S43.E15: Sterling K. Brown / James Bay

[peeayebee]

I agree, Nellise. The premise could have been funnier, and I liked the idea, but it seemed they were trying too hard to stick to The Bachelor format. Plus, I really hate Kate as Mueller. 

[ktwo]

10 hours ago, LizDC said:

I don't watch The Bachelor but I know the gist of what happened there so I got what SNL was doing but it didn’t really work for me.

It didn’t work for me, either - I think I’ve said this before but although I love Kate I hate that she’s playing Mueller. It gives him less gravitas. And perhaps I’m one of the people that @possibilities describes above, but it didn’t seem like the writers had any idea of what’s been revealed in the investigation lately. 

[xander874]

I totally forgot Vanessa Bayer was off the show, so I didn't think much of the weather skit. But, then when I remembered at the end of episode, I was confused why she would come back for that rehash of a bit? Weird.

And I had no idea who the musical guest was, but I liked his first song a lot. The second not so much. 

[AriAu]

SKB had great energy and good material to work with....but he has to be in the Top 10 all time for bad cue card reading. He was staring the wrong way at the cards a lot...enough to be distracting. Still funny, mostly, but it took away from the fun.

If they were going to bother to bring Vanessa back, they should have had her do Laura Parsons, the little girl singing the news. There have been more than enough really awkward and embarrassing stories recently, that she would have been gold-imagine the riff on Stormy Daniels...opportunity missed.

[Irlandesa]

2 hours ago, Nellise said:

I thought the conversations worked, but the long times with no interaction between the two slowed it down way too much. I'm guessing they were trying to imitate how the Bachelor really is, but it was hard to tell if that was the case or there were just screwups. The pauses felt like when SNL has some technical issue so it was throwing the whole thing off for me.

The interaction they were parodying was a *shocking voice* never done before unedited scene.  So the pauses and black screens mimic the pauses from the Bachelor but it's not normal Bachelor format. (Many think the original should have been edited as well.)

That's why I appreciated the craftmanship but I also see why it could have felt slow.

[ChromaKelly]

11 hours ago, JZL said:

Concur about Heidi. 

I'm beginning to think Kyle needs to go, at least as a performer.  His misses are outnumbering hits way too often any more.  It seems a lot of his stuff is drawn from the same stilted Bruce Chandler well.  It works occasionally but when it doesn't it fails hard. 

Totally agree about Kyle. Sometimes he's funny, but I cannot stand those Good Neighbor skits or really any of his pre-recorded stuff. I rarely fast forward anything on SNL, but those I've gotten to the point where I FF on site. Same with Bruce Chandler. Kyle is not filling any particular niche on SNL, cut him already. The only thing I do like is that too-earnest high school drama group with the boxes.
The cold open was OK for me. I agree though that Kate as Mueller isn't working that well. It's like they went "let's have Kate play all the men!" since she started doing Sessions. Which, I don't love the Sessions thing either.
Sterling K Brown definitely had the energy and enthusiasm. Most of the show was pretty good. I'm not all that bothered by obvious looking at the cue cards. I know they change things on the fly, and not every host is used to working in a live sketch comedy format, so they can't really help but look at the cue cards. As long as they don't stumble, I'm good. I tend to like the weird random stuff like the Shrek bit.
I love the weather girl bit. It was odd that they brought her back just for that, but whatever. I was just happy to see it. Hap!
This is U.S. was the standout IMHO. I do miss Jay's Ben Carson though.

[BoogieBurns]

Funny how SKB could have played his actual character, N'Jobu, in Black Panther, and they chose not to... He would still be an "ancestor". Maybe they purposely didn't want to spoil the movie, but I don't see it as a spoiler at all. 

[teebax]

1 hour ago, AriAu said:

If they were going to bother to bring Vanessa back, they should have had her do Laura Parsons, the little girl singing the news. There have been more than enough really awkward and embarrassing stories recently, that she would have been gold-imagine the riff on Stormy Daniels...opportunity missed.

I hated that character more than anything else she did on the show. I think she should've come for the Super Bowl episode and rehashed her Totinos wife role.

Like another poster, I completely forgot she was off the show.

[izabella]

I hated all of Vanessa's WU characters.  Jakob was funny the first time, and that's it.  Every time after that it was exactly the same sketch without any new flavor to it to make it funny.  I feel the same about the nervous weather reporter, and the singing news girl.  Vanessa was fantastic in just about every "housewife" role in the sketches, and I always laughed at "My Hungry Guys."  If she was doing a cameo, I'd rather she had done something in a sketch.

