The most honest and beautiful play of tomorrow’s Super Bowl LV on CBS may have just happened on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, can be.
“Hello and welcome to the Super Bowl, four hours of television for 11 minutes of action,” declared SNL‘s Kenan Thompson as sports broadcaster ‘James, no, not the one, Brown’ in the opening of tonight’s show. “As everyone at home knows, this year was anything but normal,” SNL ‘‘s longest cast with Chris Redd, Mikey Day and Beck Bennett around him as CBS ‘ NFL Today crew.
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From there, as has happened so many times this season, the sharp cold open became soft with a round table of diverse one-lines in search of a shit and a sense of humor – and it’s not like the hypocritical and hypersensitive NFL or the hoopla of the Super Bowl itself is so hard to mock.
“The pandemic, racial and political divisions, Armie Hammer, but today we come together in a spirit of unity to watch football and kill millions of chickens for their glorious wings,” Thompson’s coffee cup welder Brown explained. He then chased the NFL with a bang over the league that came through the season with ‘only 700 cases’ from Covid-19.
“You know who the Covid restrictions feel more than anyone this week, the famous Tampa Bay prostitutes,” Redd’s glasses Nate Burleson added in a wet noodle at the Sunshine State’s host city of the annual social game. Also, the hometown of the Buccaneers’ contenders and their new QB Tom Brady, the Tampa Bay Stadium, nearly 70,000, will have only about 25,000 masked fans in the stands, 7,500 of whom will be vaccinated by health workers.
Back to SNL‘s cold opener: There was a ‘historically glorious’ attempt to mock the efforts of many advertisers to progressively support and link themselves to the civil rights movement and BLM. On the other hand, the “conservative lead” side, with the promise of “no child sex trafficking,” is a preview of a fictional QAnon ad cheating on Papa Johns pizza and succeeding “Hillary’s Pizza.”
The spiral opening sketch also weighed on Viacom’s cross-promotion with Nickelodeon and others. Not that NBC’s own cousins like Bravo could not share in the shadows either, with an Andy Cohen-presented simulcast titled “Old Hag, Young Slut.”
The mock title is a tribute to 43-year-old Brady and rival Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes, 25, if you are not a football fan. If you were not a football fan, the duel and banal coaches of Aidy Bryant would have left you cold too.
This morning it was in a sense an interruption of more of the same old guy SNL, sort of.
Body politics forms almost the whole basis of SNLs return from interruption last week and almost all the cold openings of the past few years, with Donald Trump as the toxic core.
Absent and low (icy) tonight since facing the election and constitutional reality and the White House on January 20, the former Famous apprentice host is in the spotlight in his second indictment starting Tuesday.
In the second SNL of 46th POTUS Joe Biden’s term and the 11th episode of the current 46th season, tonight’s program is presented by Dan Levy with musical guest Phoebe Bridgers. It’s a debut with the latest version of the Not Ready For Primetime Players for both the multiple Grammy nominee and the Schitt’s Creek co-creator and star. Tonight’s SNL comes at the end of a whirlwind week for Levy. With Emmy’s history already last year with big wins for his final season, Schitt’s Creek won several Golden Globes and SAG awards this week.
All this makes it sweeter than the offspring of one SCTV alum (Eugene Levy, who also on Schitt’s Creek and made a cameo in his son’s monologue) and the co-star of another (Catherine O’Hara) is facing the long term SNL which was created and is still run by a Canadian (Lorne Michaels). SNL has, of course, been home to some of the best and brightest of the Great North North over the decades (too much on both sides of the cameras to mention here.)
Play on!
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