“Live from New York…”
Tina Fey hosted the 39th season premiere of Saturday Night Live. Fey hosted for the fourth time by doing skits about the six new cast members and stuffed animals.
Arcade Fire was the musical guest for the night and rocked the stage in between skits. Six new cast members joined the show this season. The new cast members have big shoes to fill, since Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, and Jason Sudeikis left at the end of last season.
The cold open was a speech on Obamacare, and cast members went up to the podium to tell President Obama how they felt. Beck Bennett appeared in the cold open, making him the first new cast member to get any screen time. Lorne Michaels, the executive producer and creator of the show, also made a cameo during a fake game show skit called “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire.”
The show did its best to incorporate the new cast members, using them in various sketches throughout the night. During Fey’s monologue, all six new cast members went on stage and danced while Fey critiqued them. Another big change for the show came around halfway through the broadcast, when Cecily Strong, who joined the cast last season, took the position as co-anchor with Seth Meyers on Weekend Update, making her the first co-anchor since Amy Poehler departed from the show in 2008.
Each episode, costing approximately $2.5 million to produce, usually features little pre-taped sketches. This week, a hilarious parody of the HBO series Girls aired during the broadcast. In the Girls parody, cast members did impressions of the characters from the show, and Fey played Blerta, an Albanian woman who makes their problems seem miniscule.
Other sketches throughout the night include a Manolo Blahnik shoes testimonial, a used cars advertisement, and all of the stereotypical people that board an airplane (“business travelers, please board so you can begin working on graphs”).
Weekend Update featured plenty of comical news topics, as well as characters. Fey went on during Weekend Update to talk to Strong about being an anchor and told her that Meyers “doesn’t own you” and to “follow your nightmares.” Topics for the night included the series finale of Breaking Bad, a new web series from John Stamos, and the top party school in the nation (“and the University of Phoenix came in last place again”). A new Weekend Update character was Bruce Chandling, a stand-up comedian played by Kyle Mooney, another new cast member.
Fey hosted SNL three times before, and has worked on the show for nine years, so she knows what she’s doing. She was remarkable as host this time around, exactly like her previous hosting duties. The writing, especially excellent this week, made sketches even funnier than they have been in prior episodes. The new cast members are not half bad, seeing as the show utilized each one of them.
Strong proved she can handle the pressure of being in sketches and being the co-anchor of Weekend Update. Once Meyers leaves early next year to have his own show Late Night with Seth Meyers, she would be a nice fit to host the segment.
The show lost three of the biggest cast members after season 38, leaving the show with a little obstacle to overcome- can it survive without any standout members of the cast? The answer is yes. Six new cast members add a whole new spin on the show and give SNL a new jolt to live on. There has only been one episode, but there is complete hope for them. This episode of SNL showed the new cast members have what it takes to survive the show. Season 39 is a big transitional season for the show, and now it’s time to watch and see what happens to SNL.