[possibilities]

3 hours ago, ktwo said:

it didn’t seem like the writers had any idea of what’s been revealed in the investigation lately. 

That's true. I think they were going for the shock, because it will shock us Mueller-followers if he delivers the message that he delivered on SNL. I think it was because they were sticking to The Bachelor thing, which I didn't see but I gather he made a shocking change of direction? But yes, they did have to kind of skip over recent news reports in order to do that.

[Cornhusker12]

3 hours ago, ChromaKelly said:

I agree though that Kate as Mueller isn't working that well. It's like they went "let's have Kate play all the men!" since she started doing Sessions. Which, I don't love the Sessions thing either.
 

Yeah I agree. Playing Sessions is fine, she turns him into a freaky little goblin and as with any of the men in Trumpworld there's the added jab (in their minds) of being played by a woman, it's decently funny. But there doesn't seem to be any reason why she would play Mueller. No physical resemblance, no interesting take on his personality, I don't get it. 

[izabella]

42 minutes ago, huskerj12 said:

But there doesn't seem to be any reason why she would play Mueller. No physical resemblance, no interesting take on his personality, I don't get it. 

I think it would be hard for anyone to play Mueller, except as a silent specter hovering over the administration.  He doesn't give interviews, he doesn't give speeches or appear at events, and he doesn't take questions from reporters, so it's hard to caricature any characteristics or personality traits of his (as far as the general public is concerned).

[JZL]

11 hours ago, ktwo said:

It didn’t work for me, either - I think I’ve said this before but although I love Kate I hate that she’s playing Mueller. It gives him less gravitas. And perhaps I’m one of the people that @possibilities describes above, but it didn’t seem like the writers had any idea of what’s been revealed in the investigation lately. 

They referenced the Seychelles meeting, which only broke Wednesday-ish.

I sure hope they crucify Nunes and Co. this coming Saturday.  (Does Kate have a Nunes?)

[msrachelj]

pretty bad show. hardly laughed at all. i guess i'm in the minority but i hate the sappy ass show, this is us. don't watch the idiotic, brain wasting, bachelor. i may be getting too old for most of this show. and the musical numbers suck. yep.

[Inquisitionist]

8 hours ago, msrachelj said:

pretty bad show. hardly laughed at all. i guess i'm in the minority but i hate the sappy ass show, this is us. don't watch the idiotic, brain wasting, bachelor. i may be getting too old for most of this show. and the musical numbers suck. yep.

Well, I'm pretty old, too, but I thought this was one of the strongest episodes they've had this season.  I routinely FFwd through the musical acts, though.

[vb68]

On 3/12/2018 at 11:49 AM, ChromaKelly said:

I love the weather girl bit. It was odd that they brought her back just for that, but whatever. I was just happy to see it. Hap!

I think it must be a personal favorite of Vanessa's or something. I have a feeling she really fought for it to get on. In the Finale back in the Spring, Che said to the character, "Why are you back again so soon?" And Vanessa/Dawn mumbled somewhat coherently, "It's my last show and Imma doing it one more time!"   So I bet they gave her some options, and that's the one she wanted.

[mtlchick]

On 3/12/2018 at 11:49 AM, ChromaKelly said:

I'm beginning to think Kyle needs to go, at least as a performer.  His misses are outnumbering hits way too often any more.  It seems a lot of his stuff is drawn from the same stilted Bruce Chandler well.  It works occasionally but when it doesn't it fails hard. 

Agreed.  Other than the Leslie "relationship", I can't think anything of note that he's done in the past 2 seasons.  I don't mind if he's banished to the writer's room and shows up on occasion, but I'm almost baffled he's lasted this long as a regular.  

[possibilities]

I looked it up on IMDB, and the K. in Sterling K. Brown is actually for Kelby, in case anyone was wondering.

[JZL]

I wonder if Kyle could play Mueller without butchering it. 

[vb68]

I really do like the idea of Pete as Kushner.  I hope he gets to play with that one a little bit.

[lookeyloo]

We are watching now and for some reason the trump brothers just made us laugh out loud. Doing a lot of FF 

[Fostersmom]

Common as a TED Talk. I literally can't see this commercial without thinking of SNL. 

