Well, that was a sucky experience. Scarlett Johansson does her best, but she's not a "showcase" kind of host, and tonight was hampered by some really weak material, including some of their more painful skits in quite a while. Ugh. I wonder if tonight's SNL or the Pacquio-Mayweather fight ended up being more of a let down.
COLD OPEN: The show does spoof the fact that everyone's watching the big fight tonight (except me, who couldn't care less about boxing), and has Aidy and Jay in the ring as the fighters, but it's pretty painfully unfunny right off the bat. Not a good sign.
MONOLOGUE: ScarJo comes out for the fourth time hosting and does a sexy song and dance to "Love to Love You Baby," that she says she sings for her new baby daughter, but it's just kind of boring. I'm getting tired of all the singing monologues, actually. Starting to scream of lazy writing- hey, let's just have the non-comedian host sing!
RIGHT SIDE OF THE BED: Umm, whaa? Who the hell wanted this sketch back? Talk about lazy. Taran and Cecily reprise their morning show hosts as an overcompensating closeted gay guy and his idiot wife, while Scarlett is an annoying woman from New Jersey. It sucks from start to finish. Please don't ever bring this back again, guys.
ORIOLES GAME: Kenan and Taran (both getting a lot of play tonight, and funnily enough, the two have rarely been paired together before), do the commentary for the empty Orioles game that had to be played during the Baltimore riots. They could have done more with this, but SNL is cowardly about racial material as always, so it comes across as more pointless than anything else.
BLACK WIDOW AGE OF ME: A trailer for the Marvel "girl superhero" movie, which is turned into a romantic comedy starring Black Widow looking for love. This also should have been funnier and shorter. I guess it's a decent jab at Marvel for still not having or knowing how to write a female superhero movie (as if it has to be different from any of the others to make the kind of cash they're practically pulling off a printing press at this point).
GIRLFRIENDS TALK SHOW: Gaahh! WHY? Why is this show trying to torture me tonight by bringing back nightmare sketches? I refuse to believe there's a single fan of this skit out there. It's no better tonight than it's ever been. Everyone sucks in it, and I hate it.
UPDATE: Michael and Colin give us some Baltimore riots jokes, gay marriage at the Supreme Court jokes, and are way too cowardly to even make any Bruce Jenner jokes at all, which IS the joke here, but I find their terror at being perceived as the slightest bit politically incorrect to be annoying. There are other comedians who had no trouble at all joking about Bruce Jenner this week- their fear speaks volumes about how weak these two are. Kate comes on as Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Bobby and Vanessa as unattractive/dirty Game of Thrones couple Sam and Gilly, and Kenan and Jay as Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal, who break on the air, so at least that's amusing. It's an uneven set this week.
DINO MUSEUM: ScarJo and Cecily are weirdos on a dinosaur tour at the museum- this is awful and excruciatingly painful to watch, even though Cecily is probably doing her usual thing where she makes fun of young hipster girls she sees in real life (that's my theory about how she comes up with her characters- there's a definite pattern).
BLAZER: This is actually kinda funny- it seems like an old commercial for a 70's cop show starring Taran trying to make himself look good..until you realize he's only beating up black people in "the streets." They go on to make a pointed cops are racist joke at the end. One of the better bits of the night.
VIRGIN ATLANTIC: A new plane with bionic flight attendants Vanessa and Scarlett in first class, but the two of them have kinks in their systems. This is not a bad idea, and Taran plays a great pilot who makes all the wrong announcements to the passengers, but there's not enough good jokes here. It's too bad, because ScarJo plays the perfect robot (as always) and Vanessa's good here too- it's something that had potential and could have really used more than halfhearted writing, which has plagued every single sketch this week.
JINGLE WRITERS: It ends on a down note, with Aidy and Scarlett as hippie jingle writers pitching bad jingles for Pampers. This is so awful I forgot it existed about ten seconds after I watched it.
So, that's it for tonight. A terrible episode, even though Scarlett Johansson wasn't bad herself, but she can't save the material. I give it a D (some of the Update stuff was okay and I liked Blazer, but that's a rotten batting average). Let's just move on and put this one behind us, okay? Next up it's Reese Witherspoon, and there's just two episodes left of the season, so I really hope we don't end this year in as much misery as we did last year. Get it together people.
