After a couple of episodes of its new season that desperately went after younger audience, “Saturday Night Live” reached back for a host nearing 60 in Bruce Willis this week.
It was his first time hosting since 1989. And while Willis proved game for whatever kind of skit they tried to throw him in, from centaur to a kind of terrible Michael Kors impersonation, and was about as prepared and committed as any host, judged from his lack of dependence on cue cards, the show largely struggled because they simply ran out of material.
Nobody says it’s easy to produce a 90 minute satirical show every week. Doing three of them consecutively to start out the season showed some definite flaws this week.
They could start with a perfectly good premise, as in the cold open, when the free-floating astronauts of “Gravity” are affected by the government shutdown when they find that when they call to Houston all they can get to respond is a NASA janitor. But then the skit has nowhere to go.
Such was the case on a number of bits this week, with Willis the odd man out at a talkative city barber shop, with no good stories to tell, a skit that ended with him leaving to go to a Sheryl Crow concert. Or the centaur skit, featuring a new hire suffering in the back end of the suit (a good metaphor for new cast members), that ends with him being dragged out of the scene.
Having Willis showed just how much testosterone there is on the set this year — five of the six new hires are guys, joining an already male-dominated remaining cast. This meant they could stage not only the all-male barber shop scene but a Navy Seal skit, a frat house pledge, and guys’ afternoon watching football. When the latter turned into a “Boy Dance Party,” it turned out to be one of the best-realized bits of the evening. But the title also fit the new “SNL” cast — boy dance party indeed.
It seemed odd that there were two space themed sketches in one week — as if they couldn’t decide on one good one. But the second was troublesome in that it reintroduced the childish Bobby Moynihan character Kirby who keeps talking about his kitty cat.
Another returning cast member was Teran Williams’ aggressive teen Eddie, who takes one mistake and keeps rubbing it in, saying “I’m just messing with you!” Bringing characters back is a way to establish recurring characters, but these had more the feel of recycling whole sketches, not bringing back beloved figures (and if Kirby and Eddie are the best we have in terms of recurring characters on “SNL,” that may be cause for worry).
The sets and costumes seemed especially elaborate all night (it might have been all those Willis wigs). But it was as if budgets had been recently enhanced by Emmys and the fact that the show is the network’s biggest ratings winner each week.
No set, however, was more elaborate than Katy Perry’s for her first number, a jungle themed “Eye of the Tiger” (her second song seemed sleek by comparison).
But one sign that they were running out of material came in rerunning an ad for eMeth that first ran two weeks ago. You can see it a third time next week when the season premiere reruns again, giving writers a chance to recharge in time for Edward Norton Halloween show Oct. 26.