SNL50's remembrance of things past

For me, SNL’s 50th Anniversary special was about as good as the show gets: 50 percent  worked pretty well and 50 percent didn’t. Over the last few years, the average SNL has hit closer to 30-70.

But that’s just me. I loved the two legendary Pauls as musical guests, even with their voices now abraded by age.  I loved the reel of commercial parodies (“Oops, I Crapped My Pants”) – always one of SNL’s strengths. Loved Martin Short and Steve Martin. I liked John Mulaney’s musical history of New York. I even liked the reprise of that hoary “Scared Straight” bit with Keenan Thompson and Eddie Murphy.

Kristen Wiig’s return as doll-hands Dooneese was not hilarious, but Will Farrell kept it going. Don’t know if I ever want to see the alien abduction sketch again, even with Meryl Streep. Like so many SNL mainstays, this one has worn thin. Ditto with “Domingo”: funny the first time, and now just dumb.

A couple other misses: Where was Bill Hader? Dan Akroyd? And if there was even a fleeting reference to the late, great Phil Hartman, I missed it.

Iread this piece in The Atlantic, complaining that the special leaned way more on the show’s last 20 years than its first 30. To which I can only shrug: Well, duh. Can you blame them? 

Folks of my generation were all about the same age as SNL’s original cast. We watch it 50 years later because we’ve always watched it – even as we kvetch about lame cast members and lame writing and lame musical guests. Never mind that most of us now stream it a day or two later because we don’t like to stay up past 10.

Now our vast baby-boom demographic is aging toward the great beyond. About time. Ask the two Pauls. Ask the lovely Sabrina Carpenter: She, and most of SNL’s current viewers, weren’t even alive in ’75. The love of Golden Oldies is not really their thing. So of course the show, for whatever years it has left, must favor its current core audience.

Maybe that’s why all this SNL50 stuff seems something like a wake: frequently funny, but always a bit sad. Nobody lives forever, not even Lorne Michaels.