Phishbulb

I recall in the Tiffany Haddish episode, in the "Last Black Unicorn" sketch, Melissa was doing a typical Valley Girl-ish type teenage girl voice and she sounded reasonably normal. So she can control it when she wants to.

I think this week there actually isn't an "SNL Vintage" episode, because at 8 PM they're running a "SNL Best of Football" special (which I'm sure will include some sketches from Brady's episode). Too bad, as I would have liked to have seen Natalie Portman's episode from 2006 before her new one. I really can't remember anything about it other than the "Natalie Raps" digital short.

It didn't really end up affecting much. The only thing I can say is that watching "The Dump" right after "The Matriarch" would kind of make more sense, as "The Matriarch" is the episode where they first get the Colonel.

I didn't think it was as bad as some other people here thought it was, but I thought the framing device of the daughter narrating it from the future wasn't really necessary (despite it being cool to hear Octavia Spencer's voice). Especially since they didn't bother giving the older daughter much of a personality and she was the least interesting character in the pilot. I wouldn't mind seeing a weekly series starring Tim Meadows and Bryan Callen as they're both funny performers. It seems like from the pilot too that Ana Gasteyer would have been a regular if it had gone to series. The humor revolving around the teachers and the coach was definitely more successful than the family-based stuff, but in time I could see those other characters becoming more interesting too.

Followed by Christine being oblivious and saying "Polyester used to be my favorite fabric..."

I think this is kind of an unfair comparison because Luke legitimately hasn't been on enough for me to even tell if he's a worthy addition to the cast or not. Rudnitsky had the pirate sketch that revolved around him which was awful, a poor Anderson Cooper imitation, and then his late entrance in the Space Pants sketch which didn't help matters. He did several things on the show that were actively bad. But Luke's one thing that he's done was somewhat of a clever idea for a sketch- and for what it's worth, his performance in it wasn't bad. He WAS supposed to be an annoying dick, so we can't hold that against him. Once the reveal happened in the sketch, he did a good job of underplaying his bully character actually being insecure and just wanting to be appreciated by his fellow students. It was an odd way for them to introduce a brand new cast member- by giving him a sketch where the first 2 minutes were him (intentionally) bombing with bad material. I don't know if he will be able to recover from that by season's end. The weird thing is that when he was first hired the clips circulating of him showed him with a guitar doing funny songs, so I thought he would have tried something like that on Update by now, if that's what he was known for before SNL.

The last time Will hosted, in 2012, they didn't do one. (Instead, he and Ana Gasteyer brought back the singing married couple The Culps). Then again, Darrell wasn't part of the cast in 2012, whereas now he is at least the announcer (I think maybe he records his intros in LA though? I don't think he is there every week doing it live). The last time they did Celebrity Jeopardy was at the 40th anniversary, which was a really super-sized edition with many cast members. I think they could definitely slot people like Melissa or Alex into the sketch, people who are good with impressions.

They always appear in January, as that's when the new season of The Bachelor is currently airing. The last 2 have actually tried to incorporate the real people from the show (I know Beck's character in the last one was based on a real guy, and so was Alex's character in this one, right?) But yeah, Blake Shelton, Rhonda Rousey, Felicity Jones, now Jessica....all non-comedic hosts trying to do comedy, which is usually not successful.

Weirdly though, next week's scheduled episode is an episode that was produced 2 episodes before "The Divorce", which means it'll probably be another episode that will be odd to watch because it won't be following any of the events that have happened in the last 4 episodes. They'll pick back up with episode 14, "The Church", on February 6th.

The cameo by Josh Duhamel was doubly funny for me, as I couldn't tell if it was Duhamel or Timothy Olyphant at first. They're another couple of actors I always get confused.

Also, Aidy has been in more than one movie. She just had a fairly big part in "The Big Sick" last year.

LOL, bumping up an 8-month old thread just to throw shade?? Fine, a "complete 180" was what I meant to say, sorry :)

Cool news! It looks like ABC is planning to air this episode on January 24th in the regular "Goldbergs" timeslot. http://splitsider.com/2018/01/abc-will-air-the-90s-set-goldbergs-spin-off-pilot-later-this-month/ I guess they're hoping it can act as a possible "backdoor pilot", possibly trying again for next season.

Nice seeing Jayma Mays as Cat, Greg's girlfriend. For those that don't know, she is Adam Campbell's wife in real life.

I kind of wish that spinoff centering around Coach Mellor (which would have been set in the '90s, I believe) had been picked up to series. I think the only cast members carrying over from the show to that pilot were Bryan Callen as Coach Mellor and Tim Meadows as Mr. Glascott the guidance counselor (with a cameo by Wendi McClendon-Covey). I guess ABC is kind of full up on family-oriented sitcoms at the moment (which is probably why the "black-ish" spinoff ended up on Freeform).

For the question about what they dump on contestants at the Puppy Bowl instead of Gatorade, I said "toilet water". No?

There was so much funny stuff in this most recent episode- Katie's on-line boyfriend being Pennywise from IT (lol); the Carrie Underwood-esque music video with Portia, hilarious lines from Chuck like "Well, well, well, as Baby Jessica said when she was having a nightmare...", and him worrying that he was being followed by Jigsaw. I noticed the writer on this one was Robert Carlock, who was a big shaper of the style of humor on 30 Rock and also created Kimmy Schmidt with Tina Fey. There is a great JPM (jokes per minute) average with this show that reminds me a lot of 30 Rock.

It is interesting sometimes the choices they make with what to cut and what to keep in. Usually Beck and Kyle's films end up getting cut a lot of the time, but in this case their "Scrudge" film made it in. I would argue that this commercial parody is a lot more laugh out loud funny and wide audience friendly; it would have had a natural place between Franco's monologue and the first sketch. I'll even go out on a limb and say this would have been better than keeping the film with Cecily helping the homeless guy who turns out to be Franco. That was a lot of build up for not that great of a punchline.

Anne Hathaway at one time seemed like she was going to be a steady reoccurring host, but she hasn't hosted since "Les Miserables" in 2012. I think she's overdue to host again.

Yes, if the (presumably) male customers were getting tired of "seeing the same feet", why would they have Luke shave his legs and try to pass his feet off as women's feet? I would think you'd be able to tell; they should have recruited Haley for this.

I'm hoping Zach Galifianakis hosts in March for this (as a combo, promoting the new season of "Baskets" too). Would make his fourth time hosting.

The movie TRON, however, came out in 1982, so Adam wearing a shirt with Tron on it was an example of the show having fun mixing up different eras/time periods.

The sketch was originally written way back in 2012 when Bruno Mars hosted. So the construction was the same. Bruno played the young Active Jack (and probably sang the song WAY better than Kevin Hart did) and Kenan was the old Active Jack. Kenan brought this sketch up on Seth Meyers' show when he was on there over the summer. So it's nice they finally got to do it, although it's pretty bad that this ended up being the funniest sketch in the show when it wasn't even really written this week.

Particularly Kenan "Mighty Ducks" Thompson.

Two female writers, Fran Gillespie and Sudi Green, have also been promoted to "writing supervisors" (which is what Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider were before they became head writers). Both are relatively new to writing for the show, having only been at SNL since 2015. Green was the woman who stood up to ask a question in James Franco's monologue. I believe she was one of the co-writers of "Welcome to Hell", so her writing definitely seems to be in line with the sort of stuff Kelly & Schneider were doing when they were on the show.