Tina Fey seemed to be hosting the crucial 39th season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” as a way to lend experience and substance to a cast that’s mostly green. Six new people were starting on the show, joining a few others only started last year, leaving the seniority of the troupe to people like Kenan Thompson and Bobby Moynihan.
“it’s a rebuilding year,” Fey said, “as they keep saying in my plastic surgeon’s office.”
Untethered by a current show on TV, Fey joked that she needed to host “SNL” because “unless I’m on TV every three weeks a part of me dies.” But even she knew that her job hosting the season premiere wasn’t so much a star turn for her as much as it was a feat of midwifery for these baby cast members.
Hence, she exposed them in the monologue to the humiliation of dancing in the background of the opener’s song and dance.
Soon after, there was the smart inside joke of the game show “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?” in which newcomers were strutted out alongside the equally odd looking members of the Montreal band. Fey was the contestant; Thompson the host.
But already a few new featured cast members stood out, particularly the one woman among the five guys, Noel Wells, who did a good version of Lena Dunham in the first big filmed skit, a take off of “Girls” (with Vanessa Bayer as Zozia Mamet, Cicily Strong as Alison WIlliams and Kate McKinnon as Jemima Kirke).
The twist — like Bob Dole in “The Real World” was Fey as a woman from Albania named Blerta who is honest about what she sees. “You are weak and soft and dress like a baby,” she tells Lena’s character.
Good stuff, which rolls right into an airplane boarding sketch, boarding all manner of odd rows … “first class, X-Men first class, X-men business class… people who clap when the plane lands…”
Fey and Taran Killam played the airport employees and it was a success, even if it didn’t have time to introduce whatever new cast members were being boarded.
Cicely Strong’s promotion to Weekend Update co-host was generally smooth. She tends to exaggerate facial expressions a bit, but that could have been caused by first night jitters. Generally, she has this gig down cold. And she paused for a time to thank all the female Weekend Update anchors that came before her. Fey came out early for the kudos, but first she mentioned Jane Curtain, then Amy Poehler…
The update segment was a good way to introduce one new character from a new cast member, “Bruce Chandling, standup comic,” who was asked about international developments but kept talking about the differences between L.A. and New York in a manner that was funny for being not funny, using a kind of voice from early John Travolta and a silly face of expectancy as he waited for laughs. Newcomer Kyle Mooney has been using the character a few years on his own and it looks like a good addition to “SNL” (it’s a big weekend for Mooney, who is also part of the cast of “Hello Ladies,” premiering on HBO Sunday, as a coworker of Stephen Merchant).
Chandling, in his first outing, is no Stefan, but I was thinking he was in the ballpark of Drunk Uncle, who showed up anyway and did one of those well written bits so well performed by Monyihan.
And speaking of relations, Drunk Uncle brought in his own kin, Meth Nephew, which was Aaron Paul playing his Jesse Pinkman character from “Breaking Bad.” His cameo had already singlehandedly saved the typically all-over-the-map cold open, involving Jay Pharoh’s Obama trying to explain health care reform before Pinkman arrives and speaks of a friend who was forced to cook meth to pay for cancer treatments before Obamacare came to pass. It was a nice touch, and an great surprising cameo. But, again perhaps worried about the cast’s overall lack of star power, Paul was used two other times, both dressed as Pinkman, for the same essential reason — a cameo to goose up or close a skit, one for an ad for a smokeless product, eMeth, the other alongside Drunk Uncle. The first time is fine, but the third is a little unsurprising.
The one overall dud skit was Kenan Thompson narrating a “Cinema Classics” that put to use Fey and Killam again in a dumb movie that involved a lot of taxidermy. With a stuffed critter at the wheel, I could only think of Toonces the cat who thought he could drive. It’s hard to think of the mugging Thompson as a senior cast member, too; I keep thinking of him as that over-enthusiastic kid in “All That.”
It’s true that the worst sketches tend to pop up toward the end of the show, but so do the loopiest. So Bayer and Strong teamed up as those dizzy, monotone former porn stars doing infomercials for luxury products, pronouncing just about everything wrong.
They kept calling Manolo Blahniks “Manuel Blondicks”
“Other shoes are flat and for nurses,” one said, in a skit that grew cumulatively more funny.
And that was it. Arcade Fire were pretty good, but they ate up as much time as they did space on stage with their seven member band augmented by five other musicians on the disco-like tunes from the upcoming album “Reflektor” that itself reflects the sound of its producer, James Murphy of LCD Sound System.
It was notable that for the first time, “SNL” was followed by a half hour special of more of the band’s new album in a fanciful presentation featuring a club performance, giant carnival masks and costumes.
The special also had a bigger roster of cameos than old sketch show that preceded it, with James Franco, Bono, Ben Stiller, Bono, Michael Cera, Rainn Wilson, Zach Galifianakis and Bill Hader (who just left “SNL” in the spring) all popping up, along with glimpses of a phony 80s style sitcom, “Big Bud, Lil’ Bud” starring Aziz Anzari and Eric Wareham. Crazy stuff.
They should be doing the extended after-show special with a lot of other musical acts on “SNL” as well. But not all of them..
Next week’s returning host and musical act, after all, is Miley Cyrus.