-1993 years made the decline in the second half of this season harder to take. One consistently strong asset to this season was new featured player Norm Macdonald, who’s distinctive style was a welcome new addition to the show and he would often be the biggest or sole highlight of a sketch, especially during the particularly rough second half of the season.
— As a bonus, here’s a famous EW article from towards the end of this season, giving suggestions of how to fix SNL for season 20. I’m sure a lot of you have already read this article before, but I figured it would be a bit of a different experience to read it now, as we’re currently in the context of this period of the show.
MY PERSONAL CHOICE OF “BEST OF” MOMENTS FOR THIS EPISODE, REPRESENTED WITH SCREENCAPS
HOW THIS EPISODE STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING ONE (John Goodman)
a step up
MY PERSONAL CHOICE OF “BEST OF” MOMENTS FOR THIS ENTIRE SEASON, REPRESENTED WITH SCREENCAPS (Note: These picks were hastily made off the top of my head and will naturally be missing some deserving sketches. I don’t have enough time to do full, thought-out “Best Of” picks for this whole season)
HOW THIS OVERALL SEASON STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING SEASON (1992-93)
a big step down
My full set of screencaps for this episode is here
TOMORROW
The notorious season 20 begins, the last of the three most infamous seasons in SNL history. Steve Martin hosts the premiere, and we get a few new cast members, as well as a new Weekend Update anchor.