[Lantern7]

I kept meaning to ask . . . what's so bad about Nickelback?

On 3/12/2018 at 12:09 PM, BoogieBurns said:

Funny how SKB could have played his actual character, N'Jobu, in Black Panther, and they chose not to... He would still be an "ancestor". Maybe they purposely didn't want to spoil the movie, but I don't see it as a spoiler at all. 

Maybe they're saving the hardcore stuff for when Chadwick Boseman hosts. Is N'Jobu in the first scene? That would be a bit of a spoiler. I did like the idea of some American schmuck in the spirit realm because he was married to a Dora Milaje. Apparently, it's funny when Kenan Thompson bitches about being turned into a warthog and grilling lion meat. Work for me at least.

ETA: I'm one of the twelve people in North America not familiar with the Bachelor finale, so the cold open was lost on me. On the bright side, Alex & Conor from The Amazing Race now look like princes compared to Arie the IndyCar driver.

Edited March 20, 2018 by Lantern7

[helenamonster]

22 hours ago, Lantern7 said:

I kept meaning to ask . . . what's so bad about Nickelback?

I always wondered this as well. I didn't ever really get into them but I also never understood the massive amount of vitriol they incurred, especially online. But tvtropes.org (aka a website you can lose an entire day on) has a really interesting explanation about why Nickelback and similar post-grunge bands are so reviled today on their page for "Deader Than Disco":

Quote

Post-Grunge is dead in the water today, being to the Turn of the Millennium what the trope namer was to The '70s - the punchline of a decade. It originated when bands played music that took the most popular elements of Grunge music while scrubbing down the more experimental elements and doing away with the dark lyrics that were undergoing a backlash at the time due in part by Kurt Cobain's suicide. Post-grunge quickly became the most popular mainstream rock genre in the late 90s and only continued to get bigger in the 2000s, providing an ample amount of crossover hits and the forerunners of the genre such as Foo Fighters, Creed, and Nickelback became some of the biggest bands in the world. And since post-grunge was mainstream friendly, people flocked to it to get away from more "dangerous" music genres; then, when "dangerous" music was in vogue again, a wave of harder-tinged acts like Hinder, Buckcherry, and Saving Abel came out to cater to those who were starting to write the original acts off as too light (though it was still mainstream-friendly). 

By the late 2000s though, fatigue would set in for a variety of reasons. Firstly, while other rock genres grew to popularity around the time period, post-grunge reigned with a virtual stranglehold on the mainstream to the point where it became inseparable from rock music as a whole, and due to its mainstream-friendliness, this led to an oversaturation on the radio stations. On top of that, the genre built up a reputation for being formulaic in its musical structure and lyrics. With those two combined, it didn't take long for a Hatedom to develop and backlash against the music and the bands playing it to reach full swing. Bands like Creed and Nickelback became the biggest targets of Snark Bait and were held responsible for having "killed rock music" (or at least leaving it stagnant). The harder-tinged acts also faced backlash for the childishly hedonistic and misogynistic themes of their own lyrics; the bands that avoided these sorts of themes had to either modify their sound or Genre Shift completely in order to stay afloat. And because post-grunge had become nearly inseparable from rock music as a whole for over a decade, many rock fans felt that once the genre succumbed to its own fatigue, it did lasting damage to rock music's reputation and contributed to its decline from the mainstream music scene of the 2010s, enabling Electronic Music to fill in the void and finally establish a foothold on the mainstream American music consciousness. 

Today, post-grunge is held up as a cautionary tale in what happens when you take a genre as unique as grunge and turn it into a mass-produced commercial product. Only a few bands were able to come out of the fall unscathed and still consistently put out hits and play to decently sized audiences (though not nearly as large as in their prime), but even then, it was largely because they either incorporated elements of other genres into their sound to the point that some would say they're "not really post-grunge anyway" or abandoned it altogether. Besides them, the scene is a graveyard full of bands that can't chart to save their lives, are stuck playing in small clubs, and are little more than Snark Bait (if they aren't completely forgotten altogether). Whenever anyone uses the term "butt rock" in a derisive fashion, they're most likely referring to post-grunge, and one would have a hard time finding a rock band formed in the 10s that plays this style, since Lighter and Softer pop/indie-inspired rock and Electronic Music-infused rock have become the vogue, and if a band is going to play harder-edged rock in this day and age, it will most certainly not be in the style of post-grunge.