Scot Bertram

With Will Ferrell Gone, SNL Starts Over

In Season 27, Saturday Night Live viewers occasionally got a glimpse of what the show would look like when one of its all-time great cast members bolted. For a few episodes, Will Ferrell was off filming movies like Old School, leaving the rest of the cast to pick up the slack. And the results weren’t promising.

In Season 28, the show has to grapple with Ferrell’s permanent absence. In some ways, it succeeds – new cast members Fred Armisen and Will Forte make an immediate impact, with Forte bits like “The Falconer” filling the void of weirdness left with Ferrell’s exit.

But for the most part, Season 28 feels very much like a show trying to gain its footing while attempting to remake itself. Top-notch cast members like Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Maya Rudolph are still there, but the writers aren’t giving them much to do. Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz keep giggling every time each one sees the other on screen, except they are doing so in sketches that don’t warrant breaking. Seth Meyers is basically just there to do the same thing Fallon does, just not quite as well.

The show is also beset by a run of bad hosts, from Jeff Gordon to Ray Liotta to Queen Latifah to Adrien Brody. Sadly, Brittany Murphy’s apparently chemically-dependent hosting tenure foretold her unfortunate future demise. Even a Christopher Walken-hosted episode drags, which would be impossible in previous seasons.

Even Weekend Update, a strength of the show over the previous season, goes south, with flatter jokes and uninspired desk bits.

Nonetheless, there is plenty to discuss from the season, from the competition the show now faced from Chappelle’s Show to the new recurring characters injected into the mix to the show’s lack of desperately-needed irreverence.

We discuss all these topics and much more on this week’s episode of Wasn’t That Special. Please subscribe and join us for a trip through every year of SNL. And consider joining at the Executive Producer level, where you get a whole load of extra commentary and clips that will help you become an SNL expert.