How Saturday Night Live Can Recover from a Bad Season

Saturday Night Blah!

In its long history, SNL has had a boom/bust cycle. The first cast blew the world away with their new breed of comedy. When they quit, the show seemed on the verge of death itself, suffering through the painful sixth season, in which most of the cast would end up only lasting one season. Producer Dick Ebersol rescued the show and in the process created stars out of Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo and returned the show to its past glories, starting a long series of creative surges and lulls in the show.

Although SNL has received much publicity recently for its Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama sketches, the episodes since the writers strike have been terrible. A combination of poorly conceived and written sketches, tepid performances, and lackluster hosts has led to a huge creative downturn since even last year. So how can SNL recover?

OVERHAUL WEEKEND UPDATE

Seth Meyers and Amy Pohler may be the worst hosts of Weekend Update since its inception. Unlike Chevy Chase, Dennis Miller, Norm MacDonald, and even Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon, neither one of them has the attitude or personality to sell what they're reading. When you couple that with lame jokes, the segment falls flat week after week. While it may be hard to top "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report", Weekend Update doesn't even seem to be trying. It's time to shift the segment back to a single cast member who focuses only on WU, hire some writers who can do some stinging material, and make the segment something worth watching.

DO A PARODY OR TWO

For some reason, SNL seems to not want to do parodies of successful movies and shows. A show like "Mad TV" has created dozens of funny sketches out of current hit shows and movies. The best SNL seems to do is a parody of MacGyver, a show that ended its run years ago. Parody would offer the show ideas that would be instantly identifiable to the audience and provide ample opportunities for humor. It would also, in most cases, give them at least one guaranteed sketch for each guest host. Surely the writers could have made something funny out of an Enchanted parody for Amy Adams or a Juno parody for Ellen Page.

LESS LIVE, MORE FUNNY