Though many of our commenters didn't have high hopes for Jude Law hosting last night's Saturday Night Live, the actor was, surprisingly, one of the highlights of an otherwise lackluster show:
One would think that on the last broadcast before a month-long break, the show would want to leave audiences with a few memorable sketches to tide them over. However, that was not the case, as the show relied heavily on repeat skits, familiar characters, and even re-runs of commercials they'd played earlier in the season. The entire show felt a bit tired, as if the cast and the writers were bored and phoning it in, though host Jude Law was actually quite good and made the most of the material he was given. He spent the majority of the evening poking fun at his own persona, as seen in his monologue:
And in this Hamlet audition sketch:
The show was fairly commercial heavy, featuring this spot-on parody of the ridiculous Broadview Security commercials, though as many of our commenters pointed out, Sarah Haskins had already mocked these ads last November, so SNL felt a bit late:
The show also took on the recent troubles at Toyota with this Ford ad:
The digital short, "Boombox," featuing Julian Casablancas, is yet another song from The Lonely Island's Incredibad album, which is fine, but the stronger digital shorts this year have been the ones that aren't music videos for the group's album, like the Yo Gabba Gabba parody and Shy Ronnie and Sergio, and each successive video from Incredibad is a tad less funny than the last:
Weekend Update has become the most insufferable and predictable part of the show: Seth Meyers makes a bunch of gay jokes or poop jokes or rape jokes or dick jokes and then Kenan Thompson shows up in drag. There was one surprise during last night's Weekend Update, however: Jerry Seinfeld, who refuses to leave us all alone, showed up to promote The Marriage Ref do a "Really?! With Seth and Jerry" skit, which was just annoying and transparent and made you remember how much stronger the Weekend Update desk was when Amy Poehler was around:
The highlight of the show was probably this Twilight Zone takeoff, which started a bit slow but got progressively sillier as time went on:
At this point I'm kind of over criticizing the show, as it doesn't seem like the show is going to change direction anytime soon. There just seems to be a lack of energy outside of the digital shorts, with skits relying on 7th grade humor (dick! poop! gays! accents are funny!) and the "if we repeat this joke enough, you'll eventually break down and start laughing" mentality that might work on a few viewers but surely exasperates the rest of us. It's a shame in that the cast is really great: Sudeikis and Hader can elevate a mediocre skit just by showing up, and the three newest female cast members, Jenny Slate, Abby Elliott, and Nasim Pedrad are all hilarious whenever they're given a chance to be. It seems as though the show would rather stick a wig on a dude than craft a decent character for one of the female cast members, but when you have back-to-back skits in a show that are rooted in the "hilarious" concept of violence against women, I guess asking for the ladies to be treated equally might be a bit too much to ask. However, the next episode, which airs on April 10, might change all of that: it's hosted by Tina Fey.