2008-09-15

T Mobile Favorite Five on SNL

Saturday Night Live was a disappointing premier this weekend. There were some great spots on it, but other parts were disappointing. If this was in the middle of the season, I might have had lower expectations, but the writers had all summer and they gave us an obnoxious waiter sketch and an incompetent political-comic sketch in the middle of the news.

The ugly kids bit was an interesting concept, but the sketch didn't really go anywhere. The "Cathy" bit was another decent idea that they didn't do anything with. The Charles Barkley sketch had some interesting ideas that they just didn't execute on. The Bela joke was almost there, but they didn't quite finish it.

In fact, many of the sketches had an unfinished quality to them. They had good ideas but fell apart in the story within the sketch. They put the ideas on display but didn't really do anything with them. The whole show seemed like it was rushed from the brainstorming stage to the performance stage.

That said, they did somethings very well.


One of my favorite sketches, though, was the T Mobile sketch. When T Mobile was originally airing the commercial, I thought it was a bit creepy. SNL captured that aspect of it and then ran with the concept.

If you are not familiar with the ad, the first segment of the SNL parody is a recreation of it. Basically, T Mobile let people designate their 5 favorite contacts for free calling. A teenage girl names her favorite friends (all girls) and her brother then names those exact same friends, noting that her friends are hot. When you she objects and complaining to her parents, her father suggests it's her fault for having hot friends.

Here is the SNL Sketch (the video should appear below -- if not the link should work, too):




My other favorite sketch was the Michael Phelps diet sketch:




So while there were some highlights this week, they are off to a rough start -- especially coming off hiatus.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I loved the opening sketch and that may have been the last of my love affair, as you would read in my post today as a homeschooler I was offended by the quiz Bowl skit.

Anonymous said...

I would have to your assessment of SNL. Sadly, their writer and actually comic value has dropped in the last 10 years. They've lost a large number of talented people that really made the show. It would be nice to see them back to the quality they had back in the 90s. Though I must say this episode did induce some bizarre dreams for me this weekend. You'll have to stop by my blog to read about that :-).

Paul Eilers said...

We don't watch SNL anymore. We're either on the computer, watching college football or trying to catch up on sleep, due to our 17 month old son!

But I would have liked to have seen Michael Phelps on the show.

Mystery Man said...

I have to agree with you. It had its moments, but for as much time as they had to put this together, I sort of expected more. I know one of the sketches was alast minute substitution since Barack pulled out, just not sure which one.

Hopefully the rest of the season will be better.

Matthew S. Urdan said...

yeah, that political commentator in the middle of the news was just stupid. Michael Phelps Diet? The funny part was Jared's guest slot. T-Mobile, I'll give you that. The rest though, other than Palin/Clinton, was pretty lame.

Anonymous said...

Tina Fey's Sarah Palin voice was spot on. Impressive. It is a shame when the highlight of the show actually occurs before it "officially" starts.
The issue I have with most of the bits, is the lack of any real endings. They just stop